Fluff with teeth: Theories on the DM and player's use of fluff

[NichG]

The genesis of this thread is the idea that, while we have a lot of ways to concretely discuss mechanics and balance in D&D on this forum, we don't have many ways yet to concretely discuss and think about the implications and effects of different kinds of fluff.

I'm putting it here under D&D 3.5 because that is the specific context - many of the examples that gave rise to this had to do with the fluff and refluffing consequences of templates and the like. I think in other games this is less of a problem too, because often many fluff things are recognized as having impacts and are given mechanical costs, so there is more specifically to be done to close the gap in our understanding of the consequences of fluff in D&D 3.5.

From here on out is a repost of an idea constructed between Boci and myself about how to go about concretely evaluating the gameplay impact of fluff components of a character's background. This is not meant to be 'just so', but rather to spur discussion to improve this sort of thinking.

The core idea (or at least my core idea) behind this is, 'good fluff has teeth' - the things that are relevant and shape gameplay are the things that are remembered as cool or interesting, or become the tools that players use to drive the plot. Since such things can shape gameplay, there are balance and DMing considerations to understand around such fluff.

The example here was, how do you evaluate the impact of a character whose backstory makes them a landed noble?

I'd propose a set of questions that one should answer to ones-self when considering the consequences of a given bit of fluff. This is similar to your list, but I'm going to rephrase in terms of specific questions - see if maybe walking through that is more useful?

I'll also put a bit of reasoning behind each question.



- Who does this background give you contact with, who would otherwise be inaccessible?

Information flow is an important element of the progression of the plot and control of the narrative. Often, a limiting factor on how fast things can move is that you do not know the right people to tell information to, try to interact with, try to stop, etc.

For the DM: Be aware that this character may be able to jump ahead a bit or may try to leverage their contact to head off a threat. If you run a game where there's a threat at a much higher power level than the PCs when they discover it, a likely response is for the PCs to go and contact similarly powerful people to prepare/deal with the threat. As such, there can be a risk of dissonance if you have to come up with reasons why the powerful NPCs would not intervene, so its important to bias the pacing factors of the campaign towards lack of information rather than lack of ability when a PC has powerful contacts .



- What is the context that is required to exist because of this background?

If a player is playing a noble, that means that there is a nobility. That's kind of a no-brainer of course. But there will be dissonance if, for example, the nation the player came from is run by a council, or is a democracy/democratic republic/etc, and they're playing a noble. For something like a half-dragon, this implies the existence of dragons, their immediacy in the setting (e.g. its not that 'there were dragons 1000 years ago, but now there aren't) and that they can have offspring with other species.

In general, this question is all about the background causing things to exist or not exist in the setting.

For the DM: One thing to do is to intentionally force the context to be inconsistent in order to cause this background to spring into contrast. The player is a half-dragon but there have been no dragons for thousands of years - this is now a mystery that can be turned into a plot hook.



- What inconveniences are attached to this background? Are they player inconveniences or character inconveniences?


If a particular background is going to cause the PC to be barred from entering cities or forced to serve on the city council and not allowed to go on adventures, the player needs to know and/or the DM needs to do something to moderate this.

For the DM: Player inconveniences often become table inconveniences, and are generally bad game design - be very careful about allowing things that cause player inconveniences (e.g. not being able to travel with the party) without some sort of moderating factor. Character inconveniences are generally not an issue, but may increase spotlight time.



- What are the constraints on the character due to this background, for sake of internal self-consistency?

If all nobles are trained in foreign languages, but the character does not speak those languages, that becomes an inconsistency that should be resolved or explained. Much like forced inconsistency between context and background, a forced inconsistency between the character and their background can become a plot hook or important point.

Does this sound concrete? Do you have other suggestions of ways to systematically think about the consequences of fluff, positive, negative, mechanical, DM-wise, etc?

