Baking in the Flavor - Campaign or Rules?

 Don't depend on the system to do the heavy lifting, use the system as scaffolding. Your game system should provide you with tools - you get to use your imagination and trial/error to see what works.

In other words, rulings not rules. Yea, we're back there again.

I see some wonderful blogging prompts as I follow more and more folks on Mastodon who are "tooting" (hehe) about RPGs. Today's prompt came from a Wayne Loche:

Any GM wroth their salt has just re-skinned a stat block to save prep time for a session. It's the old adage of Just Use a Bear (http://talesofthegrotesqueanddungeonesque.blogspot.com/2016/08/just-use-bears.html). 

But I also wish the flavor of a creature was baked into the system more. A stat block of a guard vs a bear should feel like you're fighting those things in particular. I get that would be a design nightmare. But it also enforces that monsters are just sacks of health. #DND #ttrpg

Now he follows up with a recommendation for a book called _The Monsters Know What They're Doing_ by Keith Ammann, which looks to be somewhat in vein with what I'm about to say, but geared towards 5e tactics.

My viewpoint is that the system SHOULDN'T bake in a flavor. Your orcs are not my orcs. Your dragons are not my dragons, etc. Now, admittedly, if one uses OD&D Supp2 and AD&D monsters as written, you're in effect implementing an instance of Gygax's Greyhawk campaign. So to a certain extent, a great many of us have already been using the flavor that's baked in.

I think it's the campaign that is responsible for baking in the flavor. Rules should be there as scaffolding. The systems to determine what happens. Not to tell me that a bear will grapple to knock you on your ass, then bite your damn face off, as versus a guard fighting a defensive battle while calling for reinforcements, then going all medieval on your sorry butt. What if my bears are stealthy stalkers in my campaign? What if my town guards are mystically enchanted so that they take only 1hp of damage and deal 3d6 of damage? (I'm looking at you, Richard Garriott of Ultima 1, 2 and 3 town guards programmer...).

I want the rules to stay out of my way of my imagination.

Stat blocks do not equal the sum total of the monster, and they shouldn't. Stat blocks are there as mechanical assists so I don't have to thumb through the g.d. Monster Manual for the umpty-umph time because I can't remember if a wight is AC4 or AC5. Stat blocks aren't going to tell me about my fearsome mountain ogres who are 3x size of normal ogres and eat those bears for snacks. It's going to tell me enough that I can adjudicate the battle.

I think that is something I see a lot in the later D&D'ers. That everything should be in the book and if it's not in the book, it doesn't exist or shouldn't be played. I could speculate the why and where of these habits, but it kinda doesn't matter. For me, anyway, when I look at all those pages of the supplements, I see someone else's campaign houserules, stuff that I may use, but most likely will not. 

That's why rules-lawyers hate my games. I am always clear that I fold, spindle and mutilate the RAW when it makes my game better -- and I'm 99.999% sure that's the way Gygax, et.al started out. We'll not go into how commercialization killed that golden goose, blah blah blah... but it is true that Gygax wrote in the very first edition of D&D this golden rule:

"... the best way is to decide how you would like it to be, and then make it just that way!"

Amen, Brothers Arneson and Gygax. That's a rule that I can live with as written.

What do you think?