Crunch appeal

#41

I agree with Jesseabe. Maybe system mastery doesn’t help as MUCH with a PbtA game, but it still helps.

BlockquoteLots of situational modifiers +/- : these increase info load and add potentially several mechanical steps of the same nature (complexity alright)

Blockquote

Yeah, this is the kind of “crunch” that can cause me to roll my eyes and get frustrated. Rolemaster seemed to have all these niggly modifiers. Consulting multiple charts. It is telling that I started gaming in 1977 and I’ve only played Rolemaster a couple of times and none of them were “fun”.

Hero and Gurps in certain circumstances can have a lot of modifiers happening all at once. Stealth, on crunchy leaves, but shadowy and dark and the Sentry is more than 8" (16 meters)… -1+1+(look at range chart, that -4 is for the Sentry’s Perception roll no matter what the PC rolls). So, two rolls, multiple modifiers. For something that PbtA does in one roll.

Dungeon World might have Stat + one bonus or negative due to fiction and what prior move results. Pretty damn easy.

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#42

I think this is getting very much to the heart of “crunch does what?” because it asks the real question, “What do we find rewarding in RPG play?” Hence my using GNS as a starting point… because that is about understanding the different ways people feel rewarded by play.

If crunch is purely defined as depth and breadth of complexity that requires mastery in order to achieve maximization and optimization… then I’ll happily join the “I hate crunch” side of this.

But if crunch can be applying of mechanics of varying complexity that requires mastery in order to achieve smooth, frictionless, detailed and evocative experiential play… then I’m one who loves crunch… just a different kind.

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#43

Maybe “What do we find Rewarding in RPG Play” should be a new thread?

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#44

Burning Wheel is useful as an example here, I think. High crunch, lots of details to grasp, intricate subsystems with complex interactions. It’s definitely a game you’re mastering in order to win… But the crunch is baked into narrative goals, character development etc. The win condition, such as it is, is for your character to have an interesting growth arc. It’s not just smooth play, there’s a real goal there, but very different from what you’d see in GURPs, or your other crunchy system of choice.

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#45

Yes please. If we get too far into it here, I’ll split the thread. But if it stick to "What is crunch good for, we can keep it here.

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#46

Ok, this is going to sound weird because of the word choice, but I think of crunch as being the opposite of “elegant.” But I’m trying to use elegant in the same way a mathematican (*disclaimer, I am not a mathematican) tries to create elegance in expressing a formula or equation.

See, it’s weird because of the connotation of elegance vs inelegant, and I like some crunchy rules so I’m not trying to make it a perjorative. But even if I like a crunchy “roll X dice plus modifiers, check against target, use the difference here, minus the armor” or whatever, it isn’t exactly as elegant as the less-crunchy “high card wins.”

Elegance is also not a matter of simplicity. Even something like the old TSR Marvel which was roll D100 and look up some charts is in some ways inelegant.

All of that to say, there is an appeal to inelegance. There’s a satisfaction of seeing the complexity and watching as it works to produce the desired effect. I mean, until we house rule it, of course :slight_smile:

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#47

Dannythewall…
Elegance is a word I often use for good game design. I, too, look for elegance. I thought the d100 gunplay mechanic for the second Top Secret that did the damage as well as the hit location as well as how hard it hit and if it hit at all… all in one roll…was super damn elegant. Always impressed me.

Having to roll, consult a significant chart, roll again… and maybe even a 3rd roll… not elegant.

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#48

I would not frame the idea as elegance vs. crunch but define elegance as “good crunch”. My working definition for Game Elegance would be: the effectiveness of a mechanic at evoking what it is intended to simulate.

I would not tie elegance directly to simplicity, although the latter often improves the former. DnD’s skill check elegant; if something is beneficial it increases the result of a d20 roll, if it is harmful it decreases it. There is an intuitive mental feel to “I am good at tying knots so when I make a roll to tie knots I do better”. It is not simple per se when some rolls can involve multiple modifiers, each of which a derived from other stats or GM interpretation, but it provides an easy mental checklist to make every important “thing” have an impact on the game.

