What is a "Narrative Mechanic"?

[pemerton]

While it’s a bit abstract saving throws do correspond to something in the fiction - your chance of the effect landing (taking into account your ability to avoid it and the effects ability to land, often based on the stats of another creature).

I'm not persuaded that "chance of an effect landing" is a thing.

But setting aside that metaphysical doubt, rolling the die is not a sign of that chance. Nor is the number that results on the die a sign of that chance. Whatever the nature of the correlation, it is not a sign.

Yes, I was thinking that from a wargaming perspective dice rolls are taken to represent real factors that the game abstraction is insufficiently detailed to capture. Therefore the roll is representing stuff that is indeed going on in world... and often folk do narrate it as such!

Whatever the mode of representation, it is not a sign of those things. It is certainly not a description of those things. It is much closer to a substitute for those things in a reasoning process.

In D&D rolling a d20 to hit does not occur in the fiction - but the attack on the troll that roll represents does. That's a diegetic mechanic - the mechanic represents a clear action or event in the fiction.

However, in D&D, the granting (or spending) of a point of inspiration does not in general represent any causal change in the fiction. The player just declares they have advantage on that attack roll, without having anything in the fiction to indicate why the attack is more likely to hit. That's an adiegetic mechanic.

In this case, Come and Get It - which is supposedly the poster child for 4e D&D's "dissociated" mechanics - is diegetic: it represents a clear event in the fiction, namely, that the fighter does <whatever>, as a result their foes close, and then their foes get whacked.

Flashbacks in BitD are clearly diegetic under this criterion: the mechanic represents a clear series of events in the fiction, namely, the character having prepared themself.

Even spending inspiration can be diegetic, if a particular table takes the view that expending inspiration correlates, in the fiction, to trying harder.

Say an Int save to see through an illusion (one of the more common Int saves) or resist a psychic attack. I feel like it is easy to see how that narrates into the fiction, i.e. is diegetic. As for what to picture exactly, obviously one draws from comic book frames... gritting teeth, must... resist... etc

I don’t agree here at all. A common theme in literature is the hero overcoming a mages magical control over him by sheer force of will. Ala the will save.

Int and cha occur in literature to a lesser extent but the same principle arises.

I've now lost track of what the word "diegetic" is being used to mean. But whatever it is being used for, it is not being used with the meaning of event that is experienced, or is amenable to being experienced, by the characters in the fiction.

I mean, suppose that a RPG worked this way: a player has a pool of tokens, and every time they want their PC to grit their teeth . . .must resist . . . and overcome some burden by sheer force of will, they can spend a token and their PC resists. The spending of the token would correlate to, or represent, something in the fiction, namely, the character resisting. So now is the spending of the token "diegetic"? But I thought that sort of "fate point" mechanic was what the label of "diegetic" was supposed to be excluding?

Hence why I have lost track.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Assuming that the stress expenditure has some in-fiction correlate, there is an interesting question - when is the stress deemed to have been suffered? At the time of flashing back? Or at the time flashed back to? I don't know BitD well enough to know the answer to this question.

There is no canonical answer, and since taking the same action WITHOUT a flashback would not cost any stress at all, its hard to see it as diegetic at all!

 

[pemerton]

There is no canonical answer, and since taking the same action WITHOUT a flashback would not cost any stress at all, its hard to see it as diegetic at all!

Well as I've said, I've lost track of what "diegetic" is supposed to mean in this context, given that it is not being used with its ordinary meaning of labelling an event in the performance that is experienced, or apt to be experienced, by the characters in the fiction.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

My thought here is that an abstraction such as tracking tokens supervenes upon the game world. Per supervenience, change to tokens matches change in world.

Suppose that I am a man and english speaking, and my character is a woman and sylvan speaking. We take my human male-voice english-language speech acts to be (say) elven female-voiced sylvan-language speech acts. They're evidently not, but they do supervene. My character surely does not experience my english-language wordings.

Or another example, I say that my character Jo jumps. I should think that Jo experiences jumping, but Jo surely doesn't experience my saying that Jo jumps. Therefore my capacity and acts as player in that regard are no more diegetic than if I rolled dice: both represent something in world without being that something.

Thus I'm speculating that any game element that has a supervenience relationship with stuff in game world can be said to be diegetic (or more accurately, I'm agreeing with your earlier intuition that it isn't a useful term.)


