Crunch Creating Fluff
Most gamers would likely say that fluff, the meat and content of an RPG, should be considered when making the crunch, the system and mechanics used to support the fluff. There is at least one case, however, where the opposite was done, and quite successfully.
My favorite ADnD supplement is a too often overlooked one, College of Wizardy by Bruce R. Cordell. Printed in 1997, this supplement contained information which completely changed the way magic could be viewed in DnD. For quite some time, DnD had used the fire-and-forget method of spell casting, taken from Vance’s Dying Earth series. To this point, the best explanation for fire-and-forget boiled down to “It’s magic and it works the way we say it works” or “We need it for game balance. Casters are already more powerful than Fighters.”
College of Wizardry changed this with the introduction of the Language Primeval, also known as Aleph. Sound familiar? Aleph was the first language spoken in the multiverse, spoken by those creators that came before the gods themselves. True Names were derived from Aleph, as was all magic. The raw power of Aleph, which when used in its perfect form could re-write the multiverse itself and overpower any deity, was such that it would burn holes in the minds of mortals and gods that attempted to learn it.
Once this is revealed in the book, much of Fire and Forget has a fluffy explanation. Arcane and Divine magic, both being descendants from Aleph, share similar properties with it - that of memory erasure, though on a much more precise level. This also caused non-Focus spell components to make more sense - many languages involve spoken words and physical gestures, and Aleph was apparently no exception.
Why doesn’t this happen more often? These kinds of crunchy rules that appear nonsensical only serve to force my focus out of the game by creating a break in the world’s reality. Smoothing it over not only creates a number of truly interesting story lines, many placed in the book and many more for clever Narrators to figure out, but it allows everyone who participates in the game to immerse themselves a little bit more.
What are your thoughts on crunch creating fluff? Where else have you seen it done?
Why I Do It
The past week has been spent contact people in the RPG community and offering help with various projects that they have undertaken, and during this time it occurred to me that I have never explained why I am doing any of this.
RPGs are a defining aspect of my life, and have been since I first started playing them. Much of my knowledge in diverse areas of history, religion, geography, weapons and a dozen other things has come largely from experience garnered during play. (Pun possibly intended.) Further, it was through gaming that I first began to develop any real social skills. Without exaggeration, I can say that RPGs have made me who I am today, and without them I would be an incredibly different person, to say the least, which brings me to why I do this.
I love RPGs. As I explained above, I owe the life I have to them, and because of that I can think of no nobler task than giving back to the RPG community in any way that I can. I started this blog with the hope of offering help and insight to people. I join communities with the hope of offering help and making a real connection with people who share my greatest passion.
Anything I can do to give to the community, I will do my best. If you are involved with an RPG related project or otherwise know of one, please get in touch with me. You can leave a comment on this article or send me an e-mail at Daniel (at) AlephGaming (dot) com.
Narrator’s Creed
Thanks to Greywulf and ChattyDM for this.
We, the undersigned……
- Demand a rules system that is consistent, clear and concise in all respects
- Want one book that contains character generation, the game rules and a wide and inspiring selection of opponents
- Expect regular supplements which take the game in fun, exciting and unexpected directions. Give us new monsters, new rules and new ideas, not formulaic repetition and rehashes of previous material
- Need published adventures created by the best minds in the industry that are fun to run and don’t require multiple rule books and monster manuals open at the table just to run a simple encounter. Give us all we need to run the encounter straight off the page
- Demand a system which works with (but doesn’t demand) miniatures, an internet connection or an electronic gaming aid. Let us choose how we play rather than be dictated by the financial interests of your company. Get this right and the profits will follow. Have faith in your customers, and they will have faith in you
- Want a combat system which can scale with the number of opponents, whether it’s a single foe or a thousand screaming goblins.
- Expect to be able to be able to create and customise monsters and NPCs simply, whether we be planning a scenario or sat at the table mid-game. We demand simplicity.
- Want stat blocks which take up a few lines of text, not a whole page
- Demand character generation that is as flexible and unrestricted as possible
- Expect the rules system to reflect the genre, not mould the genre into it’s image
- Want game designers who listen, not preach; improve, not re-invent; and inspire, not promote.
- Require a freely downloadable Test Drive Preview of the game with which we can run a sample adventure from start to end.
In return, we will…..
- Advocate, promote and play this game at every opportunity
- Make this game our game through customization of the classes, features and game world
- Introduce new players to the game, and thereby expand the hobby and profits of the company
- Buy the game, buy the supplements and buy the adventures, for they will be good, and worth our hard earned cash
- Have fun and be very, very happy indeed!!
Greywulf has asked that this be passed on if you agree with it, through communities or blogs. You can find the original post, by Greywulf, here.
Fluff is better than Crunch
Those Chatty Minions have gotten me thinking about the fluff/crunch debate, and I’ve realized that I believe fluff is far more important than crunch.
