How comedic is your game?
And is the comedy intentional? Ad lib? Incidental?
Well I mostly play with friends and we bust each other's balls constantly in real life, therefore it tends to happen in-game as well.
I like adding comedic elements to my campaigns to highlight the absurdity of this fantasy goulash, but I refrain from using real world references. Our comedy is sometimes intentional, often times not, but stays mostly in-game. When it breaks immersion, I intervene.
Both. I've written comedy in the past and I've also done stand-up, so it can be hard to repress my urge for the funny. My guys are also funny guys. Feeder lines all over the place, when the mood is right. But like Nerzenjager, we don't do real-world references in a fantasy game, or the like.
We tend to get a good amount both in and out of character. Depends on the group of course.
In game, I want about as much comedy as horror--a little for spice and leavening, never the main course.
Out of game, we have a fair amount of ad lib comedy, that comes and goes as inspiration strikes. We don't force it, but if it's happening, we don't try to stop it, either.
A little joking is fine. I'm not fond of a game going complete comedy, unless it's intentional, like Paranoia.
Well, I often describe my game as "Half Conan the Barbarian, half Daffy Duck." I only have one intentionally comic character, Necross the (Ha Ha Ha) Mad. But other characters will say things like "Lawful ain't the same as NICE, Cupcake." But if you interrupt the Duke of Orleans with a stupidass joke, he may well take exception.
But get into a serious fight, and it will end up with everybody kickin' and gougin' in the mud and the blood and the beer.
So I guess the answer is "some."
I never do intentional, pre-planned comedy bits in my game. I don't have prepared gags. That said, when I'm improving NPCs, it often goes to a humorous place and sometimes NPCs -- particularly small evil humanoids -- really just lend themselves to comedy. A kobold that has been captured and cowed into servitude and gone pure sycophant as its survival instincts kick in is just inherently funny.
Then there's the players, who often bring a lot of comedy to the game, sometimes intentionally, sometimes because they're idiots and do idiotic things. You know the end of Guardians of the Galaxy, where Starlord challenges Ronan to a dance off? I've had PCs attempt equally outlandish tactics to distract or buy time, and I generally just roll with it -- if GotG were my campaign, Ronan would have had the exact same reaction of bewildered confusion. And that's usually pretty funny. Also, there's always the inevitable toilet humor. You go into a sewer and encounter an otyugh, there are going to be poop jokes.
Sometimes games just create hilarious coincidences. For example, I run HERO System and use the Hit Location Charts because combat in my games is pretty gritty. The first, second and third story arcs all ended with one of the players scoring an extremely high damage roll against the Big Bad's groin location (which is only beat by head in terms of damage multipliers). Once is funny, twice is a funny coincidence, but three times in a row and now you've got a trope, and you better believe that when the players met the campaign's fourth Big Bad, the first thing said to him was "Don't fuck with us, man, we'll chop your fucking dick off."
That there is the constant comedy of all rpgs, the comedy that comes from the frisson that exists between expectation and reality. You think you're running Die Hard, and that the comedy will be limited to badass one-liners and "Ho Ho Ho Now I have a machinegun" shenangins, with maybe a funny NPC on the side like Argyle. But then the game starts, and it quickly turns in Game Over, Man as it turns out the players are being idiots, die rolls are causing pure havoc, and everyone is getting their dicks cut off left and right.
Quote from: RPGPundit;1031566How comedic is your game?
And is the comedy intentional? Ad lib? Incidental?
I try to avoid intentional comedy in game because it tends to fall flat. I've had enough bad execution in the past from players who have created "comic relief" characters that I don't want to deal with it in game ever again.
Incidental comedy is great and I love that in game, but planned comedy just fails in my games.
"Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."
In my club, most of the members are incorrigible smart-alecks at best, and so things can sometimes take a comic turn. It usually just kind of happens.
Example: Player characters solve a murder in an introductory scenario in the campaign, but don't find the loot right away. The killer, apprehended, is a travelling entertainer with a mangy-looking bear. I, game mastering, make a juvenile joke about the bear being constipated (now that it is out of the woods, it can't and so doesn't.)
Being a persistent smart-aleck, I repeat this, and one of the players pops up, "I know why the bear is constipated...I know (etc.)" The other players ignore him until finally, to get this buzzing out of my ear, I ask player, "Alright, why do you think the bear can't go?" Answer: "Because the murderer fed the bear the silver coins." Now, this is completely, utterly, wrong. It is also very clever, and so at a dramatically appropriate moment the bear lets fly with some coins.
