Season 7 Episode 9

[muntjack]

Not sure if this will work, but this is for you, Tappy. A-Frame.

[bloodsparrow]

I think I see what Tappy is saying when he says FATE is crunchy. I don't agree with it, but I think I see where he's coming from.

Fluff is not the polar opposite of crunch. For instance, Riffs is crazy crunchy I'm told, but it's also got a crushing amount of fluff in the different worlds and races and tech and other stuff that made my eyes glaze over and really not want to deal with any of it. So clearly you can have both in one game.

Tappy's point with FATE seems to be about the mechanics.

Now in a Venn Diagram, the "Crunch" circle is completely inside "Mechanics", but the "Mechanics" circle is larger then the "Crunch" circle.

FATE is not crunchy but it could be considered overly mechanical. There is not a moment in time when I'm playing Diaspora where I'm not trying to come up with an Aspect to apply to a person, place or thing. So, because the MECHANICS apply to EVERYTHING that can happen or exist, it can get in the way of the flow of RP more then skill checks even... In theory, depending on who is playing.

So as somebody who has played a little bit of FATE, I agree with Tappy but not with how he worded it at first.

[inflatus]

For me crunch is mechanics, mechanics, mechanics, mechanics.....

The rest is fluffy.

[rickno7]

Mar 10, 2012 17:04:45 GMT -8 inflatus said:

For me crunch is mechanics, mechanics, mechanics, mechanics.....

The rest is fluffy.

I agree with this except for the "y" at the end. The rest is Fluff. A game that has a lot of fluff would be fluffy. A game with mechanics has crunch. A game with lots of crunch is crunchy.

I think one of the sources of the disagreement is the use of "crunch" and "fluff" interchangeably as nouns, adjectives and verbs. The forums seem to be treating "crunch" as a noun and a verb. The mechanics or the act of using numbers to calculate outcomes.

Tappy is using it as an adjective, especially for when he is talking about Dresden Files. The confusion over crunch the adjective vs crunch the noun lead to a lot of the argument.

Stu also seemed to switch between them depending on what he was trying to say to Tappy. When Tappy would counter the use of it as a adjective to describe some systems, Stu would turn it back into a noun. When Tappy would justify using it as a noun, Stu would go back to describing systems using the adjective form.

This also lead to the confusion of finding out the opposites. There is not an opposite of the word "crunch" as defined on the forums, because its a noun. The word crunchy is the adjective and would have an opposite... I would not call it fluffy, I'd just call it rules-lite.

Or at least that's what my sleepy early morning brain came up with.

I also like using the word "elegant" for a game with really streamlined crunch. A game could have tons of charts, rolls, and lists during character creation, but then be playable without the use of scrap paper, counters, or handfuls of dice. This would be "elegant" crunch.

[whutaguy]

If you were going to run a fantasy game using the Traveller rules set, you are keeping the crunch, changing the fluff. If you run the Traveller universe with Top Secret rules, you are changing the crunch.
Crunch is rules, Fluff is setting.
How you measure crunchiness varies by user. GURPS character book is all crunch, GURPS (3e) World books are mostly fluff.
I tend to gauge crunchiness by how much math I have to do on the average attack roll. D&D4 is crunchy, unless you pre-math each power like the character builder. Gurps becomes crunchy if you apply range/speed, darkness, injuries, obstructing foes, etc. A (group's) game will tend to be less crunchy if that group's play style is more narrative. Inversely, it will be more crunchy if the minis map is broken out when a PC buys rations.

[inflatus]

Without the fluffy the crunch is just blah. The fluffy can be anything other than the mechanics.

Even though I mostly play and GM GURPS (crunchy), I try and add a lot of fluffy.

[HyveMynd]

Even though I haven't listened to the episode yet (saving it for when I get home tonight), I have an opinion on the crunch/fluff discussion and I'm going to share, damn it.

My friends an I played a game of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying yesterday. It got mixed reactions but we're all willing to give it another shot, so I guess that's a positive review. Anyway, MHRP has a "Benny" economy that works very similarly to FATE's Fate Points. Basically, whenever a player gets a 1 on any of their dice, the Watcher (GM) can "buy" those dice for 1 Plot Point each and add those dice to their Doom Pool. Similarly, if the Watcher gets any 1's, the players can spend a Plot Point to take advantage of it (stepping up an Effect Die, making an Asset last longer than a turn, gaining a Stunt die to use on their next action, etc). Players can also earn a Plot Point by using their Distinctions (which are similar to Aspects in FATE) in a way puts them in danger or causes trouble for them. When you do that, you add a d4 to your pool (which is bad because it has a higher chance of rolling a 1, which the Watcher can then buy to increase their Doom Pool).

So there should be a fairly steady stream of Plot Points flowing around the table; the Watcher buying 1's to build up to their Doom Pool, and the players spending those Plot Points to take advantage of the Watcher's 1's or to do cool stunts.

I understand that just like Aspects in FATE, the Distinctions in MHRP are designed to be a double-edged sword. You can use them to help you in some situations (adding a d8 to your pool) or as a hinderance in other situations (adding a d4 to your pool but getting a Plot Point). The problem for me is, just like in the few games of FATE I played, I felt like I was gaming the system and not role playing my character. I played as Susan Reed, the Invisible Woman, who had three very positive Distinctions; Compassionate, Implacable Will, and Soul of the Team. Almost right from the beginning of the game, the players rolled a metric fuck ton of 1's, giving the Watcher a huge Doom Pool which he used to beef up the villains we were fighting against. We had some Plot Points at first, but we kept rolling 1's and to not steamroll us to death, the Watcher stopped buying our dice. But that robbed us of Plot Points which had became necessary for us to even do anything to the bad guys.

