Crunch: Definition

Part of a game or game’s documentation detailing characters, situations and other elements of the narrative using a significant amount of rules, data and procedures, especially in role-playing games.

Crunch pulls attention away from how your character is feeling or would react, and refocuses it on ‘what’s my alignment? Do I have the feat for this? How many skill points do I have in this area?”unclekulikov

For all of its detractors, though, crunch is the beating heart of all gaming. The rules and mechanics of gameplay are the reason we indulge this hobby instead of telling stories around campfires.1d4chan

A game telling a story has to rely on some mechanics, procedures and hard data to allow the narrative to develop, the characters to act and interact. Those are the simulation rules, the more systematic aspect of the game, where situations, characters and actions imagined by players are converted into data, calculated and confronted.

The crunch.

Probably in reference to the expression number crunching.

And in contrast with the narrative itself, the descriptions of the game’s universe are the fluff.

Talking about the crunch of a game really makes sense when there is at least some fluff in it. Crunch is rarely used when it comes to mostly mechanical games like dry Eurogames or abstract games. Or in more realistic simulation-based games, like wargames.

Those two nouns, along with the derived adjectives crunchy and fluffy, have been widely used for quite a long time. Although certain sources say that they first appeared in standard board gaming, the oldest mentions I could find online are in role-playing discussion groups and date back from 2002, at which time they already seemed very well established. That said, if their first usage is a bit foggy, their prevalence is not. There’s no question that crunch and fluff are far more used in role-playing, as any googling will demonstrate.

The crunch of a role-playing game is still very much its core rules and data, its engine, its system. An RPG that needs to devote large portions of its rulebook(s) to the system is a high-crunch game. Extension books that add to that system are known as crunch-books.

This sense of crunch remains practically the same when used in reference to board games, although it will mainly applies to adventure, simulation-based board games that have some fluff to them.