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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 9145248" data-attributes="member: 82106">Hmmm, it SEEMS TO ME, and I haven't given this a huge amount of deep thought, that the useful way to use diegetic in RPG play is in the sense you mention, things that are supervenient over something in the game world, but I'm not sure this is 'enough' for some people. You could think of this in terms of the 'strong' and 'weak' forms of supervenience. Weak supervenience would allow for a given element to be considered 'diegetic' if it can only change when the thing in the game world changes, but in that case it doesn't necessarily have to be the same relationship in all cases. If you would play that game again, and arrive at the same fictional position, the element which is supervenient on it might not be the same. Strong supervenience would demand that it is. So for example in a strongly supervenient definition mechanic X is only diegetic if it always represents fact Y within that world. We see this is a COMMON objection, generally described as mechanics that don't represent the fiction, such as the famous "I inflict the prone condition on a jelly" from 4e, which is widely panned. So, 4e demands that, for the jelly's prone condition to change, some fiction about the jelly must change, but not WHAT fiction. Of course ALL RPGs (at least a wide assortment) have this character to a degree, and this is endlessly discussed (in this thread even). Hit Points are 'weakly diegetic' by my proposition above, for the hit points to change SOMETHING in the fiction must also change, but what that is, isn't strictly defined, in one instance it could be a decrease in luck, in another a wound. To some degree this will also be a question of granularity. Often we simply don't define the exact fictional outcome of things, "I killed the orc" and we know I hit it with my mace, but we don't really know what sort of injury was produced, a head wound, crushed ribs, broken back? It may be counter-productive to label such things 'weakly diegetic' however, so perhaps there are additional constraints that would be useful, or maybe its just a fuzzy boundary. But in a more practical sense, this fuzziness is really why I was never that interested in the whole question. It can be debated forever, but in the end something either does or does not strike a particular player as strongly diegetic or not, weakly diegetic, or not diegetic at all.</blockquote>

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