D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[EzekielRaiden]

Yes.

It cannot be all of those things simultaneously. Several of them are mutually-exclusive events.

And skilled enough means you were skilled enough to succeed or not skilled enough to succeed.

Which is completely meaningless, a tautology, not to mention becoming circular logic when it's literally the premise you're defending.

All you need to know for a simulation is skilled enough to succeed or unskilled enough and failed. The specifics of how you messed up can be narrated and it doesn't matter what the narration is so long as it fits skilled/unskilled.

Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnope. Sorry. Not enough. Because by that standard, 4e is one of the most simulationist games ever made, and I know for an absolute fact you would reject that.

You are wrong. RAW explicitly states that the ability SCORE is...

"An ability score is not just a measure of innate capabilities, but also encompasses a creature's training and competence in activities related to that ability."

So skills have nothing to do with skill? That's pretty messed up then, to call them "skills" when they aren't "skills"...

Unless you're wrong, and ability score is not the end-all, be-all of skill.

Athletic exists to be a defined sim category that PCs can engage in as well as a skill for proficiency to attach itself to. Without athletics helping to dictate how ability checks succeed and which strength checks it qualifies for, it would be open to much wider interpretations.

Yes. Ability score = innate capability, training and competence. Proficiency = specializing in that skill. Expertise = expert at that skill. Training and expertise can overcome the deficit that a -1 from strength gives you and allow you to excel. The ability to overcome a low score to still be good is not proof that the low score doesn't still represent innate capability, training and competence.

This is ridiculous, and literally directly contradicts the text.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I agree to the last, but not the first.

I think I am now ready to propose my own attempt at defining "diegetic" in context of mechanics:
For a mechanic to be "diegetic" it is required that all input to the mechanics is diegetic (in-fiction elements, knowable by people in the fiction) + a randomiser. This would for instance exclude dread, where there is a minor player skill element going into mechanics. Player or DM preferences are not allowed to enter it either. Safeguarding against a corrupt referee is generally not practically possible, but if a DM let their preferences affect the mechanics, the result is no longer "diegetic".

Okay, so how do we square that with--for example--the GM having complete preference control over the description of the outcome? Because some descriptions have significant impact, such that they condition future valid mechanics, while being, in D&D, completely and totally up to GM preference.

I'm really struggling to see how you could ensure that "all input into the mechanics is diegetic" with D&D--non-diegetic inputs crop up frequently. Battle Masters, for example. Or even the Champion, simplest of the simple subclasses on the simplest of the simple classes: what is the diegetic input for the Defy Death subclass feature? You have advantage on Death saves. How can that be diegetic?

Furthermore for a mechanic to be "diegetic" it is required that all possible outcomes from the mechanics must be possible to understand trough a diegetic causality perspective from the inputs to the outputs. This excludes for instance pink elephants coming out of your nose as an outcome from a sneezing table in a setting supposed to simulate reality. In a simulation of a dream world this might be an acceptable outcome, as the dreamer might consider this kind of causality perfectly as expected. However, the output do not need to contain any more information than a simple binary "yes/no".

Okay....so....how do you pick which one? Because it seems to me that that now means the GM can invent anything they want, whenever, whatever, so long as it has the tiniest scrap of plausibility, boom, instantly diegetic, always forever.

Again, I keep coming back to the notion of the failed Perception check as a critical breakdown point for this sort of assertion. The inputs seem diegetic; GM knows the party has just been exposed to something they might or might not notice, so she asks for Perception checks, essentially as a reactive defense; let us assume a DC of 15. The players roll. The high-Wisdom, Perception-proficient Druid rolls a natural 1: result 11. The 8 Wisdom, no-proficiency Sorcerer rolls a nat 20, result 19. The GM narrates this as the Druid being preoccupied with preparations for the day, while the air-headed Sorcerer was placidly looking out at the forest and spotted the enemy by chance.

Diegetic inputs, outcomes that are possible to understand in the way you described, being entirely well-grounded and naturalistic, something that anyone could have foreseen as a plausible result. Yet we as players know that this is the GM retroactively inventing the explanation, solely because of the dice, not because of skill (since skill would have said the exact antithesis of this event occurred). How can that qualify as diegetic? We're literally retconning the world in order to explain what happened!

These two conditions are sufficient for a mechanics to be "diegetic".

