Joke Games/Joke Characters

I guess this is another concept I have a love/hate relationship in my gaming history. Mostly hate.

James M. over at Grognardia posted the other day regarding an old TSR module called Castle Greyhawk. Having little to do with Sir Gary’s original Greyhawk setting, it turns out (I had never read it) to be a “lighthearted send-up” of Hollywood – great, just what I wanted in a D&D setting.

OK, so Gygax was not exactly “Mr. Serious” when it came to his gaming. Despite being inspired by a lot of good, serious fiction, GG put a certain amount of goofiness into some of this stuff. Making a level out of Alice in Wonderland was just one example of his silly nature when it came to games. But for the most part, his stuff seemed timid compared to some of the jokey Judges Guild products (a lot of which I loved).

But for me in my adult life, the laughter in a game tended to come mostly from the pathos and irony that often pans out during gameplay, and players witty and intelligent verbiage that gets the whole group belting out guffaws. Like last year when I had a new player use my generous stat rolling rules (best 3 of 4 dice, move them around, switch a couple of points, etc.), and he still had shit rolls. Had him try another set, still shitty, Let him move some stats around, still shitty. By the time he said that this was the norm for him when rolling up a PC, the other players and I were ready to pass out from laughing. And not at him - his attitude was so great about being a stat sad sack. Now that’s humor, without injecting Star Trek and cartoon monsters into the mix.

But my serious nature about my fantasy was not always so! Like most people who start D&D as a kid, the characters and games were almost instantly stupid. I mean, what would you expect from 14 year olds? But when I got up in my teens a bit, and had a fantasy world that was starting to grow and flesh out, I wanted my games to be more like the stories I loved – high adventure, romance, and grim determination.

But up until my 20’s there was still a bit of jokey jack joke joke stuff in my games, and I thought I might brainstorm on some examples from the past:

*Something that really stands out is the point around 1982 when a couple friends and I made up the Three Stooges as our characters (I got to run Moe!). We included various attacks, like the “two-finger eye poke” and the “block two-finger eye poke.” Hmmm…forbears of Feats and talents?

*A friend and I ran the kitchen of his father’s pub in Santa Monica. There was a crotchety old guy that hung out there, and a flaming young gay dude, “Gay Bob” we called him, The old guy would get so mad at Bob, and chase him out onto Main Street. Yeah, me and my buddy made up characters for that, except that the crotchety old guy was made into the pseudo dragon familiar of wizard Gay Bob. And Yeah, I painted wizard Bob with flowers on his robes. Sigh. At least they didn’t last more than a game or two.

*A buddy had a character in my game called “Cadille,” a huge black eunuch (get it? Cadillac?). He sounded like a cross between a 70’s pimp and Uncle Remus. Needless to say, not very sensitive. Around this time we seemed to be in competition to come up with the most lame jokey PC’s and NPC’s.

Characters were one thing, but I rarely made entire game sessions a joke (not on purpose, anyway). Not for D&D. “Funhouse Dungeons” sounded interesting too me, but never ran one, and never played in one. I did have a short Champions campaign that I had set in a funny animal world, but even that had real world physics (as opposed to “Toon Heroes” or whatever).

I guess one exception was the first Tegal Manor setting I ran, in which I remember having placed Radium rifle-packing Green Martians from John Carter in the main ballroom for some reason (I think I had some great old figures for them, so I must have wanted to use them). I made up for that by running some great, mostly serious games in the manor years later.

I think the place I had the hardest time keeping things serious was City State of the Invincible Overlord. I ran it apart from my regular D&D world, and had characters start out at high level. I ran it as-is, winging it on anything that was not in the little book that came with the maps. It almost always devolved into the characters causing some major shit (somebody even killed the dolphin that appeared in the bath house) because they were high level and didn’t give a fuck, and running like hell from the city when the real badasses showed up to deal with them.

I remember a memorable Monsters! Monsters! Game I ran. Originally a Tunnels and Trolls game, I used the concepts for D&D. The characters were a hill giant, an intelligent gorilla, ogres, and such. Attacking a small town was big fun. Great images of the giant reaching into 2nd floor bedrooms of sleeping people to squash them, and the gorilla raping women in the barn. Sheesh. It all ended with the monsters attacking a walled city in the second game. Being only 2nd level, the young monster gang were quickly finished off by guardsmen arrows. T&T was sort of made to be a joke game, but that MM based game was just nuts.

By the late 80’s, I kept things fairly serious as far as characters and situations. I could come up with a pun like the next guy, but I’m not wired to find that super-entertaining. How about just having an adventure where the laughs come naturally, from gameplay involving smart and fun people? It never really works to force humor in real life, so why attempt it in a game, where most players enjoy a fairly serious adventure and prefer the humor to be natural – even if they are running a bit of a jokey character (many people don’t realize they are doing so!).

Almost always the “humor” probably sounded better on paper than it did in action.

So how about you? Especially as a youngster, did you indulge in a lot of the jokey stuff? Tell me about the embarrassing character ideas you and your friends came up with, or your experiences with some “Looney Manor” style dungeon. Do you still encounter a lot of this (if you go to lots of conventions, my guess is you will say “YES!”). Do you like it, even prefer it? What factors made a joke game fun for you?