Compare that to say, 3.5’s rules for turning undead. The intent is “holy power harms undead”. The implementation involves checking your turn ability (which is derived from your class level) against the HD of the multiple targets with scaling effects based both on your level and their own. It turns what should feel like a straightforward and powerful ability into an exercise in bookkeeping.

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#49

I am not into edition warring and don’t know what turn undead should be, but it’s not fair to mention how “turn undead” is calculated from level, because I believe this part of the calculation is made during downtime.

Bookkeeping before and after a game session is rarely associated with crunch. Or at least, it’s a sort of crunch that circumstances (downtime) give a very different perspective on. Maybe you could develop the comparison with the sort of crunch discussed in this thread?

Also, I feel I am beginning to come across as contrarian, but I don’t see the advantage of making “elegance” in game a synonym for “intuitive”, when the previous definition for the term was more precise and rather useful.

All I can say is that, for me, elegance is a ratio of depth to complexity, so indeed simplicity (low complexity) is directly tied to elegance.

So, turn undead is how many crunch ?

  • substract X to Y for undead 1
  • check effect
  • compare two numbers for undead …
  • check effect
  • compare two numbers for undead n
  • check effect

I guess in practice it’s not undead but ennemy type that determine a loop, with mooks all having the same number of HD. What strikes me as blocking the flow is the “check”. each. time. We had a Hero system game master who did that : he prepared every threshold for NPCs beforehand ; he even prepared the rolls before hand so we just had to roll on a table of rolls (sic). The ugly hidden costs ! Downtime is what made the high times high.

So, this rudimentary design is not elegant. In all these old games you need to crank the rusty fortune wheel every time you want an answer. They could have gotten straight to the jugular, with the boss or the dragon taking harm, the minions fleeing or half of them turning to dust, on a 10+ pick two. That was elegant. But it was probably felt as too hasty, intellectually unsatisfying. They wanted to see everything. Maybe crunch was used a bit like slow motion, like RDUNeil does ? Or maybe they just didn’t know better.

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#50

I would argue my definition for elegance is distinct from intuitive. It’s intuitive that an explosion deals more damage in a closed space. It is not elegant that blast damage in Shadowrun requires determining the explosive damage dropoff and then evaluating the number of times the explosion “ticks” a target based on how close it is to walls.

Intuitive: a mechanic produces results in line with assumptions (crits deal extra damage, rolling a 1 is bad, a trait called “deadeye” improves my ability to hit targets)

elegant = a mechanic feels like what it is simulating (pulling a jenga block to not die, armor reduces damage by a flat amount, Moves from PbtA)

An example of a mechanic that is Elegant but not Intuitive would be THAC0. It’s a target number to hit on an attack roll modified by the defender’s armor. Improving it makes it easier to hit things and armor makes it harder to hit the thing. But it’s not intuitive because a lower armor class is better. DnD’s current system is (mathematically) nearly identical to but more intuitive because bigger numbers are better.

that being said, I feel like the road I’m running down is probably not useful to a player. To my design sense I find it helpful to define and chase elegance, but to a player they don’t really care what kind of crunch they’re interacting with as long as it’s enjoyable.

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#51

Ok… wrote a long rambling reply, but it got away from me… short of it…

This is an insightful interpretation of exactly how I feel. In certain instances I do feel that “10+ pick 2” is way too hasty and unsatisfying, intellectually and viscerally. It short cuts the payoff, even if it is elegant.
BUT in other instances I love it, because it short cuts the BORING stuff to get to the payoff.

example: If the “move” is something like “Investigation”… and a single roll encompasses an entire montage scene of talking with witnesses, reading case files, sitting on stake outs, getting warrants, etc. And this jumps right to “what is dramatic” which is “What did the investigation turn up?” and how does that set up the next scene?

