Game Texture

Just had a decent afternoon to check the open meet of the AEGIS group after reading much mention about their open meets held at every last Saturday of the month. Held off by a number of diversions, I decided to see this one out. I went over to the designated meet location and see a small group of gamers present. After some introductions and chat, I was told and put under the impression that this is one of the slow turnouts for such a meet at such times. It wasn't a total waste of an afternoon. I did get to chat and brush up a bit of stuff with two people I know from my college gaming group. Going through with chatting the other people I haven't met or know of plus one discussion from I know, it dawned on me later on with the matter of RPG system mechanics consistency.

Game systems per se are like food or candy bars, there's elements like flavor, consistency and texture for example. The texture in this case pertaining to the adjectives crunchy and mushy in this instance. The mention of these two adjectives indicates the extreme ranges to a game's amount of number crunching, pertaining to the simulation of reality aspect presented in the game. This is very obvious in the character generation details and more so in execution of task resolution and especially more intensive in combat.

Excessive number crunching as a whole in gaming is something that kinda grounds out the storyteller aspects of an RPG session. Excessive modelling of reality dynamics in gaming kinda relegates an RPG session, in my thinking, as one long mathematical simulation that harkens back to RPG's earlier roots, tabletop wargaming. All this excessive nitty-gritty attention to detail to reality really puts me off in one way or the other unless I have to give in and bear with it to its lure because a particular genre, concept or idea can work and take flight in said system. I guess it would harken more to my game style is of a storytelling matter then just a string of resolution rolls which may give results contrary to what you may have in mind.

I'm more keen with less "crunchy" kinds of RPG systems since the matter of flexibility is what I prefer to use. A stable, robust system would be a more current phrase for me to say. It also makes the character creation details with the players a more shorter affair. Of course, the price for simplicity becomes apparent when certain reality or skill related questions arise. This topic of crunchiness in a game system would lead me further on into a future post regarding the limits of people in respect to being into categories of players. Next time. *Waves bye and goes back into the doghouse.*