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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GlaziusF" data-source="post: 4462223" data-attributes="member: 74166">Okay, here's the thing. Legolas? Written by one dude. Conan? Written by one dude. How many dudes are sitting down at your gaming table? HINT: it is more than one.This is not to say that collaborative storytelling doesn't exist. Of course it does. It's called improv. But the problem with improv is that if you ever contradict someone else the whole thing just kind of trips over itself and falls into an open grave which is then filled in. There's a reason why most pure improv skits only last a couple of minutes, and why most improv is done in small teams: as the number of things said becomes arbitrarily large, the chances someone will contradict someone else approach 1.You need a mechanic of conflict resolution more robust than "everyone always agrees with each other". That is the game. Or rather, the rules of the game. Which you implicitly agree to by sitting down to play it.Crunch and fluff as commonly used are not actually different from each other at all.Here is the big secret of mathematics: numbers all represent ideas. If you walk into an amusement arcade and see on the wall a sign that says blue plastic tokens are worth 5 dowactoos and the yellow ones are worth 25 dowactoos, then you know a yellow token is worth 5 blue ones, even if you have no idea how to earn the tokens or what dowactoos are.All mathematics really does is express and explore the abstract relationships between the ideas represented by numbers. So a mathematical formula is just a very compact way to communicate relationships between ideas. So, "crunch" communicates ideas and relationships between them in a compact and sometimes abstract manner. "Fluff" also communicates ideas and relationships between them, in a verbose and still sometimes abstract manner. They are both ideas, just in different packaging, and it's disingenuous to say that a game "starts with fluff" or "starts with crunch". It starts with ideas.There is, of course, bad crunch and bad fluff, and in both cases they are ideas so disparate that the effort it takes to tie them together on the part of the GM or the player isn't worth the payback. Rolling dice six times and consulting twelve tables to adjudicate a single sword swing, for example, or trying to define "lawful good" in such a way that the game doesn't become an exercise in "Paladin Says". There is also unnecessary crunch and unnecessary fluff. The Dragon article full of new star warlock powers is unnecessary crunch. You can ignore it and it won't affect your game much, if at all. The flavor text for the new star warlock powers is unnecessary fluff. You can ignore it and it won't affect those powers much, if at all.There is, however, a practical difference between crunch and fluff. People are much more apt at filling a perceived gap in fluff than they are a perceived gap in crunch. Just look at the scores of improv actors compared to the dismal showing on the improv math circuit. "What improv math circuit?" you may ask. Exactly. For this reason, a game with a lot of crunch and minimal fluff is preferable to a game with a lot of fluff and minimal crunch.</blockquote>

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