When playing a class-based fantasy RPG, are classes diegetic for you?

[Fenris-77]

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Funny, your psychiatrist was just saying the same thing...

 

[TwoSix]

Funny, your psychiatrist was just saying the same thing...

She's just fat-phobic.

 

[John Dallman]

... even the designers of the game didn't seem to think that was important the moment it was inconvenient ...

This is not a well-founded argument. The designers of the classic era failed to cope with many possibilities for their games; players of the time did not regard designer methods or choices as definitions of what the game should be. More recent editions of D&D have been more and more prescriptive about what they're intended for. That's why people dating from the classic era often still play the classic games. They aren't so prescriptive, or so limiting.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This is not a well-founded argument. The designers of the classic era failed to cope with many possibilities for their games; players of the time did not regard designer methods or choices as definitions of what the game should be. More recent editions of D&D have been more and more prescriptive about what they're intended for. That's why people dating from the classic era often still play the classic games. They aren't so prescriptive, or so limiting.

Maybe so, but there's not much else to work with. Nothing published by anybody seemed to make much effort to make NPCs match up with the character classes particularly well The best you'd see is references to them using the same spell progression or attack table as one of the extent ones, but not otherwise having the traits of a class (hit points or saving throw table for example).

I mean, fact was, people were going to do one of three things there, since the game proper had no consistency in this: imitate published examples, imitate what the people who taught them the game did, or pull it out of thin air, and I'm pretty comfortable saying that's the proper order to assess which. If it didn't lean into the way published examples did it, then there was nothing but localism at all, which means in practice, no meaningful trend that can be discerned.

 

[Argyle King]

Sorta.

Some of the games I play have race-as-class concepts. So, for those, yeah. If my class is "dwarf," that's something diegetic.

Other things - sorta. The average NPC likely doesn't know the specific class/level differences between a fighter and a barbarian, but "hey, this guy fights using the fighting style of the Northern berserkers" vs "this guy wears the armor of a trained swordsman" is something that can be somewhat ascertained from an in-game perspective.

 

[aramis erak]

Even accepting that (and I'll note I played my biggest piece of D&D proper when it didn't have NPC classes in any meaningful way), as I've noted, this thread is not just about D&D.

So you played in 1974-'76? Cause 1977 or so is when the first NPC classes were released.

 

[aramis erak]

I've been learning the Fantasy Flight Star Wars game recently, though I haven't played it, and there most the classes (careers) line up with terminology which would be used in universe (ie: "he's a smuggler", "she's a diplomat") but in order to have multiple Jedi classes they seem to have gotten away from this a bit in the Force and Destiny book. I would note, however, that the striking thing here is that since it is a game really intended for (variations on) one well-established setting the sense of what is true in the setting players have is going to have a lot more impact, and they clearly designed the classes to lean into being compatible for diagetic use as much as possible.

The 6 classes of Jedi in F&D are linked to the 6 forms and three major and 3 minor Jedi Archetypes from the SWEU fiction... and all are terms used in the fiction.
The 7th jedi career (from the black & blue livery universal supps) is very focused upon the GAR period.

 

[TorgoTheWhite]

I don't.. Sometimes world-elements will refer to my PC in purposefully inaccurate ways though. It can throw players through a loop at first, since they are so used to literal concepts and Faerun where the diagetics extends to "adventurers" as well... which I find to be lame

 

[AlexofBarbaria]

What are HP if not a pacing tool?

HP represents the toughness of a creature. It's a not the most realistic representation -- but it still has a clear referent. This take matches the definition in the 5e books. Your view is radical

I'd be more inclined to agree that HP is a Clock if you went the other way and said: HP represents how tough a monster is, and Clock complexity represents how tough some sequence of tasks is, therefore HP is a Clock. But that would be incorrect usage according to the BitD Clocks page:

"When you create a clock, make it about the obstacle, not the method...the PCs can attempt to overcome them in a variety of ways." It says a good example is "The Tower" not "Climb the Tower”.

So the Clock complexity does not represent anything in particular about The Tower. It can't, if we're agnostic about how the PCs will tackle it. This is a pacing tool: it's how much time we want to spend on the Tower scene.

HP doesn't work like this. We know how the PCs will reduce the monsters' HP: their abilities for dealing damage are defined. If we allow improvised attacks, it's even more important that we know what HP means in the fiction, because the DM needs that to rule how much damage is done.

How many rations do you have? That's another day of travel, be sure to mark your rations. That's a clock.

How many arrows do you have? That's another two attacks with your bow, be sure to mark your arrows. That's a clock.

Pick a thing in the world that's measurable and changes, i.e. goes up, goes down, goes up and down, etc. Mechanically, that's a clock. Hell, the DMG uses clocks for loyalty and renown. Again, the only difference between clocks and HP is D&D players are more used to HP than clocks, despite HP, rations, arrows, time, levels, fires, structural integrity of buildings, etc all being different kinds of clocks.

No, not every timer is a Clock. You're missing the point of Clocks and not giving the mechanic enough credit here Rations and ammo are "Climb the Tower" type problems not "The Tower" type scene prompts.

 

[AlexofBarbaria]

I think the answer to that last question is obviously not. By definition, whatever event or thing occurs or exists in the fiction itself will be its own concrete self, and not an abstracted representation of itself.

(Last question being "Can something that is an abstraction be counted as diagetic.")

Whoa hold on -- all game mechanics are abstractions, so none are diegetic and the concept is useless for discussing RPGs? It's trivially true that an abstraction is not the thing it represents. When asking if a game mechanic is diegetic we're not asking if the mechanic itself exists in the game world, but whether it has a referent in the game world.