NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zweischneid" data-source="post: 4175000" data-attributes="member: 11843">I get this impression as well, but I still don't think it's a good design choice. Why, because hard-and-fast rules (for combat, especially) are (to me at least) much easier to fudge up on the fly than the kings-quest-fluff-sort of things.At the cost of repeating, something I've noted in another thread earlier:First, it is IMO opinion not the DMs job to give the fluff, but the job of every single person sitting on the table. I may be the DM, but that certainly doesn't mean I don't want to be entertained as well on my RPG-nights and listen to one or more of the players going wild with their imagination.Second, there are both DMs and Players out there who are able to add interesting fluff to the rules, but they are in my experience few and far inbetween. Good fiction is not an easy thing to do and it is thrice as hard if you'll need to make it up on the fly (which in turn makes in harder again for players who don't know ahead what is coming than for the DM who could potentially prep). By consequence, this means that I can use an RPG that gives only the crunch and turn it into an enjoyable evening with only a selected number of creative people who can draw on their imagination to bring a world (or a character) alive at the table.If, however, an RPG comes with the flavour attached, the potential base of people I can create an entertaining game with becomes much, much wider. The 'creative' people can easily ignore the 'official' fluff and still spin their own thing, they need not adhere by the official fluff given, but the less gifted ones however have something to fall back on and use as inspiration (or straight out of the book if necessary) once it's their turn to do things.So, the more official fluff there is, the more good games you'll play, because there's more people to play with. It's that simple really. The less official fluff there is, the harder and fewer inbetween the games will be you can look back at and not despair at having wasted yet another day of you're life at a table with some ********** who just doesn't make the effort to translate rules into story.By the same reason, I think providing fluff is so much more important for a good RPG than providing crunch. If the crunch is bad or missing, it takes one guy (i.e. the DM) to sit down and fix it.If the fluff is bad or missing, it takes everyone at the table to cover it, with the final result depending on the weakest link. If the weakest link is 'official' fluff in the book, I know ahead of time that this is the safty net my game will not fall below.It is IMO an increasingly inherent hypocracy of 4e design that they want to make the game 'user-friendly' but provide increasingly less help for people on that elusive and difficult skill of creating evocative fluff.</blockquote>

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