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="Maxperson" data-source="post: 9715371" data-attributes="member: 23751">The problem is that people are trying to look at RPGs like they are movies when they are not.Aristotle identified mimesis and diegesis.  Mimesis was when the story was shown to you as in a play, where diegesis was when the story was narrated to you and wasn't visual.Movies and TV changed that.  It's visual, like mimesis, but because the camera work and editing force the view to focus on the aspects of the story the director wants you to focus on, it's considered to be a form of narration, so the visuals became diegetic when experienced by both the audience and the characters, and non-diegetic when only experienced by the audience.RPGs change that even further. Most of the game has no visual, but some parts do, such as terrain and figures. Even then those things don't include all the details that our character's experience with the terrain and creatures.  It's also not experienced solely through the narration and visuals, but also through mechanics.  The mechanics being a direct part of how the event is experienced and also part of the to the event in the fiction makes that mechanic diegetic. Without the use of the mechanic, no event occurs for the character in the fiction to be experienced by the player. The mechanic is part of what is happening in the fiction.  Without the climb check mechanics, there is no climb happening in the fiction.So like the change to diegesis with the advent of film, where visuals can now be said to be diegetic because of how it can be perceived as narration, mechanics can also be said to be diegetic because of how they are the same as the event the character perceives.  No mechanics, no climb.  Yes mechanics, yes climb.Aristotle couldn't conceive of movies and TV, nor could he conceive of modern RPGs.  Things change and what is or is not diegetic has to change with them.</blockquote>

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