Books: Mechanics or flavor? [Archive] - Wizards Community

Books: Mechanics or flavor? [Archive] - Wizards Community

Post/Author/DateTime Post
Eightbitmage
03-07-07, 08:42 AM I was wondering how people would feel about a D&D book that contained almost no mechanics. Would you be willing to buy a book that was almost entirely comprised of the flavor of things and pushed mechanics to the background, or do you NEED mechanics to make the purchase feel justified?

I have a feeling we aren't going to see many of these released by wizards due to the fact that not as many people would buy them as the latest expansion and people who don't DM wouldn't buy them at all.

Personally I can come up with mechanics for just about anything without too much trouble, so what I am always looking for is more flavor on the creatures, or things to include in my campaigns where the stats don't matter. When I buy a book I pretty much skip over the feats section, extra classes and prestige classes ect. in favor of the flavor based subjects.
Caliborn
03-07-07, 08:53 AM On 98% of the various concepts that comprise D&D I wouldn't even consider the purchase; only a few select subjects would interest me enough to by a book comprised (almost)entirely of flavor text.

Personally I'd like to see a bit more flavor and a lot less useless crap in the books; stuff like the new style magic item and monster entires, and sample characters for any of the prestige classes.
DyloniusFunk
03-07-07, 08:53 AM I was wondering how people would feel about a D&D book that contained almost no mechanics. Would you be willing to buy a book that was almost entirely comprised of the flavor of things and pushed mechanics to the background, or do you NEED mechanics to make the purchase feel justified?

I have a feeling we aren't going to see many of these released by wizards due to the fact that not as many people would buy them as the latest expansion and people who don't DM wouldn't buy them at all.

Personally I can come up with mechanics for just about anything without too much trouble, so what I am always looking for is more flavor on the creatures, or things to include in my campaigns where the stats don't matter. When I buy a book I pretty much skip over the feats section, extra classes and prestige classes ect. in favor of the flavor based subjects.

Unless it's a setting specific book, the majority of books publsihed are crunch. The reaosning being that it's easier for DM's to come up with thier own fluff than it is to make new monsters, spells, PrC, etc. So unless Wizards sees some massive change coming in their customer bases buying habits, chancea re pretty good they'll continue to do as they've always done.
Orchomenos
03-07-07, 09:07 AM 98% of the books in the average library are about flavor and concepts. They are called novels.
Caliborn
03-07-07, 09:57 AM 98% of the books in the average library are about flavor and concepts. They are called novels.
Would you honestly buy a novel written by the guys who put together Complete Adventurer?
wrecan
03-07-07, 10:29 AM No, I would not. In my opinion, that was one of the biggest problems with Cityscape. Too much fluff.

Why should I buy a supplement with fluff descriptions of what it's like to live in a fantasy city written by gaming writers, when, for one-third the price, I can buy "Life in a Medieval City (http://www.amazon.com/Life-Medieval-City-Edwin-Benson/dp/1600960642/ref=pd_bbs_1/105-1747220-2550049?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1173280937&sr=1-1)" written by an actual medievalist and add my own magical flavor?

If there's going to be a book on fluff, it has to be fluff I can't get by reading books written by scholars on the subject. For example, the only books on Eberron are going to be by Keith Baker's team. There's no Eberronian Studies Department at Prninceton.
Orchomenos
03-07-07, 10:32 AM Would you honestly buy a novel written by the guys who put together Complete Adventurer?

No. But novels written by Stephen King, JRR Tolkien, R.A. Salvatore, Manda Scott, James Clavell, Lian Hearn? Anytime. And you can find lots of Flavor in them, with 0 mechanic. Even in books written by Christopher Paolini!
Patirick
03-07-07, 10:44 AM I know I was really surprised with the brief descriptions of monsters when 3.0 first came out. I still refer back to my second edition monsterous manual because it had more information about how the monsterous existed... the flavor that turns foes into villians. I think they wanted to include more but were pressed for space to keep the 3.0 book from being as big as the 2.0 one--they wanted to keep the price down.

There's a bit of more flavor in books like the PHB2 and Complete Mage, where they go into role types and roleping backgrounds, again like alot of the old second edition books did, but for the most part, there DnD books these days are merely rules and game mechanics. I think we won't see purely flavor books (besides as mention above the campaign settings) because there's just not their market. There's just too much competition.