[Zweisteine]

This sounds cool, but be warned that many players (and some DMs) don't want to go into such depth with their characters, or with the setting. A good reason not to have everything set up ahead of time is that the world might not have much. Say a player knows that the adventure takes place in a monarchy, and wants to be a noble, but all the DM knows is that there is a king. He doesn't want to go around fleshing out all of the nobles so the character can have contacts (etc), because he knows that he doesn't know what he'll need from the setting later.

That said, a landed noble who decides to go adventuring is generally a young heir with living parent(s), and decides to go adventuring because he thinks it will be fun. The reason he doesn't have guards is because he ran away. If he didn't run away, maybe his parents though being alone in the world would toughen him up, or teach him something. Or maybe the other characters are his guards. Or (most likely) his guards were killed before the adventure began.

If a player wants to play a landed noble who has already inherited and owns his land, he runs into this problem: Nobles don't go adventuring. They stay home and do noble stuff, liking counting their money.

Now that I've finished writing this, I can't remember what I was going to say when I started...

Also, I could've sworn that some book (Enemies and Allies, maybe? probably not) had some rules about social class and how it affects characters.

[Kazyan]

{{scrubbed}}

[Bakeru]

That said, a landed noble who decides to go adventuring is generally a young heir with living parent(s), and decides to go adventuring because he thinks it will be fun. The reason he doesn't have guards is because he ran away. If he didn't run away, maybe his parents though being alone in the world would toughen him up, or teach him something. Or maybe the other characters are his guards. Or (most likely) his guards were killed before the adventure began.Or it's a non-heir, like a second or third son, trying to find alternative ways to gain influence. He'd still be a part of politics, but just unimportant enough to do what he wants.

I admit, I'm not to familiar with noble ranks, so I have no idea how this interacts with the "landed" thingy (which I presume means "noble who owns land (and sometimes the people on it)")... but then, I don't know how familiar others are with noble rankings, so I guess that's just fine.

[NichG]

Ideally, this (nebulous) kind of analysis should actually reduce the amount of detail you have to go into with fluff. Basically, some things are just not going to be relevant to the gameplay or characterization, so you can know to just skip over them and not fill those details in.

For example, I don't think that someone playing a noble means that you have to pre-stat every noble and noble house in the kingdom. But it does mean that you should be prepared for the player saying 'hey, do I have any old friends from academy I can hit up for a few hundred gp?'. You don't have to have made the list of those friends, but as a DM its good to be able to expect what might happen as a result.

More in general, what I kind of want to get at are whether or not we can come up with a language to talk about fluff the same way we talk about mechanics on these forums. For mechanics we have things like the Tier system, the idea of action economy, etc. For fluff, we don't really have something like that yet, so I think it'd be good to start to sort of develop that kind of thing.

One general principle I would propose is the idea that connections = leverage. If you are connected to a Lv20 character, then even if you're Lv3 you can throw around (a little of) the power of a Lv20 character in the right circumstances. That connection might be explicitly positive in nature (I'm so and so's son), but even negative connections can be used for some kind of leverage (so and so is sworn to kill me, so if I spread rumors that I'm going somewhere, he will head there and cause chaos).

Another idea that I think is important, though its still nebulous, is that things that give you control over the direction of the narrative are sort of the fluff equivalent of things that let you be very mechanically effective in combat. An example 'Tier 1' of backstories would be the Baldurs' Gate-esque 'I'm the son of a god, and the key to him regaining power'. Whatever else is going on around you, your backstory is probably going to be more cosmically important than it. This is pretty nebulously defined though.

The third thing I'd want to mention is more about running the game and world-building than specific character backstories. This is the idea that you can have 'statements about the world which are true' that don't take the form of explicit mechanics, and those statements are often just as powerful as mechanics. These can also take the form of logical extensions of things. Take something like a rust monster - mechanically, it doesn't have to make a save or something to resist going after a Wall of Iron summoned by the wizard instead of continuing to gnosh on the party's full plate wearers. But logically, based on its motivations and its nature, summoning a Wall of Iron to distract it should work. This is a case where the fluff (a rust monster is a creature that voraciously hungers for metal, but otherwise isn't very hostile) gives rise to something with a significant mechanical impact (the creature may well break off combat to go after a tempting treat).