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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 1700260" data-attributes="member: 1465">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?  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> 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  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> ) 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...</blockquote>

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