There’s this preconception in roleplaying circles that game settings are easy to get into if they have a book or movie about them. Middle Earth is “easy to grasp”, people say, because you “just” need to read a couple of (overly long) books, or watch a couple of (overly long) movies.

But I was watching my first Actual Play of The One Ring recently and it was set in the Second Age of Middle Earth: the coastal line of the game map looked familiar but all the names were “wrong”. I didn’t know where the player characters were from, who their allegiances were to, or where they were going. It was just a bunch of random Tolkienesque names to me. But I was familiar with the tropes, and I understood their simple short-term adventure goal. And that’s all I needed to follow along.

The last episode of Ken & Robin Talk About Stuff had a great little segment on crunch, and what it means especially when it is, in practice, vastly left unused. I didn’t really agree with Robin’s theory on self-identification as “someone who plays crunchy games”, but I was definitely behind Ken’s take about the option to bring meaningful mechanics when they fit the narrative and the fun, while leaving them aside the rest of the time. You could see this as a story-driven way of handling crunch: nobody cares what kind of gas the Batmobile runs on except in that one episode in which the Joker plans to blow up Batman in his car. Nobody cares about fatigue and encumbrance rules until that one adventure that features a dangerous trek through the Endless Pits of Lava. Well… assuming you want that episode to be about perseverance and choices, of course. Like Ken, I have a fondness for GURPS and its sliding crunch scale, so that’s probably why I’m behind him on this.

But as I’ve been playing and chatting about more games in the past couple years than I ever did in the previous fifteen, I’ve been thinking about crunch a bit. And the more I think about it, the less I think it’s a simple sliding scale from “light-weight” to “crunchy”. In fact, so far, I’ve boiled it down to three axes: system crunch, silo crunch, and option crunch.

I recently posted my #RPGDNA (since that’s a trending thing right now in RPG circles), but I figured it might be interesting to look a bit deeper into my choices. The meme format is either 4 or 6 titles, but because it’s my blog and I do whatever I want, I’ll go to 8 titles – otherwise, like I said in the original post, I keep flip-flopping between the ones I want to include or exclude.

Let’s go in rough chronological order… you’ll probably notice that I’m decidedly a product of the 90s. 😋