I am confused. You seem to argue using the critical roll against the PC as an input to narrate something diegetic into the situation, makes this mechanics diegetic? I thought that was exactly what I tried to propose as the potential intended understanding of the terms?
Perhaps I did not speak clearly.
This is a situation where people often claim they would, solely because they are
direly pressed, choose to fudge. Namely, that they know with absolute certainty that a player is having a Bad Time, would have a Significantly Worse Time if their character were suddenly one-hit-killed by an enemy, and the stars just happened to align against them in that moment. Under those circumstances, the GM will simply
lie to the player and tell them the attack missed, or hit but did minimum damage, or whatever else. That's fudging. They straight-up ignore the mechanics and declare the world is different by pure fiat. That choice, to fudge, is not and cannot be a diegetic part of the world, because in its very act, it is secretly
denying the players the ability to connect cause and effect within the world.
By instead
explaining how (even if "you don't know!") the character SHOULD have received a lethal blow...but somehow didn't, somehow
survived an attack that they're certain would have been lethal, it is now known
both to the character that they survived a thing they shouldn't have,
and known to the player that a GM intervention occurred for reasons that will be relevant to the future of the campaign (whatever those reasons might be,
ideally prepared in advance, but
if necessary improvised in the moment and fleshed out later.)
And this can clearly happen in D&D?
So what isn't that doesn't pass muster? For the record I was contemplating editing the translated D&D example to "Make a diegetic narration that describe the aftermath of a failed climb attempt" to prevent time travel shenanigans, but found that formulation to be too limiting in terms of describing the "here and now" of the situation.
The instruction to make a diegetic narration is the milquetoast thing. It's a non-entity.
Like if that singular instruction is enough to make a mechanic diegetic, then literally all mechanics ever can be made diegetic by inserting a single sentence, and the very concept of "diegetic" becomes meaningless, as
literally anything can be wished away simply by the GM paying attention to the content of the scene. If that's an adequate measure, "diegetic" never really meant anything to begin with. I'd rather keep "diegetic" as meaning something and expect a higher standard.
Is it this kind of trouble that make the formulation not pass muster? In that case I think you can easily find other common GM guidance that also indicate something to this effect, that can be added into the translation in order to make D&D recognisably "diegetic"..
What does a climb check tell you about the
specific details of the result from the process? What does the perception roll tell you about the
specific details of the result from the process?
As far as I can tell--nothing. Nothing whatsoever. You can
elect to use incidental modifiers, should any apply. You can elect to describe on the basis of the particular sense that the player described using (assuming the player did in fact describe this, and the roll wasn't called for other reasons). But nothing about the mechanic actually tells you anything about
how the success or failure happened. It simply tells you
that it did.
With my example (of the goblin surviving the critical hit), that is the GM turning
their fudging from an unequivocally non-diegetic GM action, into an unequivocally diegetic one, because there is now interference within the world. Instead of fudging being a split-second retcon, it's a thing actually part of the game reality, which players can learn about. Players could ask questions like, "Why did the goblin suddenly hulk out?" or "Can
we do that when we take lethal damage?" or others.
I called that instruction--your "Make a diegetic narration that describe[s} a failed climb attempt"--"milquetoast" for a reason. It makes every mechanic diegetic whenever the GM declares it to be. That's an inadequate standard to me. There needs to be something
more than that. With my example, the GM is taking something genuinely invisible to the rules, invisible to the players, and giving it concrete, observarble-within-the-world weight. That looks a heck of a lot more like the "establishing that this music is actually being heard by the characters" of diegetic music, than, for lack of a better analogy, the director having a voice-over which tells the audience "yes, Jane was directly aware of the music you're hearing, she'd heard it all her life." The latter is at the very least too ham-fisted and external to qualify as achieving diegesis, even if the technical effect is that we now know that Jane is aware of the music.
