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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 2111719" data-attributes="member: 10201">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".</blockquote>

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