Mearls' Chicken or the Egg: Should Fluff Control Crunch, or the Other Way Around?

[WheresMyD20]

But did Gygax's partiality to Vancian "fluff" control the mechanics of the system--or was Vancian simply a mechanic that "made sense" to him, and thus controlled the fluff that surrounded it?

If I'm not mistaken, it was a mechanic that "made sense" to him, so he used it.

I wish I could find the quote, but I do remember him posting something to the effect that players already track hit points as a resource, so he didn't want to have spell points tracked as a similar resource. He felt that it was simpler to choose the spells you wanted to use, then cross them off as you used them rather than keep track of a second point total.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Mechanics imply fluff which dictate mechanics from which fluff arises.

My favorite system of all time is HERO. I have found I can model whatever I what in it. I can take any fluff I want, and the mechanics will support it.

That said, I still often opt for source-specific RPGs when I want to play a campaign set in a particular piece of work, precisely because the system is tailor made to model that work. The fluff constrains and dictates what the mechanics can be made to do.

4Ed's mechanics have, OTOH, prevented me from updating certain characters...but simultaneously has let me design characters that I couldn't do well in previous editions.

 

[Shemeska]

When crunch and rules get in the way of fluff and flavor, you change, adapt, or abandon the crunch and the rules. It should rarely or never be the other way around.

Listing a bunch of mechanical options as the centerpiece of a discussion about the "core of D&D" suggests that the current design ethos over at WotC differs radically from my feelings on the topic.

 

[sciborg3]

I think you start with themes you want the game to encompass -> Combat, Party dynamics, Class distinction. Quests and dungeon delving.

Then you think about the next shell, so to speak, the options that can be built around the basic concept. Rulership, leading armies, summoning demon lords, etc.

What you ideally end up with is a core, streamlined system that can have add-ons to supplement your and your consumers' fluff.

There are central mechanics to the game, but there is also a shared mythology of worlds to D&D that I think 4e lost with everything being forced to revolve around the new cosmology.

 

[billd91]

When crunch and rules get in the way of fluff and flavor, you change, adapt, or abandon the crunch and the rules. It should rarely or never be the other way around.

Listing a bunch of mechanical options as the centerpiece of a discussion about the "core of D&D" suggests that the current design ethos over at WotC differs radically from my feelings on the topic.

I don't believe that's necessarily the case. Fluff can be modeled by any number of different takes on the crunch. So what makes the resulting game D&D? Modeling the fluff on BRP makes it Runequest, not D&D. Modeling it with Hero makes it Fantasy Hero, not D&D. D&D-esque crunch is a necessary element of D&D.

But crunch also creates fluff to go along with it. Can the fluff generated by legacy D&D crunch be D&D without the D&D crunch? I don't think so. Would the Planescape setting be D&D if it were done with Runequest rules? No. It would still be Runequest.

Now let's look in the other direction. Is D&D crunch without the legacy D&D fluff be D&D? I would also say there are qualifiers, and I think this is an important distinction. D20 Call of Cthulhu and D20 Modern may not be D&D despite using most of the mechanics of D&D. The intent is to provide a different game experience, not centered on some variety of D&D-fluffish fantasy. But is Dark Sun D&D? Yes. It uses D&D crunch, heavily, even if it substantially modifies the fluff to be little more than superficially recognizable as D&D fluff. If we were to deny substantial changes in fluff the identity of D&D, we'd be invalidating hundreds if not thousands of home campaigns that deviate from published D&D canonical settings or default assumptions.
All that said, I do believe that legacy D&D fluff is still important to the brand identify of D&D, even if individual campaigns or published campaign worlds deviate in specific elements.

I generally agree with you that, when push comes to shove, fluff needs to push and shove the crunch out of its way. But the articles up on WotC's website are more about what makes D&D D&D, not whether fluff holds primacy over crunch in game design.

 

[pemerton]

I really didn't get that vibe from DMG1 at all

Agreed (and XPed your post before I noticed you'd said this other thing that I agree with).

some of the research done before 4e came out that sadi basically people wanted to be free of built in fluff so they could make their own and not feel restricted by it.

Perhaps 4e went to far in that regard but I can see it as a rock and a hard place as a designer.

I don't think this characterization is quite accurate. Certainly, the mechanics received a great deal more attention than the fluff in 4e. That much is true.

I tend to disagree with these statements. Of all core D&D rulebooks, 4e seems to me to have far-and-away the most setting/flavour built in. There are a couple of pages of gods, political history built into the race descriptions, mythic history in the DMG and in many of the MM descriptions, etc.

There's a gameworld there. In comparison, the 3E PHB is far more spartan (some gods, who receive less detailed coverage). And Basic was more spartan again. The only thing I think that compares is appendix IV of Gygax's PHB - there's a lot packed into that one page!

