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Message: <blockquote data-quote="BSF" data-source="post: 2805530" data-attributes="member: 13098">It's not necessarily what I am saying.  It appears to be market pressures.  Perhaps the pressures have changed since Sean wrote his allegory?  If they haven't, then many people are telling the market that they can build their own fluff.  I encourage my players to use fluff.  I build it into the rewards system for the game.  I encourage my players to help design my campaign world.  I have gods, cultures, academies and even classes designed by players.  Then there is the stuff designed by me.  I certainly encourage narrative combat styles.  We sometimes collaborate on what a particular 'hit' might look like.  I have actually run sessions where I told the players up front that if they couldn't describe the attack, it would miss.  I encourage my players to use the mechanics of spells and change the visual effect.  I had a player using the Shaman's Handbook for his Shaman character.  He took the force domain and used a turtle as his totem.  All the visual effects of the spells tended to be turtle shells.  Sure we kidded him a little for being like Mario, but it was the thematic element he wanted.  I recently wrote up a religious zealot for an NPC.  He is based around the Barbarian mechanics, but he is definitely not a barbarian.  He flies into a religious zeal when he feels his temple is being threatened.  His zeal makes him stronger and tougher.  He eschews the written word because if it is worth knowing, it is worth knowing from memory.  I think my campaign has a bit of flavor.  Homebrewed fluff.  Sure a book with more fluff might be more interesting to read.  I won't argue with that!  But it is also something that I don't necessarily need.  For me, a lot of the joy comes from making some of my own stuff.  Still, while I don't necessarily want as much fluff, I do wish there was more fluff for the people that do want it.  I'm not better than anybody else.  I just have different desires.  I think the recent 'Behind the Spells' PDFs written by Brett Boyd (Napftor) and published by Ronin Arts is an excellent bit of drop in fluff.  At least, they sound like they are.  I haven't actually read one yet.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown    :("  data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /></blockquote>

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