What part of the game is "crunchy"?

The characters are mostly defined by 5 fairly loosely defined "rings" and you can pretty much apply whichever you want to any roll in the whole game. There are also a set of skills that are a bit more narrowly defined (honestly, some of them might be too narrowly defined while others are too broad, but that happens every time someone comes up with a list of skills) but they aren't nearly so important.

The advantages and disadvantages and when they come into play are all crazy vaguely defined, pretty much whenever people remember them and can find an excuse and all function pretty much the same.

Mental damage is tracked, but when, where and how characters react when "broken" is entirely up to them.

NPCs stat blocks entirely consist of only 2 numbers.

The only part that has like... any crunch is the school techniques, something I feel they were compelled to include to make the clans feel different.

I don't know that I have ever seen a serious RPG system ever be put out that had less "crunch". Maybe Apocalypse World/Dungeon World could be a bit of a contender.

But-- man-- you ought to have seen the previous iterations of L5R RPG. 2 stats for every ring, some of which dictated numbers across the whole sheet, every skill tied to a particular attribute and all of them having different "roll this many D10s, keep however many and reroll if you get a 10 and maybe also add this number" and all to make a TN (good luck figuring out your chance to make any given TN without serious practice or a cheat sheet) and you had the option of making your number harder intentionally and only if you previously chose to do so did it really matter if you rolled amazingly high on half the rolls in the game, so only the other half could there ever be any surprise great successes out of no where. Also, every school had 5 levels with completely unique techniques that altered various rules and while the first schools made got to be neat and straight-forward, by the 20th school made they were really doing some convoluted things in order to arrive at a similar result as those earliest designed schools.

Seriously, other people are complaining that this RPG doesn't have nearly enough detail and significance to any of the number.

22 minutes ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

NPCs stat blocks entirely consist of only 2 numbers.

Wrong

6 categorical skills, 5 rings, the same 4 figureds as PC's, plus demeanor, and two threat ratings whose genesis is unrevealed, plus some have additional techniques.

11 hours ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

What part of the game is "crunchy"?

Well, just from the top of my head:

• Dice resolution is pretty crunchy because keeping the right results matters. I would say it matters more than the number of rolled and kept dice. You have to put a lot of forethought into what you want to do with your check, and there are tons of rule interactions with rerolls, result swaps/upgrades/downgrades/whatever, reserved dice, etc.
• On this note, managing Opportunities is crunchy as all ****, especially if the players get creative.
• There is some next level crunch and bookkeeping with the various character status effects. Strife, most prominently, but conditions can go crazy too.
• Combat (all four types, but Dueling in particular) favors the crunch. Mechanical wombo-combos win the day unless your players attain transcendent understanding of Narrative Opportunities.
• Some (most?) of the Advantages/Disadvantages and Techniques are "Press F to impress the Daimyo" tier.
• There are literally rules for meta-level PC interactions (the Discord Wheel).

43 minutes ago, AtoMaki said:

Well, just from the top of my head:

• Dice resolution is pretty crunchy because keeping the right results matters. I would say it matters more than the number of rolled and kept dice. You have to put a lot of forethought into what you want to do with your check, and there are tons of rule interactions with rerolls, result swaps/upgrades/downgrades/whatever, reserved dice, etc.
• On this note, managing Opportunities is crunchy as all ****, especially if the players get creative.
• There is some next level crunch and bookkeeping with the various character status effects. Strife, most prominently, but conditions can go crazy too.
• Combat (all four types, but Dueling in particular) favors the crunch. Mechanical wombo-combos win the day unless your players attain transcendent understanding of Narrative Opportunities.
• Some (most?) of the Advantages/Disadvantages and Techniques are "Press F to impress the Daimyo" tier.
• There are literally rules for meta-level PC interactions (the Discord Wheel).

Okay, fair enough. Somehow I have missed all of this in my skimming through the beta materials, which of the articles I have read about the RPG and listening to a pod cast of people playing the introductory box adventure (I would literally have to pay to ship the introductory box to the other side of the planet which is why I haven't purchased it yet, better to wait until everything is out and buy it as a single package.)