And some suggested relations to other relevant terms:
An activity guided only by diegetic mechanisms is a simulation.
A RPG need non-diegetic mechanisms, as otherwise it would hardly count as a "game".
A game with no diegetic mechanisms cannot be called "simulationistic".
Simulationistic play is play dominated by diegetic mechanisms.

That last one is gonna be a tough one to get through, because it makes such a porous boundary. What does it mean to be "dominated" by such? Does it have to be so nearly all mechanics that it's rare to ever see anything else? That would seem to "hardly count as a 'game'" by your own standard. Is it enough to be merely 50%+1? That would seem completely out of wack with how people talk about their expectations for such gaming. But leaving it open to individual interpretation just lands us right back in the same old problem of "so now any game is 'simulationistic' if the GM simply fiat declares enough of the mechanics to be so."

 

[clearstream]

Look the post I was responding to. "Why is it such a problem for a system to integrate narrative concepts? Those could just be representing how things work in a particular setting." I.e. baking the "narrative mechanics" into the "simulation" because that is how the fictional world actually works. In the case of your rune example it would mean that in the setting people's hopes and fears actually actualise, as that is the outcome the system produces.

This notion has come around a few times. Won't people in any imagined TTRPG setting played in accord with the rules in a game text, eventually base their sciences on that text? (Whether or not they're explicitly aware of the text itself.) This becomes more acute the more numerous and specific those rules are!

Gloranthan scientists will eventually realize that almost everything can be quantified into one hundred evenly distributed outcomes. They'll discover that brandishing a weapon results in a fixed change to the likelihood of compelling someone to do something, and that prices negotiated in a market turn out to change in increments of 25%.

 

[clearstream]

Okay, so how do we square that with--for example--the GM having complete preference control over the description of the outcome? Because some descriptions have significant impact, such that they condition future valid mechanics, while being, in D&D, completely and totally up to GM preference.

I'm really struggling to see how you could ensure that "all input into the mechanics is diegetic" with D&D--non-diegetic inputs crop up frequently. Battle Masters, for example. Or even the Champion, simplest of the simple subclasses on the simplest of the simple classes: what is the diegetic input for the Defy Death subclass feature? You have advantage on Death saves. How can that be diegetic?


Okay....so....how do you pick which one? Because it seems to me that that now means the GM can invent anything they want, whenever, whatever, so long as it has the tiniest scrap of plausibility, boom, instantly diegetic, always forever.

Again, I keep coming back to the notion of the failed Perception check as a critical breakdown point for this sort of assertion. The inputs seem diegetic; GM knows the party has just been exposed to something they might or might not notice, so she asks for Perception checks, essentially as a reactive defense; let us assume a DC of 15. The players roll. The high-Wisdom, Perception-proficient Druid rolls a natural 1: result 11. The 8 Wisdom, no-proficiency Sorcerer rolls a nat 20, result 19. The GM narrates this as the Druid being preoccupied with preparations for the day, while the air-headed Sorcerer was placidly looking out at the forest and spotted the enemy by chance.

Diegetic inputs, outcomes that are possible to understand in the way you described, being entirely well-grounded and naturalistic, something that anyone could have foreseen as a plausible result. Yet we as players know that this is the GM retroactively inventing the explanation, solely because of the dice, not because of skill (since skill would have said the exact antithesis of this event occurred). How can that qualify as diegetic? We're literally retconning the world in order to explain what happened!


That last one is gonna be a tough one to get through, because it makes such a porous boundary. What does it mean to be "dominated" by such? Does it have to be so nearly all mechanics that it's rare to ever see anything else? That would seem to "hardly count as a 'game'" by your own standard. Is it enough to be merely 50%+1? That would seem completely out of wack with how people talk about their expectations for such gaming. But leaving it open to individual interpretation just lands us right back in the same old problem of "so now any game is 'simulationistic' if the GM simply fiat declares enough of the mechanics to be so."

The way I'm currently looking at it is that the test for X to be diegetic is solely X is something players can pretend their characters know. How X is established and even the plausibility of X is beside the point.

That X is diegetic does not amount to any claim about X's plausibility or some observer's satisfaction with how X was established. To say it is would be akin to saying that when I hear diegetic music in a film, that same music must necessarily have been heard on set during filming from whatever prop we're pretending accounts for it. And that prop ought to have been set up in a way that satisfied me (it was plugged in, tuned in, there was a station playing that song at that time, etc.)

Concretely, X isn't ruled out from being diegetic just because a GM established that X. And that's not limited to D&D.