Stress is paid in order to flashback, but I guess you are thinking of stress arising from actions taken in the flashback. Say if you pushed yourself (there is an example of this in the game text.) SFAIK the text is silent, indicating that nothing exceptional happens such as retconning everything leading up to the flashback! Therefore both stress paid for the flashback and stress paid within the flashback are applied to character along the player's timeline, not the character's timeline.

That's quite interesting, in relation to the above discussion.

Yeah, though I think by using 'weak' and 'strong' I salvaged something from the 'meaninglessness' of the whole term, lol.

On the subject of the timing of the cost of a flashback, I wasn't thinking of the cost of anything that happens WITHIN the flashback, but that's pretty interesting. The character could trauma out of the entire score due to paying stress last Tuesday in the character's timeline. I haven't seen it happen, but it is well within the realm of possibility! That would tend to make things even more complicated in terms of defining a diegetic action, bringing in a temporal dependency.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Taking it as a premise that this stress payment correlates with something in the fiction - let's say, very roughly, exertion by the character, then I asked: when did the character exert themself?

Option (1): in the "now" of the fiction, ie when the events of the flashback are now recalled.

Option (2): in the "past" of the fiction, ie when the events of the flashback occurred.

In the post I am about to quote, @hawkeyefan appeared to go with option (2), and indeed seems to deny that we need even suppose that the events of the flashback are recalled "now" by the character:
As I said, I don't know BitD well enough to have an independent opinion.

Given the complete lack of any discussion of such issues in the game itself, AFAIK, I think your opinion is as good as anyone's.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Well as I've said, I've lost track of what "diegetic" is supposed to mean in this context, given that it is not being used with its ordinary meaning of labelling an event in the performance that is experienced, or apt to be experienced, by the characters in the fiction.

As much as some people didn't like the term "narrative mechanic" I don't think bringing "diegetic" and "adiegetic"* into this much helped to clear the matter...

(* Is that even a word? Isn't it "extradiegetic"?)

 

[pemerton]

Given the complete lack of any discussion of such issues in the game itself, AFAIK, I think your opinion is as good as anyone's.

I think play experience would help!

 

[hawkeyefan]

Nope. Not at all.

I have some decades of life, study, and inquisitiveness behind me. I could not just vomit up everything or anything I know for you, and neither can anyone else - the human brain isn't a filing cabinet with perfect access to all contents at all times. At any given moment, if you ask me about some some obscure fact, I may or may not be able to recall it, even though I know the topic was covered in some course I took 20 years ago, or was in a nature documentary last week.

So, yeah, that die roll can totally be about recall in the moment, and/or about being able to properly do mental gymnastics in the moment, and be perfectly acceptable to me.

It may be… I would agree that recall can be part of it, or that there are some instances where it’s a matter of recall.

But to say it’s never about simply not having learned the info? That’s a really weird take that I don’t think stands up to scrutiny.

Maybe I’m missing some nuance in what you’re saying though?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You take it a bit too far.

In D&D rolling a d20 to hit does not occur in the fiction - but the attack on the troll that roll represents does. That's a diegetic mechanic - the mechanic represents a clear action or event in the fiction.

However, in D&D, the granting (or spending) of a point of inspiration does not in general represent any causal change in the fiction. The player just declares they have advantage on that attack roll, without having anything in the fiction to indicate why the attack is more likely to hit. That's an adiegetic mechanic.

Is it? Or is luck or divine favor or whatever we might imagine is represented by having inspiration, actually something that exists within the fantastical world which D&D portrays? This is yet ANOTHER thorn in the idea that we can define 'diegetic', it is going to be dependent on some fairly subtle questions about what is "fictionally real" or not! Given that these questions are not even generally addressed at any point formally by the participants in the game, I'm of the opinion that these are effectively unanswerable, or are simply dependent on one person's viewpoint.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Perhaps I misunderstood what you were trying to press on.



I expect most folks view them as typically establishing what the character can recall at the time of the check, rather than retroactively. But maybe I'm wrong.

Either way it still establishes now what the character has presumably known since some, probably undefined, time in the past. Thus they have, retroactively, always known this fact, and I believe @FrogReaver might note that this is problematic, as I recall he's kind of big on chronological integrity (IE if Joe had actually known beforehand that Trids can't eat Trix, he would have avoided the Trid lair entirely!).