15 minutes ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

Somehow I have missed all of this in my skimming through the beta materials, which of the articles I have read about the RPG and listening to a pod cast of people playing the introductory box adventure (I would literally have to pay to ship the introductory box to the other side of the planet which is why I haven't purchased it yet, better to wait until everything is out and buy it as a single package.)

It is actually not oblivious how much crunch this system has. Most of the above-mentioned things require a certain degree of in-game understanding to come up, something you probably won't get until the third or fourth session. No offense, but I don't think that you can "get" this system without playing it.

So far, my players have really enjoyed using the opportunities for Narrative results. The only mechanical opportunities they've used so far have been the "Remove Strife" ones.

I think in order to have a productive debate about crunch, the term needs a better, understood definition. The biggest problem, as I see it, is that people are having this debate working off of different concepts of what constitutes a crunchy game. I have seen crunchy referred to as just complexity. I have also seen crunchy as a synonym for simulationist games. Often the definitions match up. GURPS is on the extreme side of both complexity and simulationist. This doesn't always hold up for the other end of the continuum. There are some really simple narrative games, but the are also some relatively complex ones. Genesys, for example, has moderate complexity that drives a narrative game. I think the same will be said of New5R. However a lot of the the game is abstracted, like encumbrance. By crunch do you mean just complexity?

1 hour ago, Nreetzfc said:

I think in order to have a productive debate about crunch, the term needs a better, understood definition. The biggest problem, as I see it, is that people are having this debate working off of different concepts of what constitutes a crunchy game. I have seen crunchy referred to as just complexity. I have also seen crunchy as a synonym for simulationist games. Often the definitions match up. GURPS is on the extreme side of both complexity and simulationist. This doesn't always hold up for the other end of the continuum. There are some really simple narrative games, but the are also some relatively complex ones. Genesys, for example, has moderate complexity that drives a narrative game. I think the same will be said of New5R. However a lot of the the game is abstracted, like encumbrance. By crunch do you mean just complexity?

A fair point. We can't really agree on whether it is "crunchy" if we don't define it.

By "crunch" I've always heard it contrasted with "fluff." Crunch is numbers: how many mechanical rules do I need, how much math do I have to do? ("Number-crunching" for example).

On the other hand, if a system is more "fluff" then the rules are more like guidelines, and the main way of doing things is describing it. One of my immediate thoughts of a "Fluff" game with less "Crunch" is Marvel Heroic Roleplaying.

In that system, you had your standard array of dice, 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 1d10, 1d12. You had whatever superpower you narratively wanted to have, but it boiled down to one of those dice. Iron Man's repulsor beams or Cyclops's eye-blast, or even Magneto lifting a car and hitting you with it, might all be the same die with the same effect. So it was the "fluff" or how cool you describe it that mattered.

@NreetzfcLike so many things, Crunch is group and individual vernacular and as such, will never have a universally codified, reified definition. Loosely, however, it's understood to be a stand-in for 'lots of rules.' What that means when you crack the book can vary wildly though. IIRC, the first time I saw the term nearly 15 or 20 years ago, the user was referring to the game having substance in the rules. To him, Sorcerer was just useless fluff and he wanted something that crunched when he bit into it, something that rewarded the effort of chewing on it, so to speak. To that end, crunchy typically referred to games with a lot of rules, stat-blocks, and systems. Interestingly, while subsystems count, permutations and advanced usage rarely does. Or did. Crunchy was D&D, GURPS, HERO, and the like. A game like Cortex [Plus and Prime, not Classic; thanks for the catch, AK] does not, though system mastery matters a LOT, there.

Anyway, IME it isn't typically used as a stand-in for simulationist, though you could make a good Venn diagram showing significant overlap. That leads to understandable obfuscation. It is my belief that Crunch and the arguably deprecated GNS are better seen as axes on which to plot a game's relative position rather than interchangeable variables indicative of absolute values.

