NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9715358" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Sure it can.As noted: diegetic music. You are hearing it. Your assumption is that you're hearing it and the characters are not. But then the narrative actually demonstrates that no, the characters are hearing that music. That's clearly the thing you're doing, also being one and the same thing as what the character is doing.And I gave an example, albeit from a video game, where a specific mechanic could be diegetic in one case and not in another: Deus Ex and its character JC Denton reading emails (or other computer files), which is done through a menu screen, and the player saving and loading the game, which is done through a menu screen.The mechanic is functionally identical in each case, apart from changes to shape and location. Some parts are literally identical up to the width of the menu itself and what words appear. It's a menu screen either way. But the former is diegetic, because Denton is in fact interacting with a menu, and the characteristics of that menu are tailored to be what he sees. Same goes for, as an example, interacting with medical or repair bots; you can even see the menu screen objects on their chassis. But, and I should hope this would be obvious, the game menu is objectively not diegetic. JC Denton doesn't have the power to Save Game where he feels like it. He cannot adjust the brightness of his world. He cannot alter difficulty settings. Etc.Clearly, some mechanics can be diegetic. A lot of them can't be, just like how a lot of film elements can't be diegetic. I wouldn't actually say that cutting and editing is non-diegetic a priori, but it is almost always so. Long "single take" shots are rare because they're exceedingly difficult to pull off well, even though that is actually what humans experience. However, if a film is being recounted as a visual depiction of a story a person is telling, then it can be diegetic to have cuts or skips because that's the nature of human memory. (Or, in the case of something like The Princess Bride, the grandpa is actively "editing" the story down for digestibility for his young grandson, so although the "cuts" are not diegetic for Buttercup and Westley etc., they can be for the boy, because that's the story he's actually experiencing.)But yes! This does in fact mean that essentially every mechanic used in D&D isn't diegetic and almost certainly can't be made so. That shouldn't really be a surprise. We are still primarily using slight variations of mechanics invented around 50 years ago primarily to let some wargamers get up to some silly shenanigans with swords and sorcery. They weren't meant to be diegetic at all; they were simply meant to be adequate to get useful information across.</blockquote>

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