Author Topic: What part does comedy play in your game?  (Read 2486 times)

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Offline Colin-ICE

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What part does comedy play in your game?
« on: April 13, 2016, 12:10:09 AM »
Some of my fondest memories of gaming are the moments when nothing was happening because everyone was laughing too much. I've often wondered how the GM feels about it though so I thought I'd open it out to the group.

How do you feel about comedy and laughter whilst roleplaying?

Offline bpowell

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Re: What part does comedy play in your game?
« Reply #1 on: April 13, 2016, 01:42:45 AM »
Some of my fondest memories of gaming are the moments when nothing was happening because everyone was laughing too much. I've often wondered how the GM feels about it though so I thought I'd open it out to the group.

How do you feel about comedy and laughter whilst roleplaying?

With us the roleplaying is a social event.  I cannot tell you the times that the game play had to be stopped because one of the players was laughing too hard.  This could have come about from a pun or action in the game.

One time I had a Ranger type leading the way because they were in an outdoor setting.  He completely blew his check to find the trap and fell into a 10' pit trap.  He was only slightly injured.  But since he was out in front of the party no one in the party knew what happened.  It took the player over an hour to climb out of the pit.  Each time he was trying to climb out he blew the check (less < than 0) and fell back in the pit.  Even after a rope was lowered to him he could not make a climb check to save his soul.  In the end he fell and was struck unconscious.  Then the thief in the party climbed down and tied the rope to his unconscious form and the party pull him to safety.

By the end we were all laughing so hard our sides hurt.  The only issue was that in the next he fell into another pit trap.  After that the group started calling him the Pit Master.  The nickname would not be so funny except he is the group cook with ranks in cooking (the player is an actual chef).

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Offline Warl

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Re: What part does comedy play in your game?
« Reply #2 on: April 13, 2016, 02:15:05 AM »
Quote
What part does comedy play in your game?

The Funny part.


Butno, seriously... I wish I recorded my games.. There have been many times that the players have done something and then minutes later, some one says, "I think I broke the GM."
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Offline GrumpyOldFart

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Re: What part does comedy play in your game?
« Reply #3 on: April 13, 2016, 09:00:27 AM »
For me, it's absolutely vital.

It's hard for me to give specific instances, partly because there were so many, partly because the nature of my life in recent times hasn't left me any opportunities to game for over 2 years.

Let's just say... this is my profile picture over at RealRoleplaying:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_-xMhVmY1fo0/TOQlRgwpyFI/AAAAAAAAAIU/sUUa5h6G1-0/s1600/clownblowup.jpg

That pretty accurately describes my GMing style.
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Offline tbigness

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Re: What part does comedy play in your game?
« Reply #4 on: April 13, 2016, 09:06:17 AM »
I must admit that comedy is best while playing. Although I encourage the story line, comedy usually ensues over accidental mishaps to the characters that will last a life time. Like when Luke the Ranger who broke both legs was set up on watch during the night, observed a Forest Giant investigating the fire they had. Instead of waking the fighters in the group decides to shoot the giant with his bow to get a roll of 275. The crit was an arrow through the eye....... Ever since then he was known as Luke the giant slayer even though he could not fight anything else (poor rolls) afterward during the orc raids..... Too Funny there.
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Offline Alwyn

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Re: What part does comedy play in your game?
« Reply #5 on: April 13, 2016, 02:41:46 PM »
Our group has always loved to inject humor, both in and out of character, during our games.  It seems to make the games more enjoyable.  After all, a little laughter goes a long way, and when a player character dies in spectacular but humorous way, the players seemed to be more accepting of their demise.  Usually we make every effort to raise them, so that we can remind them of the event in the future.

I had a player who was nicknamed the "Dread Hobbit Roberts" by the group, because he always rolled crit results where he ended up covered in an opponent's blood.  ::)
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Offline jdale

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Re: What part does comedy play in your game?
« Reply #6 on: April 13, 2016, 03:06:15 PM »
It certainly happens and we have fun with it. It's not written into the story -- the story is serious, the characters are not jokes and we don't use silly names. But both the players and their characters make jokes, and funny things can happen when the dice get involved.
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Offline Bruce

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Re: What part does comedy play in your game?
« Reply #7 on: April 13, 2016, 04:10:41 PM »
It happens quite often, especially with fumbles at times. Comedy is just part of the game. The best comedy scenes I can remember in all my years of gaming have been in taverns or pubs.
Here in the next few months I will be running a session in a bar/tavern setting. The interesting thing about this session will be that no one will be playing their own character. The idea behind the scene is that all the characters will probably be drunk with the exception of possibly one or two and each person must play the character I give them with how they see that character in the game along with being drunk. Each player will gain experience on basically making it fun. I will be trying to match players with what I consider their opposites. I have already decided there will be no bad consequences for the actual player characters, as it would be unfair to the players. If the players do things that could cause serious harm to the character they are playing then they will loose some of the exp they may gain in this session..... My group is both excited and nervous on doing this. I think it will be lots of fun.
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Offline Frabby

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Re: What part does comedy play in your game?
« Reply #8 on: April 25, 2016, 11:37:39 AM »
It certainly happens and we have fun with it. It's not written into the story -- the story is serious, the characters are not jokes and we don't use silly names. But both the players and their characters make jokes, and funny things can happen when the dice get involved.
Same here. I've found that occasional hilarity is great when it happens (roleplaying is a social event, after all, and we're doing it for fun), but attempts to force comedy into the game will turn out silly or awkward.