So hit your local library, bookstore, these boards, or use your own fertile imagination. That's one of the great things about about role playing to begin with. It takes work, but it is well worth the result.
Witch
03-07-07, 10:47 AM It depends on how good it is. Faces of Evil, for one, is composed of all flavor. It's one of the best D&D books I've read.
Averroes
03-07-07, 10:56 AM Actually I'm pretty much only concerned with Mechanics. When I buy a book I mainly skip the flavor sections and go straight for the feats, skills, classes and the like. Sometimes I'll take the time to read the flavor text, but mainly I prefer to come up with my own ideas about how things came to be and my groups concepts of races and classes are pretty well estabilished in our Homebrew world. Like the Dwarves are vastly different than the ones outlined in the D&D book.
I'm not saying that flavor is useless or they should remove it. I only really go over the flavor text if I am trying to understand why there is certain mechanics they put in that don't make immedate sense. Plus it is fun to read when the mood hits.
Kilsek of Sheverash
03-07-07, 11:37 AM The first decision of a great campaign starts with flavor. The mechanics then flow from there.

So to me, they've always both been important, and I look for both in a D&D product - it's just that the flavor or theme has to be compelling and fun to engross yourself in first for any of the crunch to be.

Flavor should be succint right from the beginning. If you can't sum it up for your campaign or from a quick look at a sourcebook, it's harder to come up with or appreciate the associated crunch as much.

So in that sense, I don't want a massive amount of explanation or elaboration on the flavor either. It just needs to be clear and efficient, the shorter the better. Because once it's understood and put in perspective, the mechanics are great fun, and there should be plenty of them to support the themes and flavor.
_Jayne_Cobb_
03-07-07, 12:12 PM I was wondering how people would feel about a D&D book that contained almost no mechanics. Would you be willing to buy a book that was almost entirely comprised of the flavor of things and pushed mechanics to the background, or do you NEED mechanics to make the purchase feel justified?

They did that already. It was called "Second Edition."
Edymnion
03-07-07, 12:27 PM I was wondering how people would feel about a D&D book that contained almost no mechanics. Would you be willing to buy a book that was almost entirely comprised of the flavor of things and pushed mechanics to the background, or do you NEED mechanics to make the purchase feel justified?Flavor, of course. Any joe schmoe with a little gaming experience can come up with stats for a sword with a ball and chain coming off the end (duh, lets see, take a longsword, make it a double weapon that does 1d8 Slashing/ 1d6 bludgeoning with a +2 to trips. See? Easy), but it takes true talent to come up with something truely flavorful that can inspire the imagination.

Almost all of the D&D books I've bought new in the last few years have been almost pure fluff. But then, I'm an Eberron player, and that setting is far more concerned with flavor and being fun than it is about shoving new mechanics into the game.
Free1983
03-07-07, 12:42 PM When I bought the races series (wild, stone & destiny), I was amazed by the amount of fluff. And although I didn't brought it all in my homebrew world, my next world will have a lot of stuff coming directly from those books. Not everything of course. Some things were not so funny, but it spares me a lot of work to be able to hand over the books and say "These are all gods you know or exist, sit back, read and pick one" than to make all your deities yourself.

So, I'm definitly not against more fluff, but a book that only consists of fluff, would not be bought by me.

cheers,
Sereno
03-07-07, 04:27 PM I'll cast my vote in with Edymnion, for probably the same reasons.

As both a player and a DM I think there is already WAY too much crunch in DnD. There's a feat, class or a PrC for *everything* ... which, I think, actually cuts down on Player and DM creativity.

You go through the trouble of creating an interesting pirate NPC with a balance of classes you like and then when you introduce him to the players you get an hour of argument about whether or not a "Dread Pirate" has the abilities your NPC appears to be using, get called a "cheater" or whatever.

More crunch is a Rules Lawyer's paradise.

Fluff, to my mind, gets back to using the imagination and not looking for the mechanics behind every PC/NPC/Monster/whatever. The current focus on gaming mechanics is, I believe, harming the game as a whole.
_Jayne_Cobb_
03-07-07, 05:06 PM Flavor, of course.

