Mark Delsing okay. My example will of course produce a lot of disagreements! 🙂

In our Urban Shadows game, I saved you from the demons that were about to eat you. Afterward, we sat down and shared our fears about these demons! Those characters’ developing relationship is a diegetic thing; it’s happening inside the fiction. It has its own weight and meaning and context.

Meanwhile, I-the-player have earned a Debt on you. That’s an outside-the-fiction mechanical thing that’s hooked to an inside-the-fiction thing.

Have you ever had to slow down the die rolling at a tabletop game, you know, folks are throwing around bonuses and invoking their abilities and whatever? Do you ever just pull up for a second and say “Wait a second…what does this look like in the fiction?” Then the players might look at the advantages they’re trying to invoke and then realize that what they’re trying to do has no fictional context? That’s related to diegesis, might not actually be diegesis, and this is where I’d defer to one of the gamesplainers to set me straight.

Lots of freeform relies entirely on diegesis: what does my character want, what are my character’s relationships, what is true to the fiction? It can be diceless because everything you need to move the fiction forward is already in the fiction, and the uncertainty is coming from how the players interpret their character’s knowledge of themselves and the world.

Re. “Toon.” Seriously? You’ve never heard that one? Lucky duck. It’s your PC, with the implication that your PC is a package of assets to be used to overcome challenges. Disposable, meaningless, no fictional context.