Toward the end of the fight where Carnage had essentially raped all three of the heroes, I remember looking down at my Distinctions and saying "I have no idea how to use these in a negative manner. But I have to, because I need Plot Points to have a chance of surviving this encounter." To me, right at that moment I wasn't role playing any more. I was trying to force the fiction of the story down a certain path simply because I needed a mechanical benefit to be effective. Throughout the whole game we were trying to justify fictional reasons why we could add certain dice to our rolls just because we needed those extra dice to have a chance against the Watchers NPCs. It seems that you have to constantly be aware of situations that you can take mechanical advantage of while playing this game. Your "crunch brain" always has to be on, even in situations that would be pure role playing in other systems.

So, just like FATE, I would call Marvel Heroic Role Playing a "crunch heavy" system. I really prefer the fiction of the story to tell players what mechanics apply, not the other way around. MHRP feels like it's telling me to do what makes sense mechanically and make the fiction fit. So, I'm not really sure I like MHRP...

[jimto]

Mar 10, 2012 11:08:39 GMT -8 muntjack said:

Not sure if this will work, but this is for you, Tappy. A-Frame.

Lol! Genius!

[jimto]

Damn, listening to the VMs brought back those happy few days and all the good times I/we had. We must do this again.

[jazzisblues]

Just for m'self.

Crunchy and Fluff(y) are not at opposite ends of a spectrum. They are actually not the same axis on the spectrum at all.

Crunchy implies complication, but is not necessarily a negative thing.

Crunchy / crunchiness is not necessarily inelegant.

Elegance is a subjective measure and one person's elegant may be wildly inelegant to another person.

I think the real problem is not whether a game system is or is not crunchy, but rather whether the game system is intrusive on the role play and that is not a question of whether a system is or is not crunchy but rather with how the rules of the game are implemented. One of my objectives as a gm is to remove the intrusion of the rules on

There is a (widely held) view that crunch is bad. I think that's another problem altogether and one that doesn't have anything to do with whether a system is crunchy or not, and it comes back to something I've said several times. Regardless of what game system we're talking about, all adjudications have to be done some way, and for them to be fair they have to be the same all the time. How we arrive at that adjudication is not a question of whether a system is crunchy or not but rather is a result of whether we like that contract to be imposed by rules as written or by common assent.

Just my 2 krupplenicks on the subject, your mileage may of course vary.

JiB

[ironnikki]

I agree with JiB here about crunch and fluff- they're incomparable. To me, the amount of crunch a system has is completely unrelated to how much fluff is supplied. Fluff is just another term for setting info, as far as I'm concerned.

I also believe that the presence or absence of both crunch does not necessarily have a bearing on how much role-playing will occur. A GM should select a system that supplies enough crunch to satisfy the players, while not allowing it to go over his or her head. In other words, if a GM wants to use a crunchy system, he or she had better know what they're doing with it, or it will become an impediment instead of an asset to the goal: telling a riveting story.

Fluff is completely different, in that there is a requisite amount of fluff that must be present for a good story to be told. Whether that fluff is provided by the system or the collective imagination of the players and GM is dependent on both the system and group, but there must be enough fluff to encase the plot and provide some wiggle room when things go awry. The exception here is, of course, the sandbox game, which is nothing but fluff, and in no way a bad thing.

I don't see crunch as a bad thing, but I tend to avoid really crunchy systems, because I know that I'll need to spend a lot of time getting used to the system before it stops impeding gameplay. Heck, I started playing SW about 6 months or so ago (yet another HJ convert, you bastards,) and I STILL haven't figured out all of the rules! Granted, I'm slower than most when it comes to these things, but I take that into account when I'm choosing a system.

[fray]

I was calling from the Heart concert.
Man, did that sound suck...
It was a great concert, they still rock!


Re: crunchy / fluff
Crunch is rules
Fluff is story

Crunchy is lots of rules and/or complicated rules.

[HyveMynd]

The best quote of the episode was CADave:

"We know... that this bear... has something to do with Cthulhu!"

I laughed so hard that I almost dropped the basket of clean laundry I was carrying back from the laundromat.

[azuretalon]

Mar 12, 2012 9:46:26 GMT -8 jimto said:

Damn, listening to the VMs brought back those happy few days and all the good times I/we had. We must do this again.

I could not agree more! I laughed so hard at Tappy meantioning him and Munt being the last living gamers, mourning me and other bacon fatalities over half a burger each.

[henryhankovitch]

Tappy is defining crunchiness as a binary setting. If a system has a rule that adjudicates a situation, then the system is crunchy; if there is no rule for the situation, then the system is not crunchy. The side effect of this definition is that it leads to every system except Amber diceless being categorized as "crunchy." This makes the term useless as a descriptor, obliging us to stop using it altogether if we were to subscribe to this definition.

Crunch or crunchy-ness is not a binary state, in opposition to "fluff" or whatever else. It's a relative descriptor, like "warm." You can't separate things into "warm" and "not warm"; you can only compare them by saying that one is warmer than another, and make statements of taste regarding how warm you want something to be. Crunch is the same. Crunch is a measure of volume; the more numeric rules and abstract subsystems a system uses, the more crunchy it becomes, regardless of the amount of fluff material or roleplaying which may also exist within the game.