This came up in a conversation with a friend of mine. She pointed out how our gaming group has always felt that fluff and fun take precedence over rules, but that groups exist wherein the opposite is true. I'm curious where you and/or your group falls and, if you're able to answer the question, why?
I, personally, feel that for my group in particular factors of fun, cool and awesome should have the rules working for them as opposed to trying to make fun and awesome fit into the rules. Both are very important, we realize, as rules can contribute to the fun by putting limits and possibilities in place. But no one bats an eye if we suspend a rule or set of rules for a scene or four.
Tell me about you and/or your group.
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Everyone, without exception, thinks fun is the most important thing, it's just that not everyone has fun the same way. I think that the rules should support the fun of the game -- if they need to be modified in order to do so then I'll do so, but I'd seriously prefer a set of rules which don't need to be modified to do so.
Fluff is not the same thing as fun. Crunch is not the same thing as unfun. Both fluff and crunch can be fun, if they're done right, and if they're done right then they can work together as a coherent whole (cf. Transhuman Space).
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It is a roleplaying *game*. A game needs to have rules that everybody abides by.
If you use the rules only when it suits you than why use rules at all? Or why not roll a D6 when you want some fun randomness in you game. 1-3 you succeed, 4-6 you fail. Ignore or adjust the roll when you feel like it.
This came up in a conversation with a friend of mine. She pointed out how our gaming group has always felt that fluff and fun take precedence over rules, but that groups exist wherein the opposite is true. I'm curious where you and/or your group falls and, if you're able to answer the question, why?
What do you mean by fluff here?
Is fluff the expanded upon background and setting? Filling it with a history, important players, a timeline, built in conflicts, short fiction set in the world, etc...? Because that make the game less fun for me.
I think a good set of rules that allow you to make an interesting character and that make them fun to interact in the setting is more fun. The fluff I can do myself, I guess I am a tool kit - build it yourself type of guy.
I like the rules to have an impact on the story, to send it in new directions. That's why I play RPGs as opposed to doing other collaborative fiction type things. The rules, even if they do not randomize, must shape the story.
Nobilis for instance has rules that explicitly force certain strategies and ways of viewing things. A shared story with the same setting and similar ideas could be quite fun to engage in, however without the mechanical constraints you'd never have situations where the character suddenly realizes that his resources won't stretch as far as he needs and must improvise. Yes, those situations can be engineered or occur by other means of shared storing telling, but I find that the impact of the rules can throw you a curve ball when you're in need of some creative juice.
Sorcerer is another great example. The rules explicitly give weight to anything you want to do in the story. A favorite example of mine is that via the rules revealing shocking information can overpower a gun. This is great stuff, basic to the rules, and the way that order of action is determined by the rules creates amazingly cool cluster fuck situations for the characters that drive the whole trouble -> demonic solution -> greater trouble cycle.
I suppose in the design of a game I would have fluff (the style and setting the game is attempting to convey) as principal, then have the rules flow naturally from that.
I always prefer that the rules and setting mesh as closely as possible, and find it's generally less unpleasant to make/modify rules to the setting than to make/modify setting to rules.
There have been a rare few rules sets I've been comfortable building a setting around.
But in play? Whatever is not promoting fun should be worked on later and whatever is actively impeding it needs to be corrected ASAP. If rules, they will not be suspended but replaced. If setting it will not be glossed over but changed. Players need to be informed what's changing and why, and I had better not have to do this very often because I hate it.
When I'm a player, I suppose I develop a kind of love-hate relationship with the rules particularly.
If the person running has to spend more than a couple minutes every session looking up rules, or constructs completely random/arbitrary rules I'd rather they just be running a free-form game since it's clear they didn't want to put effort into running the game with the rules they proposed running it with.
With regards to setting I suppose I'm a little more lenient. Having to look up a particular point of interest now and again is fine, but having to read sections from a book to describe the setting often irks me. Making up random things within an established setting throws me into a spitting rage because it invalidates a host of my assumptions and there's very little to do about it anymore but get the full story and remake my now completely out of place character.
If the GM is just making things up all the time for both I pretend I'm playing a free-form game with the inexplicable presence of an arbitrary randomizer that has no impact on the game.
Is this what you were looking for OP?
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Proud roller of two AD&D 2nd Ed characters unable to take a character class. I got to play the last one!
I like fun crunch which in turn supports fun fluff. Both crunch and fluff are going to be there, so I don't see any reason to try really hard to have fun with one and not try to have fun with the other. I'll probably get more bang for my buck if I put equal effort into having fun with both.
The line between "fluff" and "crunch" is, naturally, quite blurry in most games. That's because all RPGs are about making stuff up. Both the "fluff" descriptions and "crunch" mechanics ultimately do the same thing: they serve as inputs to your group's shared fiction.
Some things are easier to represent with "fluff." Some things are easier to represent with "crunch." You can't really write a bit of fiction to describe the time-evolution of play in the same way you can write "There's a king over there in this castle," for example -- you've gotta offer some rules or play advice (two things that I consider to be near identical in a functional sense, anyway).
Personally, I'm most interested in making stuff happen. Everything else -- particularly setting -- is just a platform for making stuff happen. As such, if your game doesn't have some interesting procedures for making stuff happen, it's not really worth playing for me. It might still be worth reading to steal some ideas for another game, of course.
Too much of either just impedes play, though. Sifting through the rules, setting, &c. to get to the good parts becomes a chore for me. Moreover, the prefab stuff, regardless of the form it takes, starts to weigh down our-own-thing-that-we're-creating-in-play.
Linear Mode
