I think I'm over crunch

[Geoff Watson]

The problem with fluff is that it is often campaign specific, or so general it's too vague to be useful.

Geoff.

 

[DragonLancer]

To continue a train of thought I started in another thread, I think I've had it with crunchy rulebooks. I'll round out the "Complete" series because it won't do to have just half a set, but other than that I think I'm done with the generic rulebooks. I have dozens of 3.x rulebooks. I have rules upon rules sprouting out of my ears. Enough already.

I had it with crunch books from the get go. They are just not necessary IMO, not to the level that we have them. These days I just buy books for my campaign setting (Dragonlance), books that are useful to me (Draconomicon for instance) and monster books (you can never have enough monsters!).

AMEN BROTHER!

[Rant on] I don't think I can stomach another book with more skills, feats, prestige classes, spells and combat options. Please give us more fluff, pretty please? City dynamics, organisations in a fantasy setting, guilds, anything but more racial variants and number crunching. [Rant off]

I agree, but even I know that you can’t put a book out there that doesn’t have this. Books of information and fluff don’t sell really.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

Hee's another vote for the anti-crunch movement. I have now sold most of my books from the furious days of collection, as I realized they were all largely useless and overwhelming in their poorly playtested, contradictory, broken-ruled glory. I narrowed my entire collection down from about 60 books to about 10. It's awesome!

 

[Aust Diamondew]

I'm tired of books in general. I don't need anymore crunch and I don't need to buy fluff. Fluff I can get in other ways than buying more RPG books.

I'm trying to keep the crunch down to a handful of mostly homemade PRCs and some feats either adapted from other sources or homemade.

 

[BryonD]

I'll never be pro-fluff, because making my own fluff is half the fun of the game. If I'm going to buy fluff I may as well pay someone else to play on my behalf.

I do have plenty of crunch though. Even when new crunch comes out that looks good, the diminishing marginal utility kicks in. I can only use so many distinct rules in a given session. So I buy a bit less in general now.

I still buy stuff that I simply expect to enjoy reading, stuff that adds a new spark into my existing stuff (Grim Tales) and stuff that expands my options into areas I haven't been playing recently (of late, rpgobjects modern and darwin's world stuff).

 

[Cor Azer]

I'm not huge on crunch or fluff myself. But I'm finding myself checking out campaign settings more and more. In a lot of was, even if I never use them directly, they show some nice ways of integrating fluff into the crunch. And that's, I think, what's needed. Not just fluff, not just crunch, but something that shows how to use the fluff to build the crunch.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Going over all the books I've bought for DnD and D20 Modern, I have found myself more satisfied by creamy books than crunchy books.

Even uber-crunchy books like Weapons Locker (or was it UMF) and Arms and Equipment gave me more satisfaction from the fluff than the crunch. The former had rules on "who carries what weapons" so if you ever want to know what a gunrunner or an ex-Soviet spy might carry, you can find out. The other had rules for how different races craft things (and price them).

For that matter, my favorite D20 Modern book is Columbia D20. It's about 90% cream (if you don't like the word fluff) and (non-FX) adventures, with very little crunch. Woo hoo!

Fluff does have that problem that, like prestige classes, it's a package deal. It will have stuff you like and stuff you don't - and the latter is worse because if you remove something you don't like you're going to be messing with game balance - assuming the PrC was balanced in the first place. It's usually easier to split up the fluff, but if someone doesn't like a particular campaign setting, then there's no point of buying it.

 

[Bran Blackbyrd]

Too much staring into rose-coloured glasses will make you go crosseyed.

That doesn’t mean that what Atom Again said was untrue. The Planescape books had tons of colorful background information compared to the amount of "mechanical" information they provided. You could go whole chapters without seeing something like, "1d10", written anywhere.

The point wasn't that there were no 'crunch only' books in 2E, but that 2E had more books that were almost entirely 'fluff', or at least had more 'fluff' than the majority of 3E books.


Edit: Man... I hate the terms 'crunch' and 'fluff'.

 

[RogueRonin]

That doesn’t mean that what Atom Again said was untrue. The Planescape books had tons of colorful background information compared to the amount of "mechanical" information they provided. You could go whole chapters without seeing something like, "1d10", written anywhere.

Not to change the subject... But I am, sorry. This post reminded me, my friend recently told me he wanted to run a planeswalker campaign, and he asked me if the Planescape box was worth buying off ebay. I never really read any of it, so I didn't know what to tell him. After reading this, I think I'll tell him yes. Any thoughts? Oh, and as far as actually being on-topic, you got my vote for the anti-crunch revolution.

 

[BluWolf]

I'm Full...

Sorry... this string just reminded me of the latest Taco Bell ad campaign.
I have been quite sated for ahwhile. I have not gone after the "complete anything.." because my experience has been they are completely unneccessary.

I DO like to see people use the crunch to create interesting NPCs, challenges and plot devices. While I rarely use modules whole cloth I do use them for just amazing inspiration and to remove some of the heavy lifting.

If BoBo the necromancer Gnome isn't exaclty right I can pen whip him enough to be a resonable faxcimily of a by the book created NPCs.