I’m a crunch junky, always been and I know it. I love the rules especially those involved in the creation of monsters (I’m looking at you Mr Chaos-Shaped Were-Boar Ogre!)
In fact, that’s probably why I like reading stuff by Mike Mearls (Iron Heroes, Book of Nine Swords, Book of Iron Might) so much. That man is all about the crunch. Even the fluff he writes about is crunchy.
Aside: Just so we speak the same jargon: Crunch = Game mechanics and rules. Fluff = flavour and atmosphere. One of D&D’s 3.x many critics is the that it’s very much crunch over fluff.
I’m also pretty non-receptive to fluff. I spend a lot of time tinkering encounters and cooling them up but I don’t spend a lot of time on settings and atmosphere. Case in point, as much as I love Mearl’s writing, I’m having a real hard time with Wolfgang Baur’s style. I bought 2 books by Wolfgang Baur, The Book of Roguish Luck and Expedition to the Demonweb Pits and I hated them on the first read. So much so that I wrote this about the Expedition module in a gaming forum (I’m Jag Dell, my previous alias before ChattyDM).
Thing is, Wolfgang Baur is a pretty awesome Fluff writer. When he writes about the setting, the feel of an adventure and characters, it’s pure coolness. It just does not translate in things that make me want to use his stuff. I know he didn’t write the Expedition adventure alone, but some of the hooks and railroads are pretty darn terrible! (The Witchfire Triology also gave me the same feeling, only the Rule of Cool was applied massively and surpassed a lot of the bad things about it, just not enough for me).
Now here is the ironic part. My best D&D adventures that I remember, the ones where all players really were in it and all agree that it was cool, were stronger on the fluff than on the Crunch.
So while I easily and heartily endorse Mike Mearl’s philosophy, I should be taking lessons from the one that makes me want to grind my teeth. To that effect, I joined Wolfgang’s last Open Design project last year. It’s a patronage approach to adventure design where a limited group of people pay a few tens of bucks to have him write an adventure for us (this is such a cool concept). In the end you get the adventure as a PDF and it’s distribution is extremely limited.
However, I failed to learn the secrets of masterwork fluff because whenever he wrote about mechanics, his thinking was so much away from what I liked and believed that I could not get over this and focus on the rest. (For the record, he himself says that his natural style fits more with A D&D 2e than D&D 3e) . So I decided to agree to disagree and move on to other fluff inspiration.
So I guess that I needed to approach fluff from a different angle. And I think I found it. I finally found D&D flavored fluffy goodness that I can sink my teeth in and appreciate…. and that fluff is called Planescape. I bought a mint-condition copy on Ebay earlier this summer and… just wow! I really dig D&D’s Cosmology but Planescape brought an extra oomph that is pure fluff and yet speaks to me. Its all about attitude and philosophies.
Since my players clamor for an inter-plannar adventure and I’m having a kick with Planescape, I’ll ponder on a future DM challenge in integrating this kind of fluff as extra coolness in my games. I’ll keep you posted.
“I’m a crunch junky, always been and I know it. I love the rules especially those involved in the creation of monsters (I’m looking at you Mr Chaos-Shaped Were-Boar Ogre!)”
Heh! 🙂
I used to be a crunch junkie – heck, I even tried to make Fire, Fusion & Steel work. GURPS Vehicles broke me, however.
(I admit that that’s something of an extreme example of ‘cruch’, and perhaps unfair.)
I wondered for a while, as I looked at these books and these supplements, what I really liked about playing, what were the things that I thought were really cool, where my enjoyment came from. And it turns out, it wasn’t really the crunch, it was the fluff. It was the descriptions of people, places, things, the stories behind them. The numbers? ‘Oh, it’s close enough, really’ has become my mantra. When pressed, I tend to explain it like this:
“As long as you get the relationships between the elements right (this is more powerful than that, which is faster than that other thing), you’re fine.”