Player characters end up tasked by elves to get ahold of a magic elf-smacking axe that they want to take out of circulation, which is in the hands of some rather pointless goblins. If the player characters come up with the axe, the elves will tell them what they know about a relic, which the players are interested in. They advise the players to feed the bear more bran as the bear continues to driddle out small change at a 1d6 rate or so. Our heroes, brave fellows that they are take the job and run into a group of orcs also out for the axe. All of the players successfully hide (BRP-rules) except one, the guy tending the bear. Not wanting an umpteen to one smackdown at that moment, I roleplay out the leader of the orcs suggesting that the bear needs more bran. This being a dramatic moment, the bear lets loose again, and the orc 'rents' the bear using the silver coins, and takes it into battle against the goblins.
The players, being the heroes that they are, announce that their characters are going to fire arrows indiscriminately into the orc vs. goblin melee, from behind, carefully avoiding the bear. The melee ends with 2 battered orcs, one rather sorry goblin, and half a dozen or so intact player characters. The players bravely decide that they don't like these odds, and swap the bear (which they believe is a limited resource) for the axe, which they then take to the elves, who tell the characters that they don't know exactly which human has the relic, though they can furnish some clues, and they do have the reliquary, which they are willing to swap.
Thus: magic silver pooping bear-->magic axe of elf smackage-->non-magical metal relic case, which once held some saint's middle finger.
The bear still makes appearances occasionally, as does the orc leader who owns it, with ever more outlandish "pimp-like" costumes. The bear's interesting digestive process has been named "Quantitative Easing," and at the dinner after the last session, one of the players pointed out that the bear itself should be called "Bearnanke." This was accepted by acclamation.
My limited experience with comedy games is that they are horrible. Great fun to read, but getting a bunch or people around a table with the idea that "we are going to be funny tonight" winds up with a lot of people trying too hard. Boredom is just dull, forced comedy is actively painful.
But gaming with the same people in a game that isn't supposed to be comedy winds up with plenty of laughs and a lot of fun.
Incidental, but frequent.
I don't aim for srz bznz, and I don't aim for comedy. I present it straight, and the players find the laughs.
Quote from: RPGPundit;1031566How comedic is your game?
Sometimes very funny.
Quote from: RPGPundit;1031566And is the comedy intentional? Ad lib? Incidental?
Usually ad lib and incidental. Never, ever scripted as that usually falls flat on its face. Quite often, a situation occurs and events happen, the combination seems funny to us. Sometimes comments are made, whether quips or off the cuff, that stand out and are talked about and foindly remembered for years.
We have our silly moments.
Like in the Savage Rifts game I'm in: I'm playing a time displaced Glitter Boy pilot (He was at hell central when the whole Rifts thing happened, then got swallowed by a portal and thrown 200+ years forward) and I've been playing up that he's a 1990's fan boy, with making Star Craft siege tank references, among other things. "I'm going to drop the hammer..." *Pylons lock suit into the ground, Rail Cannon ready to fire* "...And dispense some indiscriminate justice!"
Hell, first session we fought a monster that for all intents and purposes was Godzilla. And I was the only one who could get away with 'screaming' GOJIRA! The fact that I got a lucky called shot to his balls (Thank you exploding Damage dice) that not only bypassed the creatures armour (which was bloody impressive, after pinging off his skin twice with the biggest gun in the game. That was demoralizing) it literally vaporized his crotch region, his tail and about 600 trees behind him.
Then there's when someone calls him or his mech suit a 'Glitter Boy'. Back in his time, it was known as a Chromium Guardsman, a term he's quite proud of. So when some people saw him and called him 'Glitter Boy', he went onto an epic rant about how the suit isn't a vampire. We found it highly amusing, but it's an acquired taste.
So, now that I've hammered this out on 'paper' I'd say most of our in game humour is incidental.
In any random group of people, I am highly likely to have the most dry, understated sense of humor, or at least a close second due to infrequent outbursts of whimsy. In my main gaming group, I'm about average, maybe even a little on the silly or whimsical side. We've got people that are at Sahara levels of dry. There's sometimes undercurrents of humor going on that I'm not sure would even register to others.
Quote from: RPGPundit;1031566How comedic is your game?
And is the comedy intentional? Ad lib? Incidental?
Yes:).
Let me give an example of "bad execution" in my games. Had a player in a Traveller game create a comic relief vargr, this wolf-man had the money grubbing personality of Quark from DS9 without any redeeming qualities. Sometimes it would work, like when they had a drunk NPC and he gave him a tuft of his fur saying that, "Humans claim to find this useful, but I think its just weird."
Other times, it was adventure altering detriment. After a very rough multi-adventure arc where the PCs defeated a small mercenary force to protect a colony, I was going to let the PCs find the mercenary's ship and keep it as a prize. Now the mercs had hidden the ship and since their vehicles had been destroyed or captured, the surviving mercs had to get to the ship on foot - taking about three days. Plenty of time for the PCs to find the ship and take it. Comic relief vargr hacks the mercs computer and finds the location of the ship, but hides the information and doesn't tell the rest of the party while mumbling that, "he found it, so it is his ship" for almost three days. The party locates the merc's ship just in time to see it lift off and run for the safe jump limit while comic relief vargr is crying that "they stole his ship". It pissed me off as referee to know that this attempt at humor really screwed the whole party.
