The terms 'fluff' and 'crunch'

[fusangite]

So if the people who write the stuff for a living find the term usefull, why be insulted?

I'm not insulted by it personally. I just don't like the term. You brought up the idea that some people found it derogatory in your last post. So I thought I would follow through what your thinking was on the subject.

My objection remains that it suggests that one thing in the document is more substantial than the other. If you're indifferent to the current term and acknowledge that any possible term runs the risk of offending somebody, why are you hostile to the idea of changing the term to one that doesn't imply this lack of substance?

Oh, and hong, well done on that last post. I must say that I didn't think you had it in you but my goodness, you've really skewered us with your incisive and witty rejoinder there. I don't know how I'll be able to show my face here again after such a devastating counter-argument.

 

[woodelf]

I prefer the terms "meat" and "bones" because the term "fluff" implies a lack of usefulness.

And "crunch" implies dry, uninteresting, complexity.

I agree that the term "fluff" implies a lack of usefulness, but it's a nice short word. "Flavor text" is better and "game fiction" is accurate, but "fluff" is only one syllable and that makes it much more catchy.

No, "game fiction" is not a synonym for "fluff". Many things are fluff that are not game fiction--the description of what an elf looks like in D&D3E, frex. [It has no game-mechanical effect, so is not crunch.] Game fiction is just one particular kind of fluff--and one i usually can't stand, while i prefer most other sorts of fluff to most sorts of crunch.

It affects discussion negatively by casting such material as ephemeral (and the other senses of the word, such as to err, have no more positive connotations). It has this effect even when used by people who don't mean it that way -- it's just linguistically naive not to realize that words affect discourse.

[snip]
It's silly and demeaning, because logically it frames everyone who ever wrote or imagined anything without game mechanics as a dealer in fluff. To see how silly and demeaning it is, all you have to do is imagine going to your favourite novelist and telling them how much you love their latest fluff.

It paints the communities where some people use it in a bad light to those outside. What kind of people call non-game-mechanical things 'fluff', this person wonders, and damage is done however often we reassure them it's not derogatory.

Of course "fluff" is derogatory. So's "crunch". That's the whole point. Those who decried the "wasted" pagecount of non-rules text called it fluff; those who got bored with all those rules getting in the way of the good parts of the game called them crunch. Eventually, it was easier to just accept the other sides' derogatory terms, and get back to actual discussions of the point at hand, and quit arguing over the labels. At least, that's my recollection of the origins and evolution of the terms, back on r.g.f.advocacy. I wonder if it has any resemblance to what actually happened (Google doesn't seem to have Usenet that far back).

 

[Raven Crowking]

And "crunch" implies dry, uninteresting, complexity.

<snip>

Of course "fluff" is derogatory. So's "crunch". That's the whole point. Those who decried the "wasted" pagecount of non-rules text called it fluff; those who got bored with all those rules getting in the way of the good parts of the game called them crunch. Eventually, it was easier to just accept the other sides' derogatory terms, and get back to actual discussions of the point at hand, and quit arguing over the labels. At least, that's my recollection of the origins and evolution of the terms, back on r.g.f.advocacy. I wonder if it has any resemblance to what actually happened (Google doesn't seem to have Usenet that far back).

Perhaps your history lesson is correct, and perhaps for some crunch implies "dry, uninteresting, complexity". I would imagine, however, that few people who use the term "crunch" see it in that way, whereas the term "fluff" is generally agreed to be derogatory. It is my experience that most people view "crunch" as implying substance and "fluff" as implying a lack thereof.

Regardless of original intent, I contend that this is the way the terms are currently being used, and moreover that this usage has affected the industry to the point where many products are too "bony," lacking the "meat" that would make them less "dry" and more interesting. This is not seen as a problem because, ultimately, "crunch" is seen to have substance while "fluff" is not.

One has merely to go through this (or similar) threads to see that people currently use these terms as described in the preceding two paragraphs.

I do, however, agree that arguing over labels is silly. Therefore, I assume that we can all agree to "Meat" and "Bones"?

 

[hong]

Oh, and hong, well done on that last post. I must say that I didn't think you had it in you but my goodness, you've really skewered us with your incisive and witty rejoinder there. I don't know how I'll be able to show my face here again after such a devastating counter-argument.

Well, foosie, you did say that you're a crank after all.


Hong "minimal verbage crank" Ooi

 

[woodelf]

I can't imagine doing so in my style of gaming. Why would you use a prestige class designed for one setting/organization in a place for which it wasn't designed? Why not just generate a setting-appropriate PrC yourself?

As someone pointed out, because the crunch of the PrC is a perfect match for a bit of fluff you already have in your setting. Heck, that's how i use core classes, too--nobody in my setting would refer to someone as an "unfettered" or "witch", even if they had levels in those classes--they'd be considered a "desert rider" or "sal'uk" or "mageweaver" or "sorcerer".