(Some might want to put forward the maps and gazzeteer in the old Rules Cyclopedia. I personally don't think there's as much there to kickstart a game as there is in 4e.)

In 4e, the fluff of a power is almost immaterial. With shockingly few exceptions there is no mechanical difference between an arcane power and a martial power that has the same effect.

<snip>

What it costs is the ability to reason about a world mechanically.

I think your comparison of arcane to martial powers might be underestimating the signficance of keywords. Nearly every arcane power has a damage and/or effect keyword. Nearly every martial power lacks such a keyword. This is a mechanical difference that has a big story impact. For example, it's very important for page 42 - how do we know that Fireball can burn a building down but Come and Get It can't? Because Fireball has the fire keyword and deals fire damage, whereas Come and Get It doesn't.

But I agree with you that reasoning about the fictinal world mechanically is more limited in 4e than in earlier versions of D&D.

I think the game has two subsitutes for that sort of reasoning (and in this, it resembles other more abstract systems like HeroQuest). First, there are the genre constraints implied by the various fictional elements presented in the rulebooks. (And this is where flavour text can matter, because it suggests a genre, even if it is often disregarded in action resolution.) Second, there are the guidelines to GMs in repsect of DCs, damage etc which provide a reassurance to all the game participants that nothing is going to go horribly wrong as long as situations are framed within the indicated mathematical parameters. (This is part of why "the maths" is more important to 4e, I think, than to other versions of D&D. Because if the maths is wrong, then it can't provide this needed assurance function.)

 

[S'mon]

4e is certainly designed around 'rules first, fluff second', with an eye to gameplay rather than simulation.

Rather ironically though, the way magic works in 4e feels a lot closer to the way I actually envisaged it working in my core campaign world, which is 25 years old. The 1e/Vancian system was never a very good fit. Spell-point systems fitted better; the 4e A/E/D power system is also closer.

 

[delericho]

Both and neither. The fluff should absolutely influence the mechanics, while the mechanical framework will also necessarily constrain the fluff.

Ideally, the game should be constructed with mechanics that are as flexible as possible, allowing the designers to then describe whatever fluff they want, and be able to convert that to a mechanical representation. (This may cause some problems if, for example, they want to write an adventure featuring 1st level PCs vs a Great Wyrm...)

In reality, of course, there are limits to how far these things can stretch, and there needs to be some sort of compromise.

Ultimately, I would argue that the over-riding design goal for a new edition of D&D should be "feels like D&D". What I don't necessarily agree with is that that automatically requires the game retain, for example, Vancian magic, especially as the only option for magic. The 3e Sorcerer/Wizard split, for example, was at least an attempt to be a bit more broad in what the system can handle; it was a noble attempt, even if it ultimately fell short.

After the core system has been released, I would also argue that the mechanics should then be considered primary over the fluff; if there's something that the mechanics simply can't stretch to accomodate, it should probably be removed from the fluff of the game. That said, with the ability to add new classes, spells, monsters, rituals, and even whole new power sources (perhaps with their own mechanics), there's a whole lot of flexibility available there!

 

[S'mon]

IThe vibe I got from 3e was "Ask the rules, and my god have mercy on your soul."

I reject entirely that 3e was in any way "simulationist." From the very start of third edition, the advertisement was "back to the dungeon." Later advertisement was built around rolling dice and killing monsters socially rather then playing a computer game alone. 3e at no point advertised itself as being a simulation of anything. The mechanics agree - the entire economic system collapses on a dime, the skills scale in such a way that a low level half elf can dominate the entire world with diplomacy, and the crafting rules are at best weird and obtuse. These flaws don't paint 3e as a bad system, but as a focused one - one focused on it's exact tagline: back to the dungeon.

I basically agree, but 3e did give "Rules as Physics" DMs ammunition to treat the game as a simulation - a very bad simulation IMO, for the reasons you give. 4e does not give that support, DMs still trying to treat 4e rules-as-physics pretty much have to make the whole thing up, often reaching back to prior editions for support.

BTW I agree strongly that 4e is very demanding of the players. 4e players who refuse to 'step on up' and eg describe their Power use in exciting, engaging terms harm the game for everyone, very similar to having a bad DM in prior editions. I've found this quite a problem at the D&D Meetup; having just one player who refuses to describe his Power use brings the game down a lot.

 

[Shemeska]

Of all core D&D rulebooks, 4e seems to me to have far-and-away the most setting/flavour built in. There are a couple of pages of gods, political history built into the race descriptions, mythic history in the DMG and in many of the MM descriptions, etc.

The 4e MM has the least amount of description and flavor text of any core monster book in D&D across any edition of the game. It's sparse to the point I thought the first page I looked at had a printer error that left the flavor text out.