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. 

When I asked Chase about the intricacies of crunch, from the accessibility of crunch-heavy games to new players, to the emotional depths these interlocking layers of mechanics can bring to the table, he cryptically suggested that I’ve “stepped on a discourse trapdoor, haunted house style”. This begs further examination, so I have to prod him (and the other Rascals) a little more. What exactly does crunch entail? What are some of the history or baggage tied to this term? And how do rules and mechanics define the rich, fictional worlds that their games are based on? 

Before gently shooing me away, he suggested that I look into Ben Robbins’ games, such as Microscope, Kingdom and Follow. Microscope, in particular, appears to be one of the most esoteric examples, as it puts aside the often character-focused tabletop play to look at collaboratively building a setting instead — seemingly a different beast than the crunchiest of tabletop RPGs with tombs of rules and guidelines to follow. I may also be terribly off the mark with all these, so I’ll now hand over the metaphorical soapbox to someone else.

- Khee Hoon

I first encountered crunch as an RPG term sometime in the mid-90s, when I started interacting with existing roleplayers for the first time, as opposed to being the one trying to convince friends to give D&D a try. It might have been in the pages of Arcane or from the group of players I met through Mark, one of the older kids at school. While it still referred to rules, it wasn’t a term that existed in isolation — its counterpart, fluff, covered setting material and other non-rules content. Crunch wasn’t used as a descriptor for a game, but for a given sourcebook. The RPG landscape looked very different to the one today, and it was what we now call trad games all the way down. (Of course, I could be completely wrong about this; like most folks then, I didn’t have internet access.)

Publishers also tended to release a lot more material. In 1997, TSR released around 25 books for AD&D2e alone, not including novels or issues of Dragon. White Wolf’s calendar for the same year had over fifty books across the World of Darkness line. Knowing what was in those books was really important, especially if you didn’t have a FLGS in which to browse. Describing a sourcebook in terms of crunch and fluff was useful shorthand. To use a couple of WoD books from that year as extreme examples, World of Darkness: Combat (aka The Big Book of Beating Ass) was almost pure crunch, containing pages of weapon stats and martial arts manoeuvers, with the only real background material being some info on fighting styles specific to supernatural creatures. A World of Darkness: Second Edition was the opposite, being a fluffy, broad strokes setting guide, with very little in the way of supplemental rules.

Somewhere along the way, fluff dropped out of fashion. Based on my purely anecdotal experience, it was sometime in the 2000s. Talking about books in terms of crunch and fluff was still in vogue when I was working in a FLGS in 2001-2002, but by the time I joined an RPG club in London a decade later, folks were mostly rating games in terms of crunchiness. It’s a shame, in my totally not humble opinion. Crunch, as it’s commonly used, is an incredibly reductive term that tells you very little about how a game plays. Are the rules focused on combat, or do they have detailed procedures for other situations? How closely do the rules need to be adhered to for everyone to have a satisfying experience? Are the rules intuitive and straightforward? Is the complexity mostly confined to character building? How much math do you need to do?

These questions, and many others, are all way more important than whether or not a game has a lot of rules.

- Caelyn

Ah, this old hobby horse. As ubiquitous as it is unhelpful, “crunch” lost its power of specificity after we sent “fluff” to retire on a farm upstate. In its stead, players filled the dichotomy with a new term: “lite”. Does it mean the same thing as fluff? No. Is it more helpful or granular? Of course not. Does it keep the forum arguments churning? Absolutely. Most of my experience with this murky descriptor derives from Reddit posts and internet threads asking a deceptively simple question: how do I find (or ignore) crunchier games?

You can find endless permutations of this question, or talk of its ramifications, with very little searching. Players want a game with a certain amount of crunch, or the right kind of crunch, or both. They have theories about what makes crunch good or bad, and how you might spot the difference. Curious, I compared a thread from 2004 to one from 2024, both wondering after a general definition. The two intervening decades only increased the volume of personal opinions. Some claim it hinges on task resolution, while others point to whether the material is meant for the GM or player — a few people referenced sheer page count (surely, a game that is “encyclopedic” is also crunchy) or the amount of math done at the table. But the most common refrain asserted simulation games were crunchy, while roleplay-focused games were “lite”.

This analogy doesn’t hold up to interrogation, but it can feel right in one’s gut. We call the narratively focused, or artbook-adjacent, RPGs — your MÖRK BORGs, Wanderhomes, and Brindlewood Bays — rules-lite, which sounds like they also lack the capacity for crunch. But what of RPGs like Burning Wheel, Daggerheart, or Ironsworn, which bend their voluminous complexity (or, at least, page counts) towards empowering players to tell a satisfying story.

Crunch adherents understand story in Pathfinder 2E and Draw Steel and older trad games such as GURPS as an output of the friction between mechanics. Everything is designed to generate a specific experience, and playing well — or, correctly — generates the best possible version of that experience. Crunchy RPGs, then, make explicit the instructions for playing the game well, or correctly. Lite RPGs don’t. They instead seek out the Fruitful Void, which is the subject of a different letter.

No textbook definition of crunch has been written, and if a canonical first reference exists we have long since abandoned its intent. I’ll admit to enjoying the weird empty bucket because I can learn about individuals and ecologies by what they put inside. Reddit’s definition of crunchy will differ from RPG.net, which will differ from Bluesky. It’s like genre in that way, more clearly defined by what’s left out than what’s invited in. Crunch is not a promise that you will enjoy an RPG, but it can better help you explain why you enjoyed that system’s peculiarities. Did it facilitate creative dialogue or lock it into hours of arbitration with the GM? Some people intentionally seek out the latter, and it’s not always borne from deep simulation.

To finally attempt to answer your question, crunch is best used to prompt more specific and helpful questions. If someone says they do or don’t like crunchy games, follow up with a why? Or, how so? Those answers will be heaps more illuminating. Unless they start arguing whether systems matter.

- Chase

I’ll admit to loving discussions around systems and game design, but I would say that my key takeaway to these is that systems and their myriad (or scant) mechanics are centered around eliciting a specific mood or an emotion. For instance, Draw Steel lets you experience the adrenaline and ferocity of slaying dragons, minotaurs, and other mythical beasts as a powerful warrior, be it a barbarian or paladin; you no longer have to start as a lowly nobody who just… pokes at mutated rats with twigs. Meanwhile, the one-page RPG Honey Heist is about the absurdity of gleefully pulling off a heist for the most luxurious of pure manuka extract the world has ever known — as a bear with criminal instincts. Both are exhilarating but distinct experiences, even if one of them is decidedly more crunchy than the other. 

In other words, a better question than this perennial discussion around crunch (like system discourse, it’ll probably never go away) would be, “Would you prefer to embody a barbarian or a bowler hat-tipping bear today?” My answer would most likely be a bear, but your mileage may vary. 

- Khee Hoon