Same for scenes of political debate or dealing with bureaucracy, or navigating a dinner party, etc.

Noticing a trend… social interactions… where the RESULT of the interaction is what is dramatic, not necessarily every conversation, lingering look or calculated insult.

So where does “cutting through the parts we don’t like to get to the parts we do like” fall in the elegant and intuitive discussion? (I like RadMad’s definitions of Intuitive and Elegant.)

I think it might be a third category is needed… “meaningful?” Good mechanics are ELEGANT, INTUITIVE and MEANINGFUL in actual play… PbtA 2d6 resolution can be all three, but may fail the INTUITIVE or MEANINGFUL aspects in some cases.

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#52

I feel like any mechanic can fail any or all of those three depending on the specifics of its implementation. No real point in singling out PbtA 2d6 there.

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#53

I wasn’t singling it out to attack it, but to say that it is one mechanic that can actually be all three… not focusing on that it fails. I’d say most mechanics never ever achieve all three, let alone occasionally fail all three.

It does though imply why sometimes a normally Elegant, Intuitive and Meaningful mechanic is replaced by something less elegant or intuitive… mainly because it is more meaningful for play in that instance.

That could be at the heart of “what’s crunch for” in that it provide “meaningful” interaction, even at the expense of elegance or intuitive play.

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#54

There’s a lot of conversation here and I’ll bet that I haven’t absorbed half of the nuance of the discussion, but for me “crunch” should be the mechanical “game”-element (the bit that sways a story-telling session toward something more regimented like Chess or Diplomacy) that manages the challenges integral to the game and nothing more.

A game that has a mechanic for everything is fooling itself first and foremost, as no game can hope or expect to cover all the basis of every possible type of story. Furthermore, a game that does try to do this likely lacks the focus to attract a true target audience.

On the other hand, if the mechanics express themselves too narrowly then the group using them will start to shift away from the game as written, in which case they’re no longer playing the game they picked up. That’s not a bad thing, but from a design perspective that means there has been a level of disconnect between the designer and their intent in bringing the game to the group. It’s a failure of scope, for example, if a game about taverns doesn’t have something to handle arm-wrestling.

There’s a line that needs to be judged by the creator and they need to have the insight to locate it and not fear staying within it. Occasionally, when running a session of a game, they might find the players hankering for a specific type of mechanic to underlie the framework of the story — in that instance, it warrants a step back to understand whether the issue is that the game itself has gone off the rails forcing the need for an unnecessary mechanic and if something else needs reworking in setting and solidifying the parameters.

And — now I’m tired.

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#55

I think “crunch” can refer to a lot of things, which can present themselves differently. Having to roll three different sets of dice and do complex math every time you do something is one type of “crunch”. In another game, you always roll 2d6, so it’s easy-peasy, but there is a 300-page book of these 2d6 tables - a completely different form of “crunch”.

Mechanics and rules can do a lot of things, from rewarding mastery (and note that, even if the mastery doesn’t help you “win”, it can still carry social acclaim or status, develop a shared “language” for a group, building social unity, or it can simply be intrinsically rewarding - I recently read about a D&D group that was proud of how quick they were at getting through combat rounds, for instance) to satisfying a need to explore options, create formulae for moments in play, and so on… but they also have a real, performative aspect, based on what they make the people at the table do or say. Consider how the call of “roll initiative!” becomes a little ritual at a D&D table - it is a familiar call to action that gets everyone in a very specific kind of mood or mental space. It’s a reminder of both danger and the possibility of triumph. It has ritualistic meaning, for that group.

Simply rolling the dice or consulting a book can lend weight to a moment, just as much as it can ruin flow, disrupting a moment. I often think of how Monsterhearts’ moves sometimes add dramatic emphasis to small moments - a word spoken with a meaningful subtext becomes a ‘shut someone down’ roll, and an arched eyebrow might qualify for ‘turn someone on’ in the right circumstances. When and where and how is often a subjective matter of taste, but it’s worthwhile to think of the undeniable, objective nature of certain moves and certain designs, and how they might fit into your game or your game interests.