All that said, you're not wrong that a common definition would be nice. I just don't think it's reasonable to expect one that everyone will agree on. Therefore, I believe it's best to press onward with the understanding that it's going to mean different things to different people in the specific, but you can make an educated guess about what they mean with just a little conversation.

To wit:

If you are coming from L5R 3rd, D&D 3.5/Pathfinder, GURPS, Mutants and Masterminds or somesuch, this game is likely to look pretty rules-light. If you are coming from Fate, Cortex, or PbtA games, the level of 'crunch' may seem overwhelming. Savage Worlds or IKRPG? This feels like it's in the same ballpark.

L5R5 has new dice, social mechanics, rules that govern a portrayal of character AS a character or narrative device and less as an avatar or cipher, loads of ability options that complicate outcomes tacked onto a system that appears narrative but forces frequent references to the rules (at least initially). But it also allows a great deal of creative interpretation of results, encourages success in ways that most traditionally crunchy and simulationist games do not, and has rather loosely defined attributes with methods of pulling success from the jaws of failure if you're just persuasive enough or creative enough. It has a shortlist of common mechanics but multiple published exceptions and permutations thereof. I can see how it could give off different vibes to different users.

I think that discussions about what is and is not crunchy are kind of fun, myself. ?

2 hours ago, Hida Jitenno said:

A fair point. We can't really agree on whether it is "crunchy" if we don't define it.

By "crunch" I've always heard it contrasted with "fluff." Crunch is numbers: how many mechanical rules do I need, how much math do I have to do? ("Number-crunching" for example).

On the other hand, if a system is more "fluff" then the rules are more like guidelines, and the main way of doing things is describing it. One of my immediate thoughts of a "Fluff" game with less "Crunch" is Marvel Heroic Roleplaying.

In that system, you had your standard array of dice, 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 1d10, 1d12. You had whatever superpower you narratively wanted to have, but it boiled down to one of those dice. Iron Man's repulsor beams or Cyclops's eye-blast, or even Magneto lifting a car and hitting you with it, might all be the same die with the same effect. So it was the "fluff" or how cool you describe it that mattered.

Shout outs to Marvel Heroic! One of my favorite games to date.

I would not disagree with either of you, even though you both describe crunch in two separate ways. I too find the discussion interesting. I just wanted to throw the "What does that mean to you" point into the conversation.

One nitpick: Wormdog appears to be saying "Cortex" when he appears to mean Cortex Plus -

• Cortex Classic is heavy crunch, best exemplified by the older Serenity game and by Sovereign Stone; both were 1d(Att) + 1d(Skill) vs TN by difficulty, with hit points, and fairly detailed rules. CC rules: Sovereign Stone, Serenity, Battlestar Galactica, Supernatural
• Cortex Plus is "Roll at least three dice from abilities, possibly up to 6, types by ability rating, plus additional dice from situations, and keep the best 2 dice". Fairly schematic mechanics, lots of examples, lots of "fluff" in the rulebooks. C+ rules: MHR, Smallville, Firefly, Leverage

Cortex Classic players are likely to consider L5R5 lighter. Cortex Plus players should find it a bit heavier/crunchier.

Note that Fate, Cortex Plus, and L5R5 all benefit highly from system mastery: learning to use the rules for story advantages is part of all those.

Fate, Cortex Plus, and L5R5 all expect players to engage with story modification via rules in the core of the system. So does FFG SW/Genesys.

@AK_Aramis You are correct, I was referring to Cortex Plus (all three major variants) and the upcoming Prime. Sorry for the confusion.

4 hours ago, Wyrmdog said:

@AK_Aramis You are correct, I was referring to Cortex Plus (all three major variants) and the upcoming Prime. Sorry for the confusion.

No problem for me, as I know several flavors each of Cortex Plus and Cortex Classic, but I wanted to clarify it for others... A Cortex Classic fan is going to have a VERY different reaction than Cortex Plus fans. Likewise, those who dislike one or the other. Especially since Classic is rather nastily crunchy.