The False Dichotomy of "Fluff" and "Crunch"

[Arcane Runes Press]

I like a well woven bit of "fluff".

I like a well ratched bit of "crunch".

But there's nothing better in the gaming world than a sparkling bit of crunchy fluff and fluffy crunch.

A conceptually interesting mechanic tied to flowing, inspiring prose makes a book sparkle. I'm with Psion in his PrC example: pristine mechanics with blah writing and concept don't do much for me, which is why I don't buy many WotC books anymore - the mechanics are usually solid, they just aren't interesting. It's all about stylish substance.


Beyond that, I love to see books which use crunchy fluff to alter gameplay. The Iron Kingdoms Character Guide, for example, has limitations on magic use which are purely fluffy - they exist for no other reason than to ensure the mechanics of 3.5 serve the texture of the Iron Kingdoms.

And this is fantastic to me. This is what I like to see, and this is what I want to see more of - well presented, well justified fluff which strongly reinforces the feel of the setting. That's the essence of great crunchy fluff.

In fact, the IKCG's crunchy fluff is good enough that I'm overlooking a few issues I have with the new mechanics. The crunchy fluff makes me want to play badly enough that I'm taking the time to alter the pure crunch I dislike.


This is why the first thing I look for in any review I read is whether the reviewer feels the book is well written. Of course, seeing that the mechanics are good is vital as well, but I demand stylish substance in my purchases. I want to be inspired.

Patrick Y.

 

[Mark]

The best crunch is elegantly unobtrusive while the ideal fluff is exponentially inspirational.

 

[Tav_Behemoth]

It's interesting to consider the apparent dichotomy as an example of the general writing rule show, don't tell. Game rules are the ultimate extreme of showing, like putting a set of schematics for a rocket engine into a book about spaceflight. Here's three points on that continuum:

#1 is fluff that's all tell, no show: "The people of the human kingdoms suffer from extreme taxation."

#2 is fluff that favors showing: "Trying to pay off his crushing post-war debts to Elfhame, the king of Jutsanland created new cutlery and garment tariffs and appointed a horde of tax collectors to collect them. Regrettably, these collectors were paid a percentage of the tariffs, leading to widespread abuse." (If this were actually good fluff, I'd have done it in the same number of words!)

#3 is crunch that's all show, no tell: the Jutsanland Taxman PrC and a landscape-layout page of the tariffs on various goods.

These are all different ways of telling the same story. Sometimes it's cool to leave it up to the reader to discover the story by reading between the lines of #3; sometimes there are important bits that can only be told about, like the history of the war between Elfhame and Jutsanland in #2; and sometimes no one cares about taxation and it's better to get it over with quickly, like Star Wars 1: The Phantom Menace.

 

[TheDarkLord]

I think the trend has been toward "crunch" because it is usually harder to come up with balanced (sometimes a very relative term) prc's, spells, monsters, and feats. Coming up with a homebrew setting is somewhat easier. Even if you use an established campaign world you are going to make tweaks to it that make it yours. The 3e books are more of a tool set that you can use to build a boat or a house or just about anything you can imagine given the time.

I agree.

I prefer my WotC books and the like to have more crunch than fluff. Don't get me wrong, some fluff is good, but when would I ever use it? More and more people i know who are gaming have created their own settings and worlds. Complete with plane's god's new monster's and other things. For example, 7 of us game together when we get the chance. We have 5 different campaign settings to play in whenever we get together and decide on a DM. None of theem are published settings, but all of them use different organizations/feats and whatnot from other books.

I do believe this might be a growing trend and i'm pretty sure that in the future this will be reflected in more and more books.

Just out of curiosity, isn't there a "World Builder's Guide" book?

 

[MerricB]

Of course, the more tied the "fluff" is to a setting, the more likely that the reader will have an extreme reaction to it - justified or not!

I feel that about most campaign settings: you have an integrated set of material, so that if you take just one aspect out, it has all these dependencies that are difficult to untangle. However, most Wizards books give you material with only a small amount of such dependencies. The Planar Handbook is of that sort - although some material is inspired by what happened Planescape, it is presented in a way that does not require the use of the whole. (Thus, it's a lot easier for me to integrate it with my existing campaign setting).

Cheers!

 

[Li Shenron]

Here's my 2cp...

IMXP roleplay ideas and mechanical ideas always help each other. It really always happens to me whenever I write down a new PC or NPC, that at first the starting roleplay idea calls for a character choice (class, feats...), but sooner or later some other mechanical choices call for secondary RP ideas. For example: I start by wanting a Diviner, I write down a specialised wizard (from fluff to crunch) but by the rules I have to choose a forbidden school, this time I choose Necromancy, and then say that the wizard seriously believe everything doing with that being evil and must be avoided (from crunch to fluff).

Since they are both useful, the mechanical and the non-mechanical ideas should both be published. However, they don't work exactly the same way...

