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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kaomera" data-source="post: 5500428" data-attributes="member: 38357">It's possible to play a bad game of any RPG (and any edition of any RPG). Two things that I want in a game, before I'll consider it to not be a bad game, are 1) an understanding that the players get to have their characters do stuff, and 2) an understanding that the fiction of the game is significant. In both cases I think that communication is the core issue.Some games add a lot of "crunch" to the area of doing stuff, which to me means two things: 1) it's definitely more work, and 2) if the crunch is good then that work pays off big dividends. I know that when I play a game like 4e, a lot more specific stuff happens in a fight than when I was playing 1e. We did, usually, "just swing our swords" in 1e, and IIRC I never actually swung from a chandelier. (At the same time, 75%+ of my 4e games tend to be fights, compared to maybe 30%+ in 1e, so there'd better be more happening...) I have played in 4e games, however, where all that extra stuff, and the work that goes along with it, didn't actually seem to mean anything. Just doing stuff isn't enough to keep me satisfied with a game, but "crunch" creates a communication to all present of exactly (or not-so-exactly, depending...) how certain things work.Some games take the approach of avoiding mechanical "crunch" in some areas. The idea is that you let more free-form roleplay and a consensus of what's going on in the fiction define things. If my character walks into a bar and orders an ale, I don't usually expect to be making a bunch of die rolls to figure out what happens, and this can apply to much more important stuff. This relies a lot on communication, obviously. If I announce that I walk into a bar and order an ale, and the DM knows that there isn't a bar in the town for a particular reason, but hasn't made that clear to me, there might be an issue. (But IME usually not - the DM tells me that I can't find a bar in the town and I file away a potentially useful tidbit of information and try to do something else.) I need this kind of fictional backdrop to be present in a real an meaningful way to really enjoy a game.I'm willing to put distance between the "crunch" and the "fluff" to accomplish this - to me that's always seemed to be the way things have been supposed to work. The "crunch" answers very specific questions for and about the fiction, like "do I 'hit'?" or "how much 'damage' do I do?", but not more philosophical considerations like "what does a 'hit' or 'damage' mean?" That's up to the players, IMO.I've seen two real potential problems with "crunch": One is that it can (and IME does, far more often than it should, although I couldn't tell you exactly why that is) lead to players ignoring (to a greater or lesser degree) actual communication. One particular issue I seem to keep stumbling over is "what is this world like?" For a lot of players that's something that they feel can be handled completely mechanically; if it's in the rules it should be fair game, right? And to be fair that's a completely reasonable PoV (which is part of my problem, because it makes me feel kind of jerkish to disallow even stuff that really rubs me the wrong way in my games). But I don't always feel that any and every option is really appropriate to a game.The other issue is somewhat related: D&D is (IMO) supposed to be awesome. That's basically why I play D&D (or any other RPG). But I don't personally put too much weight on the "crunch" when figuring how awesome is. It's significant, but it's certainly not enough on it's own. And I've run into a lot of players who seem to rate "crunch" as the major or even exclusive factor in how awesome something is. Sometimes that's OK, but other times I find that the players actually want their "crunch" to matter to the fiction, they just either don't recognize that or they don't know how to accomplish it. And that can leave me trying to make a rules element I maybe don't care for that much awesome for the player... And that's not really a chore that I relish.</blockquote>

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