Crunch Vs. Fluff - where do you stand?

[Eosin the Red]

I will be the odd ball here.

I am fluff with a small helping of crunch. Too much crunch and it becomes boring reading. I have resorted to buying the entire line of 7th Sea just for the reading material and that is after I went through most of the World of Darkness stuff. A real waste for me since I don't play them and in the case of the WOD stuff I ended up giving most of the 50+ books away since the local shop was overstocked on them.

 

[Raven Crowking]

So, if you lean toward crunch, what happens when they change the crunch? Do you go about converting your house crunch to the new crunch? Or do you just start over? The same applies to fluff to a lesser extent...there's a thread about orc alignments having changed. Do you change the new crunch to meet the old fluff?

 

[Bendris Noulg]

Well, there's a difference in "fluff" in my opinion, being Fiction and Flavor Text.

Fiction includes histories, backstory, plot, NPC backgrounds, etc. I want good fiction for campaign settings. Small amount of fiction in non-setting books is good too if it sets a mood.

Flavor Text is the middle-ground between Fiction and Rules. It describes the effect the rules should have on game play and (if relevant) the extended effect on a campaign setting. Flavor text is, to me, always important. It's what grabs me into the rule. It's what will inspire me to read the rule closely and consider its use. It's also what will inspire me to write my own rules if the rules accompanying it don't work the way I think they should.

By comparison, Rules on their own (no Fiction, little-to-no Flavor) rarely get noticed by me beyond the fact of their existance unless it just so happens to be something I'm looking for at that particular time.

 

[Janx]

The last two add-ons for my campaign I wrote were fluff pieces. Each was 3-4 pages. I needed fluff for my monk's dojo, and I had to detail my cleric's religion (beyond a god's name and 2 domains...).

The last book I bought was SeaFarer's Handbook, which I rewrote the ship design rules to better match "reality" after seeing Master and Commander. In other words, I made Crunch to support the Fluff I wanted.

So fluff is very important to me. I want each component I add to my game world to make sense. I removed certain classes from my campaign. because they didn't make sense with the fluff.

Bear in mind, I'm running my own homebrew world, and I write very few rules, playing stock D&D3e + the WotC class books they made at the time.

Janx