D&D 3.x monsters are fun, though, even if I find the end numbers something I won’t really use. What I love about them is there’s some really neat ideas in a lot of those templates. ‘Pseudonatural’ is a gem, as is a lot of the stuff in Savage Species. I’ll shamelessly steal those for my own uses.
What hit me a while ago, about the level of crunch that I wanted, was best put forward in this analogy:
“D&D is a bunch of Legos. I have all these cool parts, and they fit together in really neat ways, and I can make some fun stuff with them, all sorts of variations. But in the end…I’m still stuck with pieces of plastic that I can’t change. No matter what I build, it’s still made of Legos. What I want now is clay. It takes almost more work, more effort to bring out the details that Legos already have built-in, but when I do the details are exactly what I want them to be. It may not be as crisp or sharp-edged as Legos, but I want malleability over sharpness.”
Now, for a slightly different take, I’m also a miniatures wargamer, and there crunch is (almost) everything. I’ll write up my own fluff (for the most part), thankyouverymuch. 🙂
What a coincidence man, I too was broken by Gurps Vehicles and Mecha. But in retrospect, this was unfun crunch for the players.
I’m now tired of the monster design of D&D because it takes longer creating them than killing them. Since I own almost every creature supplement, I pick from them 1st and leave templating for truly special monsters I can’t find.
It seems we’re kindered spirit in term of Crunch addiction withrdrawal…
Hi my name is Phil…. and I’m a Crunchaolic.
GURPS vehicle is a trap for the crunch oriented guys. You waist time on some meaningless aspect of the game. (I too have waist time with this books)
Like you said noah, what you need from a vehicle in a RPG is limited (speed mostly).
As for the crunch Vs fluff part… If you have the imagination the fluff can be made up without needing books for it. Most of the game I have GM where with GURPS a system that has a lot of crunch and even less fluff then D&D. I took the part I wanted and added the fluff myself.
If I read the signs correctly, tThe next edition of D&D will feature simplier monster Legos on which you can smear a level of Clay to get your monster.
For example, you’ll get a Brute Template that represents large Bruiser-type monsters (Ogres, trolls, etc) and create them in a few lines of text by setting their power level and choosing features (Awesome blow, regenerate, Weapons, done!)
You add a layer of fluff on this and you have your monster…
Funny, when you look a Gygax original monsters that’s what it was…. just not as systematic.
As a game designer, I’m more of a crunch guy too, as long as it’s designed well. (The examples given of why not to be a crunch guy to me are just examples of bad design.)
To me, a lot of fluff has difficulty actually becoming useful in the game. I also hate to have to look something up in a big setting book to answer a player’s question… I’d rather just make it up and move on.
Oh yeah, and Planescape rules.
Well I guess I’m a fluff guy. As I am kind of fluid with the rules sometimes. But on the other hand I really like GURPS vehicle and mecha books. They never broke me. But they sure as hell stole whole evenings from me.
Maybe thats why I’m really digging Star Frontiers at the moment. I am super familiar with the fluff of the game from back in the day. But the rules are old school crunchy. Yet its almost a rules light game.
It’s all good I think. I want to dig fluff more because it directly relates to some of my player’s current tastes.
In one ‘season’ ender where I revealed to my players that their whole world a was a prison bubble-world, I layed it real think in describing the Carcerian Prison plane they were on. The sheer look of shock and wonder stronger than I expected and it was all just fluff.
Hi ChattyDM!
You asked me to summarize my blogpost.
Basically I am postulating that “Fluff” and “Crunch” are used in a pretty useless/reveiling way.
(unless put into further context,)
Because:
Depending on the mode of play you are in, one man´s fluff might be another man´s crunch.
For example, when the PCs are manipulating the prices of certain fruit, to make a profit, or to meddle psychohistorically with an interstellar society.
Concerning this part of the game, eating habits, holidays and fresh fruit distribution information are crunchiest crunch, whereas for a Dungeon crawl, holidays and eating habits are definitely fluff.
I was referring to your blog as an example of the widespread (sandwich pun?) understanding and usage of the two words.
There´s a lot of implicit assumptions accompanying this dichotomy.