The core books when we first opened them seemed so full of both, especially the crunchy ideas, however quite soon we got the feeling that we needed more, and here came the first splatbooks (which also had RP ideas of course).
It's important that this extra crunch was published because it's not easy for a gaming group to write down your crunch without making errors, so it's good to rely on (hopefully) playtested material.
The crunch anyway tends to saturate somewhat, when you have hundreds of feats, prestige classes, spells, etc. you don't really need to have more... remember in the old childhood days when we all played LEGO? After daddy bought us enough boxes of it, you really didn't need more pieces to craft whatever you wanted! Instead you concentrated on how to put everything together to create new combinations.
Well, IMO the crunch has already saturated at least a year ago. I hardly see something really new in recent books, and it always feel to me like it's the same trite material remixed, something that at this point wouldn't be too difficult to do it ourselves when the difference with existing stuff is not so large.

Fluff has completely different problems, and as such it tends to get the shorter stick IMO in most published books.
First of all there are gaming groups which play D&D more like a computer game or a strictly strategic game (nothing wrong with it), which means they care near to nothing about non-mechanic material.
Second, there always is something inside every DM (me first ) who whisper... "do it yourself, don't let someone else tell you how your fantasy world is..." because, let's face it, to design your setting is one of the funniest part of being a DM. It is a very hard job, but almost all the DMs really want to put something personal in the setting, and even if you use a complete published setting, you're still tempted to tinker it here and there. Since it's hard having more than a couple awesome ideas, you may want to check the fluff from many books and incorporate it (the same applies to character concepts for players), at least the unique mix you are ending up with will be your own.
But fluff still sells much less, probably because it always leaves you the feeling "I could have thought of that without buying this book" (while it's not so with crunch, since it requires quite some work to be sure it has no problems), or you read it only once and you could sell the book away now that you've heard of it...

 

[S'mon]

My problem is that I'd say "I prefer fluff to crunch", but what I really mean is not that crunch is boring, rather I find that crunch is for me incredibly easy to do, I can write crunch (for my own games, not necessarily for a general audience perhaps) far better than 99.9% of the published efforts I've seen. So when I see most published crunch I tend to be contemptuous: "Weapon specialisation feat at 1st level balanced against reduced starting gold? Puh-leeze!" (Quint Fighter Professional Soldier concept) "+1 to hit & damage every 5 levels in return for losing heavy & medium armour? Who are they trying to kid?!" (Kensai)
- I feel I have a far better sense of the 'balance' inherent in the 3e rules than the great majority of the people who write this stuff for a living. So I tend to mine crunch for _ideas_, but certainly not for finished product.

Fluff, well, I can write good fluff too, but for me writing fluff is always more effortful than tweaking crunchy mechanics, and reading good fluff far more valuable to me than yet another lame-ass underpowered or munchkinoid prestige class. The awe that many people hold for published crunch, and their contempt for published fluff, is utterly alien to me. I'm more the reverse - not because I'm a fluffy DM, I'm a crunchy GM. I just happen to be a _better_ cruncher (at least for my games) than the writers of crunch books, who are (a) writing for a generic, unknown audience and (b) often, sadly, writing to make a quick buck off players and GMs who don't seem to know any better.

(/rant)

 

[Plane Sailing]

I think the terms fluff and crucnch detract from the distiction between diffrent types of fluff and diffrent types of crunch.

For example, I don't don't like the quisi-novelistic fluff of the FR books, but I do enjoy the qusi-National Geographic fluff of The Draconomicon.

I think this sums up my position nicely.

Basically I agree with Psions premise that there is a false dichotomy because too many things get lumped together in a single heading. quasi-novelistic fluff leaves me cold, but fluff which gives me a feel for the setting (in a National Geographic kind of way) and which sparks off adventure ideas for me is great.

I guess you could say that I like a balanced diet.

 

[Incenjucar]

I think one of the issues is that we need, at least, a third term. Say:

Fluff: Non-functional non-rule content used to provide context, example, or amusement. (Volo's commentary on Elminster's undergarments, etc)

Chew: Functional non-rule content used to provide non-mechanical information. (Information on a city, etc)

Crunch: Functional rule content, used to provide game mechanics. (Feats, PrCs, new effects, etc)

Basically, what we have here is a Mars bar. The candy coating would, of course, be artwork.

 

[Li Shenron]

I think one of the issues is that we need, at least, a third term. Say:

Fluff: Non-functional non-rule content used to provide context, example, or amusement. (Volo's commentary on Elminster's undergarments, etc)

Chew: Functional non-rule content used to provide non-mechanical information. (Information on a city, etc)

Crunch: Functional rule content, used to provide game mechanics. (Feats, PrCs, new effects, etc)

Basically, what we have here is a Mars bar. The candy coating would, of course, be artwork.

You made it 3, why not making it 4 and complete the circle?

Chups: Non-functional rule content used to let you believe you bought something new, but you bought the same thing twice. Sometimes called "revision".

...ok that was mean, sorry