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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9147452" data-attributes="member: 42582">I just reiterate here that I am applying the word "diegetic" in its literal meaning, as describing an aspect of the performance that is also understood to be experienced by the characters within the fiction.Orson Welles' narration in The Magnificant Ambersons represents various parts of the fiction quite accurately. That doesn't make it diegetic! Again I just don't see the word "diegetic" as doing any useful work here. If we want to say that a mechanically-framed state of affairs (eg a to hit bonus, a hit point tally, etc) is a more-or-less regimented descriptor for some fictional state, let's just say that.We might then say that having the Lucky feat is not such a descriptor. Of course, that will then produce a puzzle about whether being Level X is such a descriptor, given that one way being of a certain level manifests in the mechanics is by having a certain number of feats, and we've just posited that having one of those feats doesn't describe anything in the fiction about the PC. One of the strengths of D&D is that it has always been rather ambivalent about the extent to which, and manner in which, various mechanics do or don't serve as descriptors for fictional states.A contrast could be drawn with (say) Classic Traveller, which has nothing like the Lucky feat as a mechanical element. Everything on the Traveller PC sheet - whether generated via PC build (say Skill Expertise Ranks) or via action resolution (say wound levels) - is a descriptor of some fictional state. I don't see that we need to complicate this by labelling Traveller's mechanics as "diegetic".</blockquote>

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