What we mean when we talk about crunch

I realized that I love learning and posing questions about tabletop games and all their idiosyncrasies, so here’s me formalizing these pieces into a recurring column. Welcome to Gut Check, where I discuss and ponder about the nature of RPGs with other Rascals.

Ask someone what crunch entails, and you get different answers, the very idea taking on an amorphous form. In the world of crisps and other brittle sustenance, it’s about the firmness, texture and the satisfyingly loud sound they make when they break in your mouth; in video games, crunch is when developers go through an extended period of mandatory overtime before a game’s release. But for tabletop RPGs, crunchiness has more to do with mechanics, from the complexity of its system to the sheer amount of rules and jargons. In essence, a game that’s low on crunch (and perhaps calcium) is light on rules, open to more narrative ambiguity, with some titles probably playable without a game master. 

Then there’s the other end of the spectrum; heavily crunchy games typically cedes narrative control to the game master, with in-depth rules and simulation guiding the experience. One example would be the extremely crunchy Generic Universal Role Playing System (GURPS), which features a system so byzantine and elaborate that Steve Jackson Games had to release a lite version, because the Basic Set can be a bit “frightening” to newcomers. Complicated, crunchy games also brings to mind 4X games like Twilight Imperium, a genre known for its tactical complexity; surely these are the sort of games that only grizzled tabletop veterans can master, as they clutch spreadsheets, papers and cards in hands.