 

[Enrahim]

(Emphasis mine.) I wanted to check that we were agreed that there are a vast number of possibilities.

On surface, a signal feature of a diegetical* mechanic on your account is that it narrows the number of outcomes to those that a designer has time and inclination to enumerate. So at least I can say that Dance isn't diegetical, right? Or is it partly diegetical?

What is the understandable causal chain in Dance for all possible outcomes? Which chain leads to lust, and which to wonder?



*Note the switch to "diegetical" which I think does a better job of avoiding implying that mechanics themselves are diegetic; indicating instead their features and consequences.

It is possible to recognise common properties of even infinite sets based on how they are defined. For instance I feel confortable claiming that all primes, except the number two, are odd. It wouldn't be reasonable to contest this simply based on the observation that as there are an infinite number of them, I cannot possibly have possibly have checked them all.

Similar for the claim that it should be possible to find some in-fiction causal relation between inputs and outputs of a given mechanic. I think that would often be recognisable as true (or at least very likely), from observing the properties of the mechanics. This without me having to actually map out these causal relations for all possibilities

Edit: If my initial formulation reads that way, it is flawed. I would welcome suggestions for improvement!

* I like "diagetical", as this was one of my objections to the attempt at using "diegetic" in the context of mechanics that prompted this proposal

 

[clearstream]

It is possible to recognise common properties of even infinite sets based on how they are defined. For instance I feel confortable claiming that all primes, except the number two, are odd. It wouldn't be reasonable to contest this simply based on the observation that as there are an infinite number of them, I cannot possibly have possibly have checked them all.

Similar for the claim that it should be possible to find some in-fiction causal relation between inputs and outputs of a given mechanic. I think that would often be recognisable as true (or at least very likely), from observing the properties of the mechanics. This without me having to actually map out these causal relations for all possibilities

Edit: If my initial formulation reads that way, it is flawed. I would welcome suggestions for improvement!

* I like "diagetical", as this was one of my objections to the attempt at using "diegetic" in the context of mechanics that prompted this proposal

While I accept the line of reasoning at a high level, it does not answer my question. X can be of the kind "worst possible failure" and "disastrous consequences" without that meaningfully reducing my options for what I can say X actually is. Subsets of an infinity may still be infinite!

Setting that aside, is there any causal explanation traceable in the text I cited for why Dance sometimes has the outcome "lust" and other times "wonder" or "telling a story" beyond the player intending that their skill use should have that effect?

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The way I'm currently looking at it is that the test for X to be diegetic is solely X is something players can pretend their characters know. How X is established and even the plausibility of X is beside the point.

But we can pretend the characters know anything. We are unbound in that respect. This, again, seems to indicate that every mechanic is diegetic simply because someone declares it so.

That X is diegetic does not amount to any claim about X's plausibility or some observer's satisfaction with how X was established. To say it is would be akin to saying that when I hear diegetic music in a film, that same music must necessarily have been heard on set during filming from whatever prop we're pretending accounts for it. And that prop ought to have been set up in a way that satisfied me (it was plugged in, tuned in, there was a station playing that song at that time, etc.)

Concretely, X isn't ruled out from being diegetic just because a GM established that X. And that's not limited to D&D.

My issue is not "just because". It is because it is only. Does that help communicate the difference?

The former is, "If X is ever in any way established by a GM, then X can't be diegetic." I agree that that standard would be impossibly high, and probably make "diegetic mechanic" meaningless by being too exclusive. But it seems to me that what you are saying is, "All you need is the GM to establish that X, then it is diegetic." But the GM can establish anything. They are unbound in this regard. Literally, absolutely anything can be established; as has been repeatedly said, "the GM is reality". Literally 100% of what they say is true, is true, and 100% of what they say is false, is false. Even if this leads to contradictions, it is (objectively) incorrect to call into question anything the GM has established, ever, for any reason.

Hence, this standard seems to do the opposite. While the former is overbroad in its limitations, treating the GM's touch as an irreversible taint, the latter is near-vacuous in its limitations, functionally limiting nothing whatsoever. Neither path is acceptable.

 

[pemerton]

Random runes found in a tower or wherever aren't more likely to be what an expert at rune reading conjectures before he reads them than anyone else's ideas.

Aren't they? Do you say this based on your own expert knowledge of runes in dungeons?

Eg do you not think an archaeologist might be better at conjecturing what some writing is likely to be about, before they read it, based on what else they can observe about it, its location, etc, than a non-expert?