For those of you playing along at home, crunch consists of the rules and mechanics of the game, whereas fluff is made up of the flavor, history, and lore of a game.
So why do I think that fluff is more important than crunch? This particular bias goes back to my days in diceless RPGs, where no mechanics existed and we were left with only stories to focus on and fluff to fill the game. But how does that make fluff more important than crunch?
A game of pure fluff can exist, diceless story games like I used to play are proof enough of this. A game of pure crunch, however, cannot exist because the game mechanics are a hollow construct without fluff, and have no content to be applied to them.
Some of you may say, “Wait! BRP is a complete system for play and mechanics without any fluff. And what about RIFTs, GURPs, and HERO?” The system does indeed exist without fluff, and characters can even be generated without touching any element of fluff. Despite this, the moment the game begins, fluff attaches itself, immediately being given form by the setting and game type.
Necessity is one of the greatest markers of importance, and it is one that fluff possesses and crunch does not.
I Hate Dice
Following yesterday’s post on evaluating randomness in your game, I have a confession to make:Â I hate dice.
In theory, the rolls of dice should, over a long enough time line, average out. After all, everyone has the same chances of achieving the same quality roll every time they pick up the dice and throw them back down. However, most people do not play games over a long time line, most play for about five hours every weekend, if that regularly.
Worst yet, not all die rolls are equal in their importance - a d6 may be just a d6, until you’re rolling stats or health points and the outcome will affect your character for the rest of their life.
To complicate the issue further, these rolls can have long term effects on party balance. A character with 16s, 17s, and 18s for its attributes will be forever better off than one with 10s, 11s, and 12s. The same applies for health points - two characters might each roll 1d10, but if one gets a nine while another gets a one or a two there is a sudden significant and permanent difference in power levels between the two characters, for no reason other than a single die roll.
What options are there to remedy these problems?
Stats can be generated with a point-buy or array system instead of random generation, granting all the players the same range of potential.
Mechanics which require some randomization for outcome determination can throw chops, or switch to a diceless system.
A simple solution is to realize that dice and other randomizers are put into place to control the ebb and flow of a game, and to leave those elements where this is successfully applied alone. At this point, allowing dice pools or re-rolls eliminates much of the problem by taking the pressure off of a single roll, allowing results to be much more successfully averaged.
Does anyone else feel this way about dice? If so, how do you deal with it?
Friday’s Random Thoughts
I wish Bards were more like the musician assassins in Kung Fu Hustle. If you fix that in 4e Wizards then I’ll happily throw more money at you as I pre-order the new edition.
John is starting a new Darwin’s World campaign for us, and I love that new campaign smell. The smell of freshly printed character sheets, nely rolled stats, and the fear that the game will end abruptly due to impregnation by giant invisible spiders.
Edit:Â The above has happened more than once, and taught me that either random encounter tables are evil, or game masters should not watch Alien immediately prior to running a game.
I’m halfway through Feist’s Magician: Master book, and I love it. I’m both surprised and delighted by the amount of fluff in the book which closely mirrors background lore in my campaign world, Orroth.
Yax has once again proved his brilliance by ranking me as the twenty-second best RPG site on the net.
Evaluating Your Game: Part Three
This is part three in an ongoing series, designed to help you evaluate and improve your game from the ground up. Previously, I discussed Genre, Setting, and Scope, followed by an analysis of Character Generation Methods. Today, I’m going to explore the role that randomness plays in your game.
When I talk about randomness, I mean meaningful randomness which affects the outcome of events purely through game mechanics. Rolling a die for an attack roll is a good example, where deciding what clothes a random bar patron is wearing is not.
First, what does the randomness represent in your game? Is it luck? Favor of the gods? An independent range of outcomes? A range to succeed or fail, determined by skill? While many people may be tempted to assume it is the last one, keep in mind that in many games, the range of randomness is never affected by skill, simply what is acceptable in that range to succeed. Be sure to consider this in all aspects of the game, skill use, combat, and character creation. For instance, why are hit points random?
Once you’ve determined what role randomness plays in your game, determine how big of a role it can play in the course of a game. You may be surprised.
For instance, in the d20 system you may assume that someone has a Base Attack Bonus of +10. In addition to this, their stat modifier gives them a +4 bonus to their attack roll. Further, they have managed through use of superior equipment, positioning, and tactics to acquire an additional +6 bonus to their attack roll, giving them a total of +20 to their attack. This means that thorough skill and preparation which borders on or exceeds the “realistic” human limit plays an equal role to pure, random chance.
Once you have figured out the role that chance plays, determine if it is the correct role. Does it play too big a part? Too small? Does it scale the way you want it to? (If scaling luck is of importance to you, I recommend looking into systems with dice pools.) If the answer to all these questions is no, then you need to ask yourself if your players will be happy with the role chance plays - if it plays too big a part, players may feel that chance simply dwarfs their character.