 

[woodelf]

Doug and Fanboy,

I think what's underlying a lot of this apparent disagreement is that we have significantly different playing styles. My problem with the fluff/crunch terminology is that it assumes your playing style. In my view, we should strive for terminology that is compatible with as many playing styles as possible. The relationship between setting and mechanics in worlds I design is, I would guess, quite different from the relationship between setting and mechanics is worlds you design.

My problem is that the terminology assumes the relationship that exists in your games and essentially invalidates the relationship that exists in mine. I would like if we could move to terminology sufficiently universal to describe the relationship between mechanical and non-mechanical information about a world regardless of the DM's world building style.

If people who design worlds the way you do want to talk about these things, I'm sure that the current terminology is sufficient. But for the apparent majority of people who have posted to this thread, it's not.

What I don't hear from you guys is why terminology that is descriptive of some approaches to world building and not others should be applied across the board.

Can you articulate how the terms "fluff" and "crunch", applied as an absolute dichotomy, implies/enshrines/promotes one playstyle, and what that playstyle is? It's not obvious to me, and it hadn't occurred to me prior to the above-quoted post of yours. And it's not clear to me what you mean--perhaps a specific example and/or counter-example?

 

[woodelf]

Meat and Bones.

Bones, because it offers the structure. Muscles can do very little without some form of structural system that allows them to act. Without bones, nothing happens.

Got some octopi and worms and elephant trunks that're gonna disagree with you. So, clearly, meat without bones is functional, if wierd; bones without meat just lie there.

Of course, using that analogy/terminology, we can expand it in some interesting ways.

• "octopus gaming" is the quest to remove all but the vistigial elements of the "bones", while still having an RPG (rather than a storytelling exercise)
• you could distinguish between "endoskeletonal" and "exoskeletonal" RPGs--the former start with rules and wrap a setting around them, the latter start with a setting and wrap some rules around them
• a "compound fracture" describes an element of the rules of a game that breaks the setting.
• truly radical innovations (perhaps De Profundis qualifies?) might be the equivalent of plants, where the means of movement is completely different, and neither meat nor bones are present
• i want to do something with "transplants" and/or "organs" here, but i'm not sure what that analogizes to
• similarly, seems like hamburger or butchering ought to fit in here somehow...

 

[woodelf]

I hate both if you don't know what they mean it confusing until you do. Especially since words exist which are clearer.
Rules and Flavor text.

Different? Yes. Clearer? Debatable. Is a table for randomly generating weight/height for a fantasy race rules or flavor text? It would be relevant with a completely different rules system, so it strikes me as flavor text. But it could be worded as one of the "rules" of character generation.

Also, as "flavor text" is usually used, it seems to be less-encompassing than "fluff". That is, i think of flavor text as being specifically "extraneous" detail--what an elf looks like isn't "flavor text" because it's a definite, defined element of the setting being described. Which gets us back to the same problem as "fluff"--flavor text already has a defined meaning in literature circles, which doesn't seem to be immediately useful in RPGs.

In fact, my recollection is that "fluff" and "crunch" arose in part specifically to combat the ambiguity and omissions of a "rules"/"flavor text" dichotomy--since i recall those terms being used earlier.

 

[woodelf]

And for another thing, is a location really fluff? Sure, it can have fluff elemtnets. But a city map really isn't fluff, heck it isn't even background information. A map just dosen't add flavor to a location, it often is the flavor.

Is it rules? No? Then it's fluff, by definition.

Everyone in this thread has made the mistake of thinking that there are only two things an RPG book contains. In reality, this isn't so.

It is if you define it as so--which i thought the terms "fluff" and "crunch" implicitly did.

 

[woodelf]

I don't like "fluff" because it is too imprecise. What I think of as fluff isn't necessarily everything that isn't crunch. Things like locations, planes, and the like, are pretty hard, useful game context stuff that isn't really "fluff" to me.

Well, that is a problem-- the fact that neither term has (1) precise or (2) agreed-upon meanings. I see them as tautologically complete--if it's not crunch, it's fluff, and vice-versa, by definition. Everything in an RPG book, save the credits and copyright notice, is one or the other. And, until the first thread on this ithat i saw on EnWorld (6mo ago, perhaps?), that's how i always saw them used. Skip Williams and Sean K Reynolds seem to use the terms that way in the quoted bits; my recollections of the use of the terms on r.g.f.advocacy and RPGNet likewise matches this absolute dichotomy.

Even then, however, i acknowledge that the exact boundary point is hard to agree upon, or perhaps even discern. I generally think of the boundary as being "would i still use this if i switched to a completely different game system?" If the answer is "yes" it's fluff (or, in my own internal classification, "essential content"); if the answer is "no" it's crunch (or "disposable inspiration").

But some things, due to the nature of the ruleset, start to blur that line. As someone else pointed out, is a random-urban-encounter generator, which doesn't list game stats for the encounters, rules or something else? Clearly, the D&D3E designation of an elf as "medium size" is rules--in another setting, where the baseline is something else, they might be "frail" or "tall", or simply have no g ame-mechanical size. But what about the table for generating an elf's height and weight randomly? I would classify it as fluff, but i can certainly see why someone else might call it a "rule".