As far as I can tell, absolutely no one on this thread is arguing that RPGs shouldn't have fluff. Am I missing something?
The original post?
NiN wrote:Going through some old threads, I saw some discussion of what goes into making an RPG book, and one of those things was fluff text, like short stories. It made me wonder: what the fuck is the point of that shit?
Or how about the post I was pissed off by?
Neb wrote:Prefacing rules text with fluff of any length from epigraph on up only serves to both establish a cadence of what to ignore in subsequent sections as well as label the author insufferable in the bargain.
Because get this: as AncientHistory pointed out: without fluff text to validate your rules you do not have a game. At all. Games can be dialed all the way down to "rules lights" which have only fluff to describe abilities and characters, but they cannot be dialed down to "fluff lights" that are just mechanics floating in space.
The game is the fluff text at the beginning of each section. That's the game. And the mechanics that come after it are there to resolve disputes about how those pieces of fluff text might interact. But anyone who says that the fluff text is pointless as NiN did or actively undesirable as Nebachawhatever did are just completely wrong. It's literally the entire point and only indispensable portion of the game.
FrankTrollman wrote:The game is the fluff text at the beginning of each section.
There is absolutely no reason to segregate fluff into a little ghetto at the beginning of each section. That's counterproductive.
FrankTrollman wrote:. But anyone who says that the fluff text is pointless as NiN did or actively undesirable as Nebachawhatever did are just completely wrong.
Did you not read the sentence "A light usage of flavor text in rules examples, however, is usefully demonstrative"? Or "Now, some degree of setting description is functional; e.g., what the various nations are, historical events relevant to play, basic cultural features, etc."?
FrankTrollman wrote:It's literally the entire point and only indispensable portion of the game.
No one is suggesting otherwise, but have fun arguing anyways. I'm looking forward to your next blistering indictment of people who essentially agree with you.
Last edited by hogarth on Wed Mar 27, 2013 5:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
FrankTrollman wrote:
Because get this: as AncientHistory pointed out: without fluff text to validate your rules you do not have a game. At all. Games can be dialed all the way down to "rules lights" which have only fluff to describe abilities and characters, but they cannot be dialed down to "fluff lights" that are just mechanics floating in space.
You can, in fact, heavily abstract a game to the point that it's essentially fluffless.
Just look at Chess. It's certainly fluff light. You've got a a couple of knight and a king and a queen and some religious guys a bunch of mooks and some towers that move for no apparent reason And that's the extent of the fluff. It doesn't explain anything important about the pieces, their goals and motivations, or how the hell the rooks move. And it doesn't matter.
Checkers is even more abstract. So is Go.
The problem is that none of those are role-playing games. You can take the fluff out of the RPG and still have a G, but you can't take the fluff out and still have a RP.
Likewise, you can add fluff to chess and turn it into a half-decent tactical RPG.
In highly abstract games like chess and go, you can argue the fluff isn't absent as much as it is implicit - these are culturally-ingrained non-cooperative contests, with their own surrounding mythology and literature developed over centuries. We use chess as an idiom for intellectually difficult tasks and strategy, the mental equivalent of a physical contest.
By a similar token, look at sports. By any objective measure, they're ridiculous, and immense kerfluffle is made about the rules of play - but only because people care about the outcome of the game and how it's played, the narrative of the sports context.
The main difference between chess, basketball, &c. and RPGs isn't so much the lack of fluff but the fact the RPGs do not have set win conditions, so it becomes less a competitive exercise than a cooperative one.
Part of it is that I think there are different kinds of fluff. The much-reviled "chapter opening fiction" is really a form of paratext, if by your basic rpg you mean "This is a game where you play the role of X, here are the rules to simulate that." So are we mostly agreed that that particular paratext can be junked without affecting the quality of the game?
Omegonthesane wrote:a glass armonica which causes a target city to have horrific nightmares that prevent sleep
JigokuBosatsu wrote:so a regular glass armonica?
You can buy my books, yes you can. Out of print and retired, sorry.
JigokuBosatsu wrote:Part of it is that I think there are different kinds of fluff. The much-reviled "chapter opening fiction" is really a form of paratext, if by your basic rpg you mean "This is a game where you play the role of X, here are the rules to simulate that." So are we mostly agreed that that particular paratext can be junked without affecting the quality of the game?
Yes.
Shitty short prose can be useful for world-building and I have certainly used it as such, but at the end of the day descriptions are more important than plot when it comes to worldbuilding and the descriptions can be moved to different sections. The shitty short prose itself should be at the back of the book, not the front. And it should all be in a single chapter dedicated to shitty short prose. And it should have a single editor (and preferably a single writer) to ensure consistency. Or you just drop the shitty short prose altogether, but I think it can have a place.
Ancient History wrote: In many of the best games, the fluff and the crunch are intimately connected... Bad games tend to be marked by a severe disconnect between fluff and crunch
This.
Thats why I cited RQ/Glorantha as a great example (specially the old books like Cults of Prax). And well remembered sir - Earthdawn is also great in this respect. As is Shadowrun old editions (I specially like the shadowtalk).
Last edited by silva on Thu Mar 28, 2013 1:15 am, edited 1 time in total.