Ditto. Fluff takes a lot more time and effort than crunch. If I can grab hundreds of pages of pre-made flavour text to drop into my game then it saves me a helluva lot more time than do a bunch of stats and numbers.
wrecan
03-07-07, 05:13 PM In my opinion, a fluff-heavy book that isn't part of the Forgotten Realms or Eberron lines is, in effect, a Greyhawk supplement. Books that don't occur in a campaign setting need to keep fluff to a minimum because all it can do it eliminate potential readers rather than draw them in.

Whoever said that Second Edition was all about fluff was mostly right, until they starting coming out with the Plyayers Option books in 1995.

But between 1989 and 1995, it was nearly all fluff. First, beginning in first edition and continuing through second, in the form of the rolling roster of camapign worlds (Greyhawk, Mystara (1981), Dragonlance (1984), Kara-Tur (1985), Forgotten Realms (1987), Spelljammer (1989), Ravenloft (1990), Dark Sun (1990), and Planescape (1994)). These books, like most campaign setting books are almost all fluff, with a few mechanics to accentuate the campaign's unique feel.

Second, as it was clear that increasing numbers of campaigns were only fractionalizing the market, they shifted between 1992 and 1995 to the 17 "Complete X Handbooks" (Barbarian, Necromancer, Villains, Druid, Paladin, Gnome & Halfling, Humanoid, Ranger, Bard, Elves, Dwarves, Psionics, Priest, Wizard, Fighter and Thief). These books were almost entirely fluff, again, with a handful of mechanics. This quickly became a money loser. People simply don't buy books of mostly fluff, unless they are tied to a campaign world they liked. But D&D had divided their market into nine parts, no one of which (except maybe Forgotten Realms) was big enough to sustain the company.

And that's when TSR almost declared bankruptcy until Wizards of the Coast bought them (and then Hasbro bought Wizards).

They tried fluff. It didn't work. Now they have wisely limited their campaign worlds to two -- Forgotten Realms, a proven moneymaker, and Eberron. That's where the fluff books will go and that's where the people who enjoy fluff books should look.
RK)13
03-07-07, 05:23 PM I like flavor over crunch for the most part. I find that flavor is what gives you ideas for an entire campaign base (especially when combined with chicken broth). Crunch can help make for a good opponent or two, or an interesting race within the world (imagine a bunch of formerly evil elves that patrol the world and use the two weapon fighting feat exclusively... oops...er... um... nevermind), but it can't be the basis for an entire world (I am basing my entire campaign on Improved Initiative!!!). Would I buy a book that consisted of only fluff? Yes. The Race series is one of my favorite, as are the fiendish codices, Libris Mortis, and Lords of Madness
Comus
03-07-07, 06:37 PM I wouldn't buy a book for fluff. I'd read it, I might enjoy it, but I wouldn't buy it. I buy D&D books for crunch. If I want to have cool fluff for a character/country, I don't need to have a book on hand - though I might draw ideas from one. If I want to have a character/NPC with a class from book X and a feat from book Y, on the other hand, I need book X and book Y to do so.
Kukamunga
03-07-07, 08:40 PM Yeah.. as interesting as fluff books are... they have no reusability to them... you read them once and you are done with them.. crunch books are actually reference books and actually deserve to be purchased.. i would prefer to see more fluff.. but i wouldent pay for it... and thats why they wont release books like that
tsuyoshikentsu
03-07-07, 09:18 PM The very suggestion strikes me as absurd. I'd never waste my money in such a manner.
SilverFoxKnows
03-07-07, 10:12 PM I would if it was all about the Goblinoids.
Sereno
03-08-07, 08:47 AM Yeah.. as interesting as fluff books are... they have no reusability to them... you read them once and you are done with them.

From a players' perspective, I agree with you.

But, from a DM's perspective, I think there's plenty of re-use in the high-fluff books. This is especially true about the campaign specific books; I can pretty-much open the Sharn-COT sourcebook to any page and get at least one idea for an adventure or an encounter.

Fluff is an idea generator ... the more you know about a place or a race or whatever, the more ideas you get about what to do with them (aside from simply setting them up as one more monster to fight).

