#RPGaDay2025 - 11 Flavour



“Flavour text” was commonly a name for kit back in the day, these days I often see it referred to as “fluff”. I’ve been calling it “diegetic rules” in my SNAFU SRD. They aren’t necessarily the exact same thing, but the Venn diagram is really close to a circle. It’s all basically ways to reflect how the game world works that don’t get specifically codified as mechanical parts of the game system. We might be looking at attitudes that different characters or cultures have to one another, we might be looking at the laws of the land within the game setting, they’re certainlyu things that you can break because the die rolling conventions (or other methods of determining action results) don’t explicitly prevent it. It’s all about elements of the game that make it interesting from within.

Someone doesn’t like fish, is it a specific allergy that will do “x” amount of damage to them? Probably not, but they’ll have an aversion to fish in play, and it will filter the way the character reacts to certain situations.

The mountain shines blue in the sunlight. Does this make it easier or harder to climb it? Probably not, but it might be interesting to see bards writing poems about the “azure heights” or something similar.

Sure, we could codify all this into the rules, but it’s faster, more thematic, and moodier to just leave things like this hanging. We can use them when they’re appropriate, or fly past them if they’re disrupting the story. Sure there are many games that play hard with the rules, and might have hundreds of pages going into specific nuances regarding the way such rules might impact the wider system, but these days I just don’t have time for that.

 

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