 

[pemerton]

Are you interested in helping me (and others) to understand better what was actually going on in the runes example?

I think I've explained it in excruciating detail. In the play of the game, the player is aware of the scene distinction Strange Runes, which (i) corresponds to their PC seeing the runes, and (ii) flags the runes as salient; the PC is lost in the dungeon, which in mechanical terms is expressed as a d12 Lost in the Dungeon complication (this is not a map-and-key game, so being lost is not resolved in the way it would be in , say, classic D&D); the player (as their PC) has the idea that the runes might reveal a way out, and so decides to use their turn in the action economy to read the runes so as to degrade the complication: this pools their relevant dice (including Solitary Traveller and Cunning Expert) against the Doom Pool (including the Strange Runes). The player's roll succeeds, and my recollection is that their effect die was a d12 which means that they completely eliminated their complication - in the fiction, this is the runes, when read, revealing where they are in the dungeon and hence a way out.

You appear to be asserting that the fact that the PC has relevant knowledge and experience shouldn't bear upon this resolution - or something like that. I assert that when an expert makes a conjecture, because a mark of expertise is that conjectures track the truth, it makes perfect sense for the PC's relevant knowledge and experience to bear upon this resolution.

You are also parsing differences of mental state - hope, conjecture, intent - to which the play of the game is not sensitive. If the player wasn't, as their PC, conjecturing that the runes might reveal a way out, they wouldn't declare the action - it would make no sense otherwise. The player, and the PC, also hopes that the conjecture is true. The PC of course intends that their conjecture be true - that's inherent in it being a sincere conjecture - but I don't see how that adds anything to the analysis.

 

[clearstream]

But we can pretend the characters know anything. We are unbound in that respect. This, again, seems to indicate that every mechanic is diegetic simply because someone declares it so.

Different modes of play have different principles and rules for agreeing what the characters can know. I can therefore say that under some set of principles and rules being followed, players will where appropriate refrain from pretending their characters know X.

As an aside, I suggest "diegetical" when describing mechanics.

My issue is not "just because". It is because it is only. Does that help communicate the difference?

The former is, "If X is ever in any way established by a GM, then X can't be diegetic." I agree that that standard would be impossibly high, and probably make "diegetic mechanic" meaningless by being too exclusive. But it seems to me that what you are saying is, "All you need is the GM to establish that X, then it is diegetic." But the GM can establish anything. They are unbound in this regard. Literally, absolutely anything can be established; as has been repeatedly said, "the GM is reality". Literally 100% of what they say is true, is true, and 100% of what they say is false, is false. Even if this leads to contradictions, it is (objectively) incorrect to call into question anything the GM has established, ever, for any reason.

Not quite. I'm saying that when determining what is diegetic while playing D&D, it's D&D's principles and rules that count. I may dislike them, and that is a separate matter from whether X has been properly established to be diegetic in D&D... i.e. in accordance with its principles and rules such that players of D&D agree to pretend their characters can know that X.

Hence, this standard seems to do the opposite. While the former is overbroad in its limitations, treating the GM's touch as an irreversible taint, the latter is near-vacuous in its limitations, functionally limiting nothing whatsoever. Neither path is acceptable.

Incorporating a person into the lusory-means enables players to entertain as diegetic all sorts of things that may be effortful, even prohibitively so, to formulate as rules in text. Excision of any role for participant imagination in saying what exists in the imagined world winds up with a boardgame, not a TTRPG. I know you do not mean to take it that far... but where do you draw the line? Quite properly, you draw it according to your preferences.

Overall I am seeking to avoid any 'private' definition of diegetic. I could protest that "Were I playing D&D I would reject those principles and rules that allow DM to freely declare X is diegetic! So that X isn't diegetic for me, a player! Checkmate!!" Very well, but then I will be playing a variant of the game that better suits my ideas of satisfactory play. That has no bearing on whether those players who do put the principles and rules of D&D in force for themselves are capable of pretending that their characters know some X, that X being established by DM.

I don't know that it helps, but imagine that the rule I wanted to follow was X is diegetic, but only if that X was established on an odd numbered day by a person named Frank. I don't think a rule like that should have any bearing on groups following different rules for establishing their imagined worlds. Referring back to cinema, it's not the mechanics of prop-creation, set-dressing, script-writing or projection that make things seen on screen or heard in the auditorium diegetic or not, it's agreement in acceptance by actors and audience that they are. My friend Frank and I could sit down on an odd numbered day and achieve that in our RPG.