#RPGaDAY2020 24: HUMOUR

#RPGaDAY2020

24: HUMOUR

Hey! I have a label for this!

Humour is tricky in RPGs, a tone dependent on everybody’s mood. As has been noted before, it has a lot in common with horror.

It can be difficult to get it going, and indeed to keep it from undercutting a serious plot.

This may get waffly. Humour me.

Humour-focused series-friendly RPGs like Paranoia, Ghostbusters, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and the like have settings that can be played basically straight and much of the humour comes from the players and their characters. Alpha Complex is an absurd dystopia but still a dystopia. Ghostbusters is basically a Call Of Cthulhu adventure solved with laser vacuums and deadpan snark, with the RPG’s designers including its mastermind Sandy Petersen. The Buffyverse is a scary place where a sense of humour is a vital defence mechanism.

A lot of the humour in Ghostbusters and Buffy arises from the kind of sarcasm and in-jokes that happen around the table - which here work in-character.

Short-term comedy RPGs like TOON and one-shot-only games like Fiasco and Honey Heist often work with a more absurd premise, as can individual adventures for series games, humorous and otherwise.

Son Of TOON added Series premises, mainly parodies of other genres, including Ghostbusters. For a while I actually ran both as an outlet for ideas slightly too wonky for the Ghostbusters game...

What kind of humour fits a given game? Examples and prompts can help.

I often have a sounding board NPC in part to include and join in-character joking. I run a few Funny Magic Episodes in a typical Buffy series. And the occasional mockably cliché situation, inept monster or cultist, and melodramatic feed line can go a long way.

Humour can also flatten an attempt at a serious game. There’s a reason I’ve owned King Arthur Pendragon for thirty years and run it for one session, and that reason is Monty Python And The Holy Grail. A disapproving look can only get you so far.

Of course I want my table to be fun even in a serious-minded game, but there are various kinds of fun and they don’t all fit together.

“How do I run a Vampire game like What We Do In The Shadows?”
“The tricky part is how not to.”

You can certainly have humour in horror and other games, you could run them light for a session or a whole chronicle.

One of the most popular Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play adventures, “A Rough Night At The Three Feathers”, and author Graeme Davis also wrote one of my favourite published Vampire: The Masquerade stories, “Annabelle’s Party” in The Succubus Club, both essentially farces, with multiple plots crashing into each other, misunderstandings, and some planned to embarrass important people.

Humour should fit the overall tone. Horror games are good for gallows humour, mean-spirited quips and the like. Lestat’s a funny guy but he’s also a monster.

A lighthearted session of an ongoing game can work well if the players are in the mood. It can be good for a break from a major plot, or for a special occasion like the session closest to Christmas or April Fools’ Day.

(This is another way it resembles horror, as a sometimes thing you can drop into a game with a different general tone. D&D got both Ravenloft and Dungeonland in 1983.)

As the GM, you can drop a comedy episode into a regular game with little or no warning, or flag it up in advance, and also recruit players to help the joke along. Some comedy-centred episodes of The Watch House were just me throwing them in, but the infamous The Fourth Wall involved planning with four of the players and dropping it unannounced on the other two. Not something done lightly!

It can also come from the players. This can be planned in advance, or emerge at the table and if it works roll with it. Some of the great comedy episodes of TWH came from the players, with or without warning.

And it can happen by accident, usually due to a string of weird dice rolls. I once dropped another planned TWH adventure and had the group fight a gremlin due to a run of 1s at the start of the session.

So look to your players and their general snark levels, as well as their mood on a specific evening, before planning to highlight humour, or the lack thereof, in a series or session.