Raven Crowking said:
IOW, you were arguing with yourself again, weren't you, humpty my boy?
Look, it's very simple.
"Fluff", as most people understand the term, refers to _published_ descriptive text, flavour text, and other _non-numeric, non-formalised_ content in game books.
"Crunch", as most people understand the term, refers to _published_ formal, numeric or probabilistic mechanical content in game books.
Someone using florid language to describe the 50 hit points of damage they just inflicted on a giant is not creating either fluff or crunch, they're just using language. Now, if that florid language was then turned into an intro chapter for a splatbook, THEN it would be fluff.
Someone writing up a 2-page statblock for a heavily templated, multiclassed monstrosity they made up is not creating crunch -- if it's something for their own game. If that statblock was published in a splatbook, THEN it would be crunch.
In the context in which these words are usually applied, the "published" criterion is important, because the most common context is when arguing over which type of content people are prepared to pay for. Some people like lots of non-formal, descriptive content. Others like more formal, explicit instructions/guidelines/rules/call-it-what-you-will for adjudicating situations that come up in play.
Even the most crunch-loving gamer is not going to say that they won't use descriptive language at all; the point is how much of it they're willing to pay for. They can come up with this on their own, and they don't need irrelevant fluff that's built on certain assumptions about the default game world and doesn't have anything to do with their homebrew. Similarly, even the most fluff-loving gamer is going to use some sort of numerical/random conflict resolution mechanic unless they're in a completely freeform game; the point is how much of it they're willing to pay for. They can handle unexpected situations by ear, and they don't need superfluous crunch that reads like an engineering textbook and causes rules arguments during the game.
(And, before you get into another irrelevant side trek about games that are free, consider "payment" to be shorthand for any expenditure of time or resources. You don't have to pay money to play FUDGE, but you do have to spend time and bandwidth downloading the pdf and getting familiar with the game.)
Waffle about the overall framework within which a game world operates also including implied rules, informal rules, commonsense rules, and pink-with-purple-polka-dots rules may be true, but it's also useless for the purpose of discussing the usual situations where the terms "fluff" and "crunch" are applied. Commonsense rules, stuff like "rocks fall down, not up" that doesn't make it into the books because people use it without conscious thought, falls outside the scope of this classification. Similarly, commonsense descriptive text like "leaves are green and the sky is blue" doesn't make it either. Your attempt to broaden the argument to encompass ALL forms of flavour text and ALL aspects of the abstract rules framework gets 10 points for philosophical rigour, and 0 points for relevance to anyone actually playing a game.
Now, it's true that some people are rather oversensitive about the word "fluff" and supposed negative connotations. These people need some of this:
... as I may have said before.
This is, if you want to get into pedantic definitional diversions, a change in the crunch. However, nobody is going to argue about this sort of thing in reality, because, as in most things, some types of crunch are more important than others. The number of people who take random height/weight tables seriously is far smaller than those who take BAB and save progressions, or PrC prerequisites, seriously.
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