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View Full Version : Crunch v Fluff & how it effects the new edition



Anderlith
2012-05-04, 02:58 AM
Everyone knows that there are different types of gamers. Monty Hall, Naritivists, they go by many names. Some prefer rules lite & DM fiat, some prefer crunchy mechanics. Rules lite doesn't nessecarily mean that it is ill thought out or unpolished, while crunch does not mean that it is tedious or optimizing focused.

Personally I prefer crunchy mechanics, I like having the ability to look in a book & point my finger at a functional mechanic, instead of having to guess & jury rig my own mechanic everytime I change the weather the PC's are in. Also I'm all for ignoring rules or reforging them. I'd rather have something & not need it then need it & not have it. (I'd also like to say that the fluff of a mechanic should always be customizable to the player or DM)


So without a screaming flame war, do you think that the new edition should be rules lite, or crunchy? & why?

Endarire
2012-05-04, 03:14 AM
Crunch and fluff are not opposites, and they aren't necessarily at odds. Both work best when they work together. There seems no point in making a setting where magic is rare, but magic items and casters are as common as they're expected to be in 3.x. That isn't low magic.

Likewise, I want there to be an official setting that explores the ramifications of industrialized magic, because that's the logical extreme of common magic as in 3.x.

Ashtagon
2012-05-04, 03:32 AM
What I want to see is more coating.

Crunch is the rules. Fluff is the flavour text. Coating is the how-to, the why, and the hook that tells new players how to play.

Sith_Happens
2012-05-04, 04:18 AM
Likewise, I want there to be an official setting that explores the ramifications of industrialized magic, because that's the logical extreme of common magic as in 3.x.

Pretty sure that's about half the point of Eberron.

kaomera
2012-05-04, 07:50 PM
Crunch: I prefer something more like a rules-light approach (but not really the specific definition of rules-light); however I think the point of Next is to provide the ability to vary the ''crunch''-level based on personal preference (and I'd hope this will work on-the-fly, so that you can zoom things in and out in terms of mechanical detail as appropriate to the current situation in the game), mostly via having a lot of layers of options.

Fluff: This has always been an interesting space in D&D - there are many ideas baked into the rules that will tend to show through in the fluff, but really very little that specific in terms of the larger-scale picture. As a result you have room for a lot of differing types of campaign-worlds, but they tend to be genericized a bit by the rule-set. In previous editions this has been worked around by adding setting-specific crunch; in Next I think the the system of options may open up more room to customize the rules for a specific campaign without having to add many more pages of rules.