@DeReel, in the Forge days, the concept of “crunch unit” you are discussing was dealt with in some detail: it was called ‘Points of Contact’.

Points of Contact
The steps of rules-consultation, either in the text or internally, per unit of established imaginary content. This is not the same as the long-standing debate between Rules-light and Rules-heavy systems; either low or high Points of Contact systems can rely on strict rules.

A game could be categorized as “high points of contact, rules-lite”, for example. If you remember Jay/Silmenume, his D&D group rolls the dice multiple times a minute, but they are almost always simply interpreted loosely on the fly.

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#56

First, thank you for the lead on “Points of contact”.
RadMad has distinguished Crunch and Content early in the thread. It’s interesting to bring it up, because with the crunch’o-meter built in this thread I am beginning to see what Content and looking it up is like.

A “list of truth” is a list of 1 crunch mechanics. Like situational modifiers, or possible moves, each truth-bit is easy to manage, but the burden of choice and info management comes when Content increases. TLDR : I believe Content is accounted for in the definition of Crunch built here, and what’s more : looking at Content reinforces the definition.

More important to me : I think you make a very valid point that mastery is a goal in itself. This breaks down in various components : flux, performance, success, competition. Victory being louder than cerebral enjoyment doesn’t help drawing a diagram of these components shares. However, by analogy, in sports and crafts, performance is a frequent motor.

#57

@Paul_T
Silmenume was kind enough to let me watch a play session in his favourite play style no later than last week. It’s really “low crunch”.
Reading about points of contact didn’t yield much. I got to see Emily Care as a newcomer to the Forge, but as I expected, discussions are very heavy handed and people try to apply the concept to whole games. Which is of little help : you don’t need a meter to tell different games apart. What they did was mostly use the difference between games to test the frontier between rules and mechanics. And craft game propaganda.
Once in this thread Edwards does the simple thing I propose : count steps in an operation. And immediately shuts down the possibility of finding patterns. IOW, this didn’t get very far…
http://indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=4352

#58

Whenever I’ve played Apocalypse World, my players have always cottoned early to the fact that, when the dice hit the table, things can always go wrong. So, whenever they knew they’d eventually want to make a move, they’d spend time laying groundwork in the fiction that would shape the kinds of results that follow from the move they’d eventually have to make—the kind of fire they’d be under, for example, or the kinds of hard bargains it would make sense for me to offer. They’d be doing this even for the moves whose whole point is to get bonuses on other moves, like read a sitch or help.

I find this behaviour really interesting, because the game doesn’t have a lot of crunch, but my players were working hard and really investing in the narrative to get as much benefit as they could from every bit of crunch. “System mastery” was about controlled triggering of the moves. I consider it one of the most brilliant things about AW that the moves shape play when they’re not being used, at least as much as when they are. And that’s not because of the amount or degree of crunch, but because of how the crunch relates to the fluff—there’s a dialectic there, a feedback process, where the fluff informs the crunch and vice versa.

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#59

That sounds a lot like OSR play, which is why I still think there are strong similarities between the two styles.

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#60

A note on Crunch vs Content.

Crunch is better looked at in play : how many interactions you actually use. But Content belongs to the game. It’s out there in the (mental/cultural) background (if you know of it/if it has been published), whether you use it or not.

Now, maybe I am reinventing the wheel, but I want to use the concepts of qualitative (verbal) and quantitative (numerical) rules :
The amount of qualitative rules is Content. The amount of quantitative rules is sometimes called rules heavy(ness), as if “verbal” rules didn’t count. +/- modifiers and tables to look up are a gateway from one to the other, and therefore always Content sometimes Crunch. The weight of the printed rules and content + unwritten tradition is what makes a game “light” or “heavy”

I think “freeform” is often used as “verbal rules”, and you can distinguish that from “open” = without rules, varying with taste, culture, and social acceptablility.

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