Good Fluff, Bad Fluff [re: Flying off the shelves]

[woodelf]

For a while, I picked up a few fluff heavy books and didn't like what I saw. I felt like I was slogging through minutia (Rokugan Secrets series, I am looking at you...) or was being provided with details that were all to apparent to me (Slayer's Guides, I am looking at you.) This led me (and many gamers, I think) to beleive that fluff is just bad.

Then I picked up Book of Taverns and was bowled over. This writing was good. Intriguing. I gobbled it up. And it was mostly what we would call "fluff", but it actually had risen to the level that I might call it "flavor" instead of fluff as Mark suggests.

This made me realize that when it comes to fluff/flavor, most of the current stable of d20 writers quite simply aren't up to the task. Many of them came from the background of beign good DMs. Good DMs may be good designers, but they aren't necessarily good writers.

I have no recommended solution to this, but will say I wish there were more good "flavor" writers out there, and it is refreshing to realize that the problem is not just a personal disdain for non-mechanical writing.

Well, part of this may be a matter of tastes: i *love* the Slayers Guide to Gnolls--it's the only one i own, and therefore the onely one i've read cover-to-cover. But what i saw of the other early ones, at least, looks pretty good. OTOH, i flipped through the Slayers Guide to Kobolds the other day, and, despite them being one of my favorite races/monsters of all time, it left me merely luke-warm. 'Course, for me, the difference was a lot more crunch than the first few Slayers Guides, rather than an obvious decline in the quality of writing or originality of ideas (i didn't read it closely enough to really judge either of those).

That said, maybe we need a baseline here--what's "fluff" and what's "crunch". As i've generally seen the terms used, if it's not a stat block or game rule, it's fluff. And i've always used that description because it's how the division feels natural to me. Frex, something like the Pern Companion (is that the right title?) i'd still consider all fluff, if it were a game book--even though it has detailed move-by-move descriptions of martial arts and fights. Why? Because that's the part that isn't tied to the rules. My definition of fluff is anything that would look the same no matter what ruleset you were nominally writing for. Is that a reasonable working definition?

If so, how about something like Dynasties & Demagogues? Only a narrow portion of it (1/4?) is crunch--feats, social-combat system, some PrC, a few new spells and magic items. The rest of the book is info on RL political systems, advice on what they might look like given a fantasy world, and very detailed, rules-like advice on how to run political adventures--but, however rules-like it may be, it's either completely devoid of D20 content, or has so little rules content as to be a non-issue if used for another system (a description of an encounter with a DC for dissuading the count slipped in, perhaps).

As for recommendations: have you looked at the Penumbra line from Atlas? Atlas has long had good fluff-writers doing their books--long before D20 came along--and i think these mostly keep that up. From what i've heard, even Three Days to Kill is pretty good on the narrative side. Anyway, i'm thinking specifically of Touched by the Gods, Splintered Peace, Seven Strongholds, and Seven Cities. The latter two are of roughly the same premise as Taverns, i gather (haven't seen that one yet). or, for that matter, i just flipped through the new monster book from Atlas. It's fairly crunchy, but has a lot more fluff than most monster books--most monsters use a 2p spread, with significant sidebars full of fluff to go with the main body which is mostly crunch.

what do you think of the Citybooks, by Flying Buffalo? They're almost crunch-free, and some of the best RPG supplements of all time. And they definitely have quality writers--many of the authors of the Citybooks have won Nebulas, Hugos, or other literary awards. They do roughly the same thing Taverns does, but each book is about a theme, rather than a category (i.e., upscale establishments, black-market, everyday goods, etc., rather than foods, services, etc.). I suspect that, if you like Taverns, and Seven Cities and things like that, you should be finding yourself copies of the Citybooks.

 

[woodelf]

Gaming fiction/fluff/flavor is hard to write, IMHO.

The problem, to my mind, is that the setting gets in the way of the character development. With the entertainment magazine it was a piece of cake because most people know what a bar is like so you don't have to have to delve into expanatory sentences like "the person behind the bar -- known as the bartender -- pulled a 'tap' to cause the beer to flow into the glass." But in fantasy fiction, basic lifestyle assumptions sometimes just have to be spelled out. This problem is more predominant in gaming fiction where you have to keep an eye on the rulebook and make those rules come alive into a plausible story.

I think you're conflating fluff and fiction. There's no more "character development" in fluff than there is in crunch--that is, it could be there but it's not inherent. Compare a hunting magazine article about tracking a deer to the rules for the same in the PH. Neither is fiction, but one is narrative. Take that hunting magazine article, and put it in a game book, and we call it fluff.

Personally, if i have to choose, i'd rather have the hunting article. In fact, in some cases, i'd rather have *just* the fluff than the fluff *and* the crunch.

----
As to writing good game fluff, as well as flavor text, i think you just need to look a bit broader. I agree with those who've said there's not much of it in the D20 market. But, as someone who loves good fluff, and has a wall of gaming books, i can attest that there's plenty of it out there--just not in D20 stuff. Which is precisely why i have so little D20 stuff--even for a D20 game, i do *not* want more crunch; what's there is already plenty, thank you. Take a look at Buffy:tVS (RPG)--or pretty much anything Unisystem by Eden--for excellent fluff, IMHO. Like Alan, i suspect it's that the D20 market has so far selected against fluff. Alan thinks it's because those examples of fluff that have appeared as D20 products have been poor. I think it's because nobody's really tried, because the perception (correct or not) of D&D players was that they wouldn't pay for fluff, so it was assumed the same was true of the D20 market as a whole.

 

[rounser]

I think there are really two kinds of fluff. The first kind is what Shadowrun and Planescape had - bits of information here and there that added to the rules, made them seem real; made the environment seem real.

The second type is what should be avoid, and that is belabored rules about the government, political, economic, et al., about the setting.

Make that three - adventures are considered fluff, but they're really the story, the guts of the game when it's actually being played.

I think that a good D&D game is a union of these three types of material - setting, rules and adventure. I think that gamers tend to try and make their own adventures almost as an afterthought, and that they like to obsess the most over settings, and buy the most of rules. This determines what sells the best.

Like gamers, designers love to create settings and rules - implementation of it all into the nitty gritty of an adventure seems like too much hard work. Far more fun to write about nations that never were and build a better ranger than to write a quality adventure - "quality" being the operative word. It's arguably a lot harder to write quality adventures than it is to write quality setting material or rules, simply because so many attempts are average or poor in comparison to setting material and crunch, leading to yet more of crunch and setting material selling best.

This is a pity, IMO, as most gamers are a lot worse at writing adventures than they think they are for reasons similar to the ones Psion touched on, and their buying habits prevent good adventures from getting written by designers (on a decent scale, too - publishers seem to prefer to set aside a small page count of say 32 pages to adventures, and go to town on setting books and rulebooks, leading to further loss of sales for adventures, never bothering to find out whether a 320 page campaign would sell), who themselves have an obsession with settings and crunch, because they're fun to design (and they sell). I doubt this feedback loop is going to break anytime soon.

Finally, everyone thinks they can write. You can type, can't you? A layman can look at a concert pianist in full flight and think "I can't do that without years of practice", but because he can put a word together, hey presto, he could be the next bestselling author any day now.