Diegetic and Non-Diegetic

I've raised this idea a few times, but this seemed a really succinct description and something I can work with.


I've played both Ars Magica and Amber, and I love both the games. They can both generate really immersive experiences but they both do so in very different ways. 

From this perspective, Ars Magica is very non-diegetic in way it describes the world. It functions in the traditional style of a series of procedural manuals and pseudo-historical textbooks. It gives an idea of what happened in the past and what can happen in your games, but not necessarily how to make if feel. Arguably, this is very "facts over feelings"... there are a whole lot of regimented ways that things work, and this fits the rigour and research of the magi at the heart of the game, while providing a lot of ideas about how things can be expanded to include the other characters who live their lives around the magi.

Amber on the other hand could be described as a lot more diegetic. By reading the novels, you get more of a perspective of how it would be to live within the world of the narrative and how the events of the stories impact their people within them at an emotional level. The rules also play very loosely, and are more about following the story and the ways characters relate to one another rather than mechanical nuance...in this way it could be described as far more "feelings over facts".

Arguably, in the versions of the old Forge terminology that I use, both game approach the simulationist style of play, but Ars Magica approaches from the "gamist" perspective, while "Amber" approaches from the "narritivist" perspective. The tensions applied by the rules of Ars Magica are designed to keep pushing you away from problematic edge cases, and about giving rules options for what happens when you get closer to the edge (pushing from without). The tensions applied by the rules of Amber are more about pulling toward a central narrative thread (pulling from within). Neither is wrong, they're just different ways of doing it.

There's plenty of other examples I've seen frecently (especially since the TTRPG Design grloup on Facebook has become a fun discussion space in recent months) and I could write a whole lot more here, but I've seen a bunch of other comments in the wild that I'll be addressing over the next couple of days. So I'm kind of circling back to the title of the blog at the moment.


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