Because:
Depending on the mode of play you are in, one man´s fluff might be another man´s crunch.
For example, when the PCs are manipulating the prices of certain fruit, to make a profit, or to meddle psychohistorically with an interstellar society.
Concerning this part of the game, eating habits, holidays and fresh fruit distribution information are crunchiest crunch, whereas for a Dungeon crawl, holidays and eating habits are definitely fluff.
I was referring to your blog as an example of the widespread (sandwich pun?) understanding and usage of the two words.

There´s a lot of implicit assumptions accompanying this dichotomy.

In one ’season’ ender where I revealed to my players that their whole world a was a prison bubble-world, I layed it real think in describing the Carcerian Prison plane they were on. The sheer look of shock and wonder stronger than I expected and it was all just fluff.

To me, a lot of fluff has difficulty actually becoming useful in the game. I also hate to have to look something up in a big setting book to answer a player’s question… I’d rather just make it up and move on.

For example, you’ll get a Brute Template that represents large Bruiser-type monsters (Ogres, trolls, etc) and create them in a few lines of text by setting their power level and choosing features (Awesome blow, regenerate, Weapons, done!)

You add a layer of fluff on this and you have your monster…

Funny, when you look a Gygax original monsters that’s what it was…. just not as systematic.

Like you said noah, what you need from a vehicle in a RPG is limited (speed mostly).

As for the crunch Vs fluff part… If you have the imagination the fluff can be made up without needing books for it. Most of the game I have GM where with GURPS a system that has a lot of crunch and even less fluff then D&D. I took the part I wanted and added the fluff myself.

I’m now tired of the monster design of D&D because it takes longer creating them than killing them. Since I own almost every creature supplement, I pick from them 1st and leave templating for truly special monsters I can’t find.

It seems we’re kindered spirit in term of Crunch addiction withrdrawal…

Hi my name is Phil…. and I’m a Crunchaolic.

Heh!

I used to be a crunch junkie - heck, I even tried to make Fire, Fusion & Steel work. GURPS Vehicles broke me, however.

(I admit that that’s something of an extreme example of ‘cruch’, and perhaps unfair.)

I wondered for a while, as I looked at these books and these supplements, what I really liked about playing, what were the things that I thought were really cool, where my enjoyment came from. And it turns out, it wasn’t really the crunch, it was the fluff. It was the descriptions of people, places, things, the stories behind them. The numbers? ‘Oh, it’s close enough, really’ has become my mantra. When pressed, I tend to explain it like this:

“As long as you get the relationships between the elements right (this is more powerful than that, which is faster than that other thing), you’re fine.”

D&D 3.x monsters are fun, though, even if I find the end numbers something I won’t really use. What I love about them is there’s some really neat ideas in a lot of those templates. ‘Pseudonatural’ is a gem, as is a lot of the stuff in Savage Species. I’ll shamelessly steal those for my own uses.

What hit me a while ago, about the level of crunch that I wanted, was best put forward in this analogy:

“D&D is a bunch of Legos. I have all these cool parts, and they fit together in really neat ways, and I can make some fun stuff with them, all sorts of variations. But in the end…I’m still stuck with pieces of plastic that I can’t change. No matter what I build, it’s still made of Legos. What I want now is clay. It takes almost more work, more effort to bring out the details that Legos already have built-in, but when I do the details are exactly what I want them to be. It may not be as crisp or sharp-edged as Legos, but I want malleability over sharpness.”