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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fenris-77" data-source="post: 8998976" data-attributes="member: 6993955">I've been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between crunch and how players represent their characters (as well as what crunch actually means in terms of design goals and resolution). In the TTRPG sphere we have character sheets running from index card-sized to sheets that are four or more pages long. If we want to parse what 'crunch' means in terms of characters we have two main axis - first we have what I'll call breadth, which appears as long lists of skills, spells, gear, or whatever - but in all cases the (I'll assume) goal is to institute a certain level of coverage in terms of what the character can do mechanically speaking. The premise there is that increased crunch, so more skills or whatever, has the specific (but not solitary) goal of making more granular the number of mechanical button the player can press to alter the game state. In terms of modern of Sci-Fi settings this makes a lot of sense, so don't take this as a criticism. The second axis is depth, which I'll identify as specific mechanics and subsytems designed to model/represent/handle/whatever certain specific actions. The low hanging fruit here is combat, which often gets far more mechanical attention than other things. To take Mythras for example, you have a bunch of  special actions designed to make combat more granular and controllable for the player. Some might blanche at my assertion that granular equals player control, but I think it is a supportable position. If we take some thing like Free Kriegspiel as one end of the TTRPG spectrum, and with something in a crunch-drenched BRP game at the other end, I think this idea becomes pretty uncontroversial. The more skills, the more mechanics, the more specific buttons a payer can push to effect diegetic change the more specific control the player has. Why more specific control? Because that granularity takes some parts of the adjudication process out of the hands of the GM. A specific example might be the notional difference between adjudicating a roll vs a generic 'knowledge' skill in some sort of OSR game versus the cornucopia of academic skills present in a game like CoC. In the first instance the GM has rather a lot of latitude about what the PC might or might not know, but which becomes more fixed as the range of skills gets more and more specific. This isn't a value judgment, nor even something I'm completely sure of, but it makes enough sense for me to toss it out here and let people pull at the flaky bits.I have more to say, but I suspect I'll start to ramble, so I'll stop here and let people stress test the idea above (if they feel like it).</blockquote>

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