Re-reading fluff doesn't need to be a wasted enterprise; it often gives a different perspective, or allows you to approach a concept in a different way, generating even more ideas.

Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Eightbitmage 03-07-07, 08:42 AM	I was wondering how people would feel about a D&D book that contained almost no mechanics. Would you be willing to buy a book that was almost entirely comprised of the flavor of things and pushed mechanics to the background, or do you NEED mechanics to make the purchase feel justified? I have a feeling we aren't going to see many of these released by wizards due to the fact that not as many people would buy them as the latest expansion and people who don't DM wouldn't buy them at all. Personally I can come up with mechanics for just about anything without too much trouble, so what I am always looking for is more flavor on the creatures, or things to include in my campaigns where the stats don't matter. When I buy a book I pretty much skip over the feats section, extra classes and prestige classes ect. in favor of the flavor based subjects.
Caliborn 03-07-07, 08:53 AM	On 98% of the various concepts that comprise D&D I wouldn't even consider the purchase; only a few select subjects would interest me enough to by a book comprised (almost)entirely of flavor text. Personally I'd like to see a bit more flavor and a lot less useless crap in the books; stuff like the new style magic item and monster entires, and sample characters for any of the prestige classes.
DyloniusFunk 03-07-07, 08:53 AM	I was wondering how people would feel about a D&D book that contained almost no mechanics. Would you be willing to buy a book that was almost entirely comprised of the flavor of things and pushed mechanics to the background, or do you NEED mechanics to make the purchase feel justified? I have a feeling we aren't going to see many of these released by wizards due to the fact that not as many people would buy them as the latest expansion and people who don't DM wouldn't buy them at all. Personally I can come up with mechanics for just about anything without too much trouble, so what I am always looking for is more flavor on the creatures, or things to include in my campaigns where the stats don't matter. When I buy a book I pretty much skip over the feats section, extra classes and prestige classes ect. in favor of the flavor based subjects. Unless it's a setting specific book, the majority of books publsihed are crunch. The reaosning being that it's easier for DM's to come up with thier own fluff than it is to make new monsters, spells, PrC, etc. So unless Wizards sees some massive change coming in their customer bases buying habits, chancea re pretty good they'll continue to do as they've always done.
Orchomenos 03-07-07, 09:07 AM	98% of the books in the average library are about flavor and concepts. They are called novels.
Caliborn 03-07-07, 09:57 AM	98% of the books in the average library are about flavor and concepts. They are called novels. Would you honestly buy a novel written by the guys who put together Complete Adventurer?
wrecan 03-07-07, 10:29 AM	No, I would not. In my opinion, that was one of the biggest problems with Cityscape. Too much fluff. Why should I buy a supplement with fluff descriptions of what it's like to live in a fantasy city written by gaming writers, when, for one-third the price, I can buy "Life in a Medieval City (http://www.amazon.com/Life-Medieval-City-Edwin-Benson/dp/1600960642/ref=pd_bbs_1/105-1747220-2550049?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1173280937&sr=1-1)" written by an actual medievalist and add my own magical flavor? If there's going to be a book on fluff, it has to be fluff I can't get by reading books written by scholars on the subject. For example, the only books on Eberron are going to be by Keith Baker's team. There's no Eberronian Studies Department at Prninceton.
Orchomenos 03-07-07, 10:32 AM	Would you honestly buy a novel written by the guys who put together Complete Adventurer? No. But novels written by Stephen King, JRR Tolkien, R.A. Salvatore, Manda Scott, James Clavell, Lian Hearn? Anytime. And you can find lots of Flavor in them, with 0 mechanic. Even in books written by Christopher Paolini!
Patirick 03-07-07, 10:44 AM	I know I was really surprised with the brief descriptions of monsters when 3.0 first came out. I still refer back to my second edition monsterous manual because it had more information about how the monsterous existed... the flavor that turns foes into villians. I think they wanted to include more but were pressed for space to keep the 3.0 book from being as big as the 2.0 one--they wanted to keep the price down. There's a bit of more flavor in books like the PHB2 and Complete Mage, where they go into role types and roleping backgrounds, again like alot of the old second edition books did, but for the most part, there DnD books these days are merely rules and game mechanics. I think we won't see purely flavor books (besides as mention above the campaign settings) because there's just not their market. There's just too much competition. So hit your local library, bookstore, these boards, or use your own fertile imagination. That's one of the great things about about role playing to begin with. It takes work, but it is well worth the result.
