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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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".