If you are investigating new systems, one thing to look at is how they present the odds of chance. Simply on a practical level, percentile is the easiest to work with, as people usually think in percentages when they think in terms of chance - it’s simply more natural than increments of 1/20th or 1/6th.
The final consideration with chance and randomness is how much you will do during play to minimize or alter it. If you are going to allow re-rolls in many instances due to clever thinking, or it simply being appropriate in the situation, this will slowly control the role that chance plays.
Best Game Resources
Some games and books are ideally suited to providing inspiration and ideas for games, even if the game to be played is of an entirely different genre. Here are some of my favorites:
Dark Matter. The Dark Matter campaign is ideally suited towards conspiracy and paranormal games, and provides a lot of space geared towards describing organizations in enough detail to provide a slew of hooks and plot ideas. Each organization is fairly universal and may be exported or converted to other settings with little in the way of problems.
Complete Mafia for d20. The historical information available in this book provides a good history of how criminal organizations work in the real world, and the detailed descriptions of criminal organizations and roles of members will give you a great start on detailing the criminal aspect of any world or setting in your own game.
Call of Cthulhu, Sixth Edition. Theoretically, any edition of the game will work, but I have far more experience with this version. Anytime a truly “alien” entity or effect is needed, a flip through this book will provide either a great example or great inspiration. The d20 version may provide more direct compatibility with other d20 games.
Rifts, Heroes, GURPs, or any other “universal” point-buy system. While these games aren’t always as universal as we might like, there’s a lot of diversity in those systems, and the books are written to encourage the building of anything - both through mechanics and stirring up ideas.
Planescape. In my mind, Planescape is the most complete Dungeons and Dragons setting in existence. Anytime something in the game happens that involves any plane other than the Prime Material, I consult with Planescape for ideas, rules, and inspiration.
TSR Wizard’s/Priest’s Spell Compendium. Four volumes each, these compilations take spells and descriptions from almost every TSR game, setting, adventure and magazine release for several decades. The spells are updated for balance and use, and provide the widest variety of spells and abilities I’ve seen in any set of DnD products. Alternatively, you can get the wizard or priest spell cards, which contain identical information.
Darwin’s World. Darwin’s World combines elements from numerous genres, providing ample information and inspiration for post-apoc games, mutant games, or high tech games. The affiliates and organizations in the game also provide great templates and can easily be exported to other games or genres. (I still would love to play an X-Men game with Darwin’s organizations.)
What resources do you go to when you need some inspiration?
Resuming a Campaign
A long time member of my gaming group is set to return from AIT in the middle of the month, allowing us to continue a campaign that after nearly three years, approaches its conclusion. While this is very exciting, it can also be daunting, as it has been several months since any of us has played that game, that world, or even that system.
In honor of this upcoming event, here are some tips for resuming a campaign that has been on hiatus.
Group Memory Jog. Get as many members of the group together sometime before the game, and simply discuss the game. Good topics that will help jog the memory include character biographies, stories over how items came to be with the party, and goals that characters had. All of this will help get rid of some of the cobwebs and get peoples’ mind going about the game.
Role-play Before the Game. Set up a basic premise which will cause the players to role-play their characters, both with each other and a small cast of NPCs. This can either be part of the game or a separate exercise to help people get started. This gives people an additional chance to get used to their characters skin.
Hang-out Without Gaming. If the group has been apart for long in addition to the game being on hold, not only does everyone has a lot of catching up to do, but they may need some time to get reacquainted and used to each other again. Make sure everyone is comfortable around everyone else again before you try resuming the game.
Pre-pare a “Best of…”  By preparing a best of list for each of the characters, you’re reminding everyone not only of the things that made the characters great and their greatest accomplishments, but also of what the characters were like and what had been important to the storyline and the game. Make sure to prepare a good selection which both demonstrates the past experience of the game, and prepares everyone for the experience ahead.
Field Questions. Before the game starts, open up the floor to questions for everyone. These questions can go in any direction - player to player, player to narrator or narrator to player. These last minute clarifications can prove invaluable.
Start Off Slow. No matter how much preparation you put into it, things are likely going to start off a little slow. If this is the case, you simply need to allow for some time for the game to once again pick up momentum. Sometimes this can take one or two sessions, but usually by the middle of the first session the game seems to be in full swing again.
What do you do to resume a game that’s been on hold?
Open Call for Interviews and Guest Articles
I have decided to introduce a new set of features to the website, and allow for interviews and guest articles. I am doing this in the hopes that it will let me bring my readers both a wider range of content, opinions, and ideas, but also let me help give a voice to people who might not have any outlet other than forums, which may not always be appropriate.
While the guest articles are primarily intended to help give an outlet to people without one of their own, I am open to guest articles written by anyone.
If you have any interest, drop me a line at Daniel (at) Aleph Gaming (dot) com.
