RogerBW's Blog

Different Kinds of Crunch 01 April 2025

It is a truism that RPGs can be divided into "crunchy" (lots of fiddly details) and "fluffy" (never mind consistency, let's just tell a good story). But I think there's a significant subdivision.

A lot of older crunchy games, such as GURPS to take an example I know very well, have what one might call real-world crunch: a sports car moves this far in a combat round, if I shoot you with this bullet and you're wearing that armour here's how much it will spoil your day. These are things that can, at least in principle, be tested against the real world: a sword weighs this much, a fit person can march this far with a heavy load, a disease is this deadly.

But there's a second sort of crunch which often isn't recognised as such, and the games that deploy it often don't get labelled as "crunchy". That is the crunch that has no direct real-world analogue: it's the crunch that invokes metagame resources, like Savage Worlds' bennies or FATE's fate points, or abstracted mechanisms like Vampire's Humanity, The One Ring's trading of Fellowship for Hope or almost everything in Blades in the Dark. These may be broadly representative of a real thing, but they represent it in an abstracted way which isn't subject to real-world verification.

One of the problems with a traditionally-crunchy game (and the GURPS forums have certainly suffered from this) is the player who wants to generalise their own limited real-world experience in order to override a game rule. ("But when I'm shooting on the range, I'm this accurate, so…") The more abstract kind of crunch isn't subject to that: it's all too fuzzy to tie directly to real-world experience. But it is still mechanically complex, often trading off various kinds of currency and opportunity; it's the same kind of rules optimisation as in a traditionally-crunchy game, except that instead of ending up with a PC buying the most powerful handgun in the world, it ends up with strangeness like the Savage Worlds principle of always making sure you outnumber your opponents, so that one of you can keep them stun-locked while the rest beat them up. Or always keeping your morality rating in the sweet spot between the two zones that restrict freedom of action. And so on.

To me that's just as much crunch, in the sense of fiddly rules mechanisms that one has to stay on top of in order to be effective in the game—but without the connections to reality that can let real-world experience substitute for game knowledge.

Where does this go? Well, don't call a game "lightweight" or "fluffy" just because it doesn't have a great long catalogue of guns. It can still be complex and crunchy even if it was all made up out of the designer's head.

Tags: rpgs

  1. Posted by John Dallman at 09:52am on 01 April 2025

    Hear, hear. I find the old-style crunch easier to deal with, because it can be researched, and is subject to "reality checking," trying out its consequences in reality.

    Many people these days are very fond of vast structures of abstract reasoning, but I'm very doubtful of them, because their postulates are rarely well explained, and the reasoning is often clouded with jargon.

  2. Posted by J Michael Cule at 11:58am on 01 April 2025

    In a hiatus in my regulaly scheduled actual gaming with people, I am compensating by reading SORCEROUSLY ADVANCED a version of the already abstract SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED that instead of depicting an incomprehensibly advanced technological world with a diceless mechanic does the same thing for a world after a magical Singularity where everybody has the capacity to be a living god.

    And it too has things that are in game and incomprehensibly crunchy and things that are meta-gaming currency and narrative that the players know they have but the characters cannot see.

    Even so it is less painful to me than the FAIR FOLK for EXALTED 2nd Edition was.

  3. Posted by DrBob at 04:59pm on 01 April 2025

    I think the "reality checking" games also abstract things to within an inch of their life, once you stray out of the realms of long catalogues of guns, how fast Usain Bolt can run, and whatever area of expertise the writers have. The mountaineering elephants of early edition GURPS being an example... Climbing defaults to Strength-5, and elephants have Strength 300. Oh dear, 295 is quite easy to roll under on 3d6! Because real world things like elephants are very hard to model in a game... they are strong enough to push over a full grown acacia tree... but they'd break their legs if they tried to jump over a fallen log.
    Perhaps I distinguish between "crunchy" and "fiddly"? Crunch to me lots of maths (multiply your dice roll by the damage modification factor for your weapon, then add your strength bonus). Fiddly is lots of steps: roll to hit, then they roll to dodge, then you roll damage, then they subtract armour from the damage, then they roll soak... and special abilities for re-rolls can be invoked at any stage in this process.

  4. Posted by RogerBW at 11:50am on 02 April 2025

    Yes, fair enough, any playable game has to make compromises on realism (there was a guy in the SJ Games forum some years ago who refused to compromise his idea of realism at all, and there's no evidence his game was ever actually played).

    I think I don't separate crunch and fiddle in your terminology; I am aware that I'm happier with casual arithmetic than many people (not a euphemism for "more competent", I mean literally I find it enjoyable rather than tedious), so it doesn't feel like work to me and it does to them.

    The distinction I'm looking at is between "you go to hit him, use your sword skill and his sword skill to see if you do" and "you go to hit him, how many Ghost Of My Murdered Father points are you spending to steady your hand".

Add A Comment

Your Name
Your Email
Your Comment

Note that I will only approve comments that relate to the blog post itself, not ones that relate only to previous comments. This is to ensure that the blog remains outside the scope of the UK's Online Safety Act (2023).

Your submission will be ignored if any field is left blank, but your email address will not be displayed. Comments will be processed through markdown.

Search
Archive
Tags 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2300ad 3d printing action advent of code aeronautics aikakirja anecdote animation anime army astronomy audio audio tech base commerce battletech bayern beer boardgaming book of the week bookmonth chain of command children chris chronicle church of no redeeming virtues cold war comedy computing contemporary cornish smuggler cosmic encounter coup covid-19 crime crystal cthulhu eternal cycling dead of winter disaster doctor who documentary drama driving drone ecchi economics en garde espionage essen 2015 essen 2016 essen 2017 essen 2018 essen 2019 essen 2022 essen 2023 essen 2024 existential risk falklands war fandom fanfic fantasy feminism film firefly first world war flash point flight simulation food garmin drive gazebo genesys geocaching geodata gin gkp gurps gurps 101 gus harpoon historical history horror hugo 2014 hugo 2015 hugo 2016 hugo 2017 hugo 2018 hugo 2019 hugo 2020 hugo 2021 hugo 2022 hugo 2023 hugo 2024 hugo-nebula reread in brief avoid instrumented life javascript julian simpson julie enfield kickstarter kotlin learn to play leaving earth linux liquor lovecraftiana lua mecha men with beards mpd museum music mystery naval noir non-fiction one for the brow opera parody paul temple perl perl weekly challenge photography podcast politics postscript powers prediction privacy project woolsack pyracantha python quantum rail raku ranting raspberry pi reading reading boardgames social real life restaurant review reviews romance rpg a day rpgs ruby rust scala science fiction scythe second world war security shipwreck simutrans smartphone south atlantic war squaddies stationery steampunk stuarts suburbia superheroes suspense television the resistance the weekly challenge thirsty meeples thriller tin soldier torg toys trailers travel type 26 type 31 type 45 vietnam war war wargaming weather wives and sweethearts writing about writing x-wing young adult
Special All book reviews, All film reviews
Produced by aikakirja v0.1