Witch 03-07-07, 10:47 AM	It depends on how good it is. Faces of Evil, for one, is composed of all flavor. It's one of the best D&D books I've read.
Averroes 03-07-07, 10:56 AM	Actually I'm pretty much only concerned with Mechanics. When I buy a book I mainly skip the flavor sections and go straight for the feats, skills, classes and the like. Sometimes I'll take the time to read the flavor text, but mainly I prefer to come up with my own ideas about how things came to be and my groups concepts of races and classes are pretty well estabilished in our Homebrew world. Like the Dwarves are vastly different than the ones outlined in the D&D book. I'm not saying that flavor is useless or they should remove it. I only really go over the flavor text if I am trying to understand why there is certain mechanics they put in that don't make immedate sense. Plus it is fun to read when the mood hits.
Kilsek of Sheverash 03-07-07, 11:37 AM	The first decision of a great campaign starts with flavor. The mechanics then flow from there. So to me, they've always both been important, and I look for both in a D&D product - it's just that the flavor or theme has to be compelling and fun to engross yourself in first for any of the crunch to be. Flavor should be succint right from the beginning. If you can't sum it up for your campaign or from a quick look at a sourcebook, it's harder to come up with or appreciate the associated crunch as much. So in that sense, I don't want a massive amount of explanation or elaboration on the flavor either. It just needs to be clear and efficient, the shorter the better. Because once it's understood and put in perspective, the mechanics are great fun, and there should be plenty of them to support the themes and flavor.
_Jayne_Cobb_ 03-07-07, 12:12 PM	I was wondering how people would feel about a D&D book that contained almost no mechanics. Would you be willing to buy a book that was almost entirely comprised of the flavor of things and pushed mechanics to the background, or do you NEED mechanics to make the purchase feel justified? They did that already. It was called "Second Edition."
Edymnion 03-07-07, 12:27 PM	I was wondering how people would feel about a D&D book that contained almost no mechanics. Would you be willing to buy a book that was almost entirely comprised of the flavor of things and pushed mechanics to the background, or do you NEED mechanics to make the purchase feel justified?Flavor, of course. Any joe schmoe with a little gaming experience can come up with stats for a sword with a ball and chain coming off the end (duh, lets see, take a longsword, make it a double weapon that does 1d8 Slashing/ 1d6 bludgeoning with a +2 to trips. See? Easy), but it takes true talent to come up with something truely flavorful that can inspire the imagination. Almost all of the D&D books I've bought new in the last few years have been almost pure fluff. But then, I'm an Eberron player, and that setting is far more concerned with flavor and being fun than it is about shoving new mechanics into the game.
Free1983 03-07-07, 12:42 PM	When I bought the races series (wild, stone & destiny), I was amazed by the amount of fluff. And although I didn't brought it all in my homebrew world, my next world will have a lot of stuff coming directly from those books. Not everything of course. Some things were not so funny, but it spares me a lot of work to be able to hand over the books and say "These are all gods you know or exist, sit back, read and pick one" than to make all your deities yourself. So, I'm definitly not against more fluff, but a book that only consists of fluff, would not be bought by me. cheers,
Sereno 03-07-07, 04:27 PM	I'll cast my vote in with Edymnion, for probably the same reasons. As both a player and a DM I think there is already WAY too much crunch in DnD. There's a feat, class or a PrC for everything ... which, I think, actually cuts down on Player and DM creativity. You go through the trouble of creating an interesting pirate NPC with a balance of classes you like and then when you introduce him to the players you get an hour of argument about whether or not a "Dread Pirate" has the abilities your NPC appears to be using, get called a "cheater" or whatever. More crunch is a Rules Lawyer's paradise. Fluff, to my mind, gets back to using the imagination and not looking for the mechanics behind every PC/NPC/Monster/whatever. The current focus on gaming mechanics is, I believe, harming the game as a whole.