So did the other players feed him feet first into the atomic pile to show their appreciation of his little essay of wit?
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1031767So did the other players feed him feet first into the atomic pile to show their appreciation of his little essay of wit?
After that, his character was never trusted to do anything alone, another PC was always around to keep an eye on him. Nobody was very happy.
A couple of sessions later, when everyone was at the Traveller equivalent of Casablanca, he split from the party while they were being chased by Zhodani agents, got captured, interrogated, and then tasered into a coma. The rest of the party didn't bother to go looking for his PC, deciding instead that he was more trouble than he was worth.
Quote from: RPGPundit;1031566How comedic is your game?
And is the comedy intentional? Ad lib? Incidental?
About as comedic as ALIEN is, I suppose. Any players with nerd jokes to tell, have to wait until after the game session.
We take the content, gameplay and roleplaying quite seriously for the most part. But there's also a lot of humor and comedy about it, built in to the settings, cultures, customs, characters, situations, behavior, place & character names, incompetently drawn maps, corrupt officials, idiocy, savagery, etc. And we will laugh OOC about things the characters might not see exactly the same way, especially combat antics like the time the gargoyle fell on the fat guy in plate armor and they crashed through the wagon he was on and then got run over by the wagon, or people who end up falling off cliffs or overboard during combat or other misadventures, or suffering other fates that strike us as hilarious OOC.
Quote from: jeff37923;1031752.... It pissed me off as referee to know that this attempt at humor really screwed the whole party.
Come on, say it, you know you want to--it really screwed the pooch.
A character concept might also provide ample humor, if a player wished to run basically as a trickster. In one of the games at my club, a GURPS starfaring sort of game, Trickster Player took something like "delusional" to get extra points--the delusion being that the character believed that he was a nuclear engineer capable of running the spaceship. Of course he had only an abysmally low ability at it. His dice were, however, hot enough (probably radioactivity) that he succeeded occasionally, and got a little better, and to keep the charade up, the player showed the other players excessively high rolls. I don't think they ever tumbled to it while the game was running.
Some. I mean, I game with old friends for the most part, so it's inevitable. On those rare occasions I play instead of GM, I try to make it germane to the character but when I'm running I'll do things like throw in "Kung-fu Skeleton!" and have him accompanied by a band of skeleton bards playing his theme music. But not all the time; it can be tiresome to do that more than once every few sessions.
Almost all my games have comedic elements; but in most of them they're incidental. In a few campaigns, like my Last Sun DCC campaign, the comedy is built-in (though there's also tons and tons of incidental comedy happening).
Quote from: wombat1;1031873A character concept might also provide ample humor, if a player wished to run basically as a trickster. In one of the games at my club, a GURPS starfaring sort of game, Trickster Player took something like "delusional" to get extra points--the delusion being that the character believed that he was a nuclear engineer capable of running the spaceship. Of course he had only an abysmally low ability at it. His dice were, however, hot enough (probably radioactivity) that he succeeded occasionally, and got a little better, and to keep the charade up, the player showed the other players excessively high rolls. I don't think they ever tumbled to it while the game was running.
"Trickster" does not mean " fucking moron.". The trickster god archetype is a very specific mode of teaching, and the way modern fandom has turned it into "fishmalk" pisses me off.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1032242"Trickster" does not mean " fucking moron.". The trickster god archetype is a very specific mode of teaching, and the way modern fandom has turned it into "fishmalk" pisses me off.
Indeed it is. Most people don't appreciate or understand Zen/Sufi/ancient gods humor, though:).
So I just clamp down on all fishmalk concepts when approving characters;).
I set it to 0, since players, even invested ones, crack jokes and such.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1032242"Trickster" does not mean " fucking moron.". The trickster god archetype is a very specific mode of teaching, and the way modern fandom has turned it into "fishmalk" pisses me off.
Yes. A million times yes.
Actual trickster-gods are super-intelligent and not actually insane at all.
In-character, situation-appropriate humour is to be encouraged.
Out of character, suspension-breaking diversions are to be discouraged.
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1032242"Trickster" does not mean " fucking moron.". The trickster god archetype is a very specific mode of teaching, and the way modern fandom has turned it into "fishmalk" pisses me off.
Trickster don't always 'teach'. Sometimes they just harm. That said, Fishmalking is always bad.
Quote from: Christopher Brady;1032883Trickster don't always 'teach'. Sometimes they just harm. That said, Fishmalking is always bad.
Oh, yeah. Coyote and Loki could both be total assholes, for instance. But they aren't the "do random dumb shit" sort of assholes.
There are mad gods, but those aren't the tricksters. They're just mad.