Offline GrumpyOldFart

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Re: What part does comedy play in your game?
« Reply #9 on: April 26, 2016, 07:11:26 AM »
I guess it depends on how you define "forcing it." Keep in mind, sometimes players do things that are ridiculous in context of what the GM knows about the situation that the players may not. For example, I lived in Salt Lake City for several years as a child, and therefore know a lot more about snow, ice and skiing than my players in later years who all grew up on the US Gulf Coast. When a player tries to jump from a pair of skis onto the back of a dragon, I'm perfectly comfortable with expressing the result in a way that makes him aware of just how ridiculous his attempt was.

That and there's a certain amount of "gallows humor" involved in gaming. The obvious example I can think of is the time an opponent was using a wand of lightning during a battle in tall grass prairie in summertime, and failed his roll catastrophically. He not only lightning bolted himself, he started a brush fire. Yeah, there was a lot of sick humor involved in that session, in much the same way that there's a lot of sick humor among soldiers in a war zone.
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Offline yammahoper

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Re: What part does comedy play in your game?
« Reply #10 on: April 27, 2016, 10:35:35 AM »
Fortunately humor is inevitable. Many of the games tropes are hysterical, especially the plethora of races. The more laughter the better.
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Offline Malim

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Re: What part does comedy play in your game?
« Reply #11 on: April 27, 2016, 12:37:16 PM »
This comes to mind...
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Offline jdale

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Re: What part does comedy play in your game?
« Reply #12 on: April 27, 2016, 01:43:20 PM »
Play styles vary. I certainly have known people who run the whole game with a focus on humor, and everything is a little silly (or a lot) from the character names to the NPC names to the story itself. It's not my personally preferred style but if that's what you enjoy there's nothing wrong with it. I do think that kind of deliberate humor can come at the expense of immersion, but immersion is not a priority for everyone either.

In my own experience, immersion helps create attachment and emotional investment in a character. Silly characters are most common when there is a lack of that attachment. For example when we were starting a 1st edition D&D campaign in grad school, characters were dying every session and we had randomly rolled stats. That's when we had characters with names like Morion and Anna Cephala (ok, biologist joke) because their intelligence was so low. Those characters were not expected to last very long (and didn't), so better just to have fun with it. Later, the characters lasted longer and there was more focus on drama, and any humor was spontaneous rather than planned.
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Offline Malim

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Re: What part does comedy play in your game?
« Reply #13 on: April 27, 2016, 03:08:32 PM »
@Jdale I agree 100% on the attachment part, Ive played 2 characters for about 23 years or so. So I dont do "stupid" things that can bring harm to them allot. But the humor comes from knowing that character and the other players characters so will be like humor in real life. Joking about a knights mom because she spends all the family gold on shopping, A monk with 150+ DB being the one only facing one foe ( Chicken joke), My Ykin Bashkar being very bad at the main language the group speak, so he often don't understand or misinterpret things and are on a hunt for accent because everybody tells him that he has a bad accent, so he wanna kill it etc.

We also have a campaign played in GURPS called necromunda where the humor is pulling real world extreme issues in and playing them out in very insane ways! I. e. your character sees a "biker" selling drugs to a young boy, I follow them to their hangout and blow it to rubble!
So diffrent kinds of humor depending on the setting and the mindset of the scenario!
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Offline Justin

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Re: What part does comedy play in your game?
« Reply #14 on: April 29, 2016, 10:28:00 AM »
I'm the minority I guess. My games are similar to jdale's, but the in-game humor only happens once every 2 or 3 sessions, perhaps even less. Except for the gallows humor Grump spoke of, that happens once every 1-2 sessions.

I'm not a big fan of comedies, especially sitcoms.
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Offline Bruce

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Re: What part does comedy play in your game?
« Reply #15 on: May 22, 2016, 05:13:28 PM »
There is a difference between humor and comedy. I have seen plenty of movies that are focused on either drama, action, or what have you. To me if there is even a little bit of humor I enjoy the movie that much more. In fact movies that have a little bit of everything are movies I enjoy the most.


Which is the way I try to run my games. I try to focus on the drama and action but without things like humor and fear the game looses it's full entertainment value. I do not mean goofy humor but things that get some laughs every so often. We all experience that in everyday life, at least I do.


I will be running the bar room session where everyone switches characters to help relieve some tension and for everyone to have some fun. But it is also a great role playing experience. So many people play only certain kinds of attitudes and personalities in that they never really grow from the experience.
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