_Jayne_Cobb_ 03-07-07, 05:06 PM	Flavor, of course. Ditto. Fluff takes a lot more time and effort than crunch. If I can grab hundreds of pages of pre-made flavour text to drop into my game then it saves me a helluva lot more time than do a bunch of stats and numbers.
wrecan 03-07-07, 05:13 PM	In my opinion, a fluff-heavy book that isn't part of the Forgotten Realms or Eberron lines is, in effect, a Greyhawk supplement. Books that don't occur in a campaign setting need to keep fluff to a minimum because all it can do it eliminate potential readers rather than draw them in. Whoever said that Second Edition was all about fluff was mostly right, until they starting coming out with the Plyayers Option books in 1995. But between 1989 and 1995, it was nearly all fluff. First, beginning in first edition and continuing through second, in the form of the rolling roster of camapign worlds (Greyhawk, Mystara (1981), Dragonlance (1984), Kara-Tur (1985), Forgotten Realms (1987), Spelljammer (1989), Ravenloft (1990), Dark Sun (1990), and Planescape (1994)). These books, like most campaign setting books are almost all fluff, with a few mechanics to accentuate the campaign's unique feel. Second, as it was clear that increasing numbers of campaigns were only fractionalizing the market, they shifted between 1992 and 1995 to the 17 "Complete X Handbooks" (Barbarian, Necromancer, Villains, Druid, Paladin, Gnome & Halfling, Humanoid, Ranger, Bard, Elves, Dwarves, Psionics, Priest, Wizard, Fighter and Thief). These books were almost entirely fluff, again, with a handful of mechanics. This quickly became a money loser. People simply don't buy books of mostly fluff, unless they are tied to a campaign world they liked. But D&D had divided their market into nine parts, no one of which (except maybe Forgotten Realms) was big enough to sustain the company. And that's when TSR almost declared bankruptcy until Wizards of the Coast bought them (and then Hasbro bought Wizards). They tried fluff. It didn't work. Now they have wisely limited their campaign worlds to two -- Forgotten Realms, a proven moneymaker, and Eberron. That's where the fluff books will go and that's where the people who enjoy fluff books should look.
RK)13 03-07-07, 05:23 PM	I like flavor over crunch for the most part. I find that flavor is what gives you ideas for an entire campaign base (especially when combined with chicken broth). Crunch can help make for a good opponent or two, or an interesting race within the world (imagine a bunch of formerly evil elves that patrol the world and use the two weapon fighting feat exclusively... oops...er... um... nevermind), but it can't be the basis for an entire world (I am basing my entire campaign on Improved Initiative!!!). Would I buy a book that consisted of only fluff? Yes. The Race series is one of my favorite, as are the fiendish codices, Libris Mortis, and Lords of Madness
Comus 03-07-07, 06:37 PM	I wouldn't buy a book for fluff. I'd read it, I might enjoy it, but I wouldn't buy it. I buy D&D books for crunch. If I want to have cool fluff for a character/country, I don't need to have a book on hand - though I might draw ideas from one. If I want to have a character/NPC with a class from book X and a feat from book Y, on the other hand, I need book X and book Y to do so.
Kukamunga 03-07-07, 08:40 PM	Yeah.. as interesting as fluff books are... they have no reusability to them... you read them once and you are done with them.. crunch books are actually reference books and actually deserve to be purchased.. i would prefer to see more fluff.. but i wouldent pay for it... and thats why they wont release books like that
tsuyoshikentsu 03-07-07, 09:18 PM	The very suggestion strikes me as absurd. I'd never waste my money in such a manner.
SilverFoxKnows 03-07-07, 10:12 PM	I would if it was all about the Goblinoids.
Sereno 03-08-07, 08:47 AM	Yeah.. as interesting as fluff books are... they have no reusability to them... you read them once and you are done with them. From a players' perspective, I agree with you. But, from a DM's perspective, I think there's plenty of re-use in the high-fluff books. This is especially true about the campaign specific books; I can pretty-much open the Sharn-COT sourcebook to any page and get at least one idea for an adventure or an encounter. Fluff is an idea generator ... the more you know about a place or a race or whatever, the more ideas you get about what to do with them (aside from simply setting them up as one more monster to fight). Re-reading fluff doesn't need to be a wasted enterprise; it often gives a different perspective, or allows you to approach a concept in a different way, generating even more ideas.