[Backstage] Looking for a little opinion...(comedy RP)

[daMoose_Neo]

Hmmkay, most of my posts have been to the publishing side concerning my CG going out, but with it at the printers I have a little time before I have to kick it up in high gear for that again. Keeping myself busy, I dug out some notes on another project and wanted to run them by here.

We (Neo Productions) used to write regularly and occasionaly upload a new sprite comic called "Backstage", a fictional comedy stip about us living at the Neo HQ. During its regular run, and when it was updated, we had a lot of fun and so did the fans, and we're looking at incorperating Backstage into a kind of game. We're kind torn though at the moment; we have a rough design based on the CG(Final Twilight) for a 5/6 Player party card game or I have some rough notes for an RP system.
Heres the gist of the system:
- No dice
- Hardly any stats: Players make characters based on their own personalities, choosing skill and personality traits based on themselves (or who they would want to be, within context). The only *real* stats lie in the Caffiene and Sanity points, which are used to boost the skills.
When using a Skill, a player explains how they would go about it and the other players score it, scale of 1 to 10. The scores are weighed by the Narrator, depending on the number of people playing, and added to whatever Sanity/Caffiene points were used to raise the score and compared to a difficulty value. Equaling or passing it suceeds, less than blows it.

ie Moose wants to build a device to pick a lock so he uses a skill "Build Stuff"- the player says something like "I grab a hair pin, some duct tape (you can do ANYTHING with duct tape!), a rope, a pulley and a chicken:" and goes on to put together a lock pick device. His two teammates laugh their arses off and each give him a 10. The Narrator had set a Skill Check of like 20 to it, with a couple players thats already a score of 20, so Moose opens the locked door easily.
or, alternativly there was a score of 30 attached to it and Moose blew it. The Narrator could throw something at the player like "The rope snaps, the hairpin falls into a crack and the chicken is REALLLLLY upset..." Moose could use some of his Caffiene points to boost the skill (working feverishly on it) or his Sanity (boggling the mind to make it work better) before or after, to boost it to the neccesary 30.

The general idea is to reward wackiness and ingenuity, no matter how odd.
Using no dice and few stats actually stems from how we wrote the comic in the first place- chatting over the internet. A number of our chats broke down into "Oh yea? Well, I'll-" followed by something strange. Most of this is being written with e-mail or IM messaging in mind for playing.
Character construction was done by looking at our own cartoon characters, the fictional us, as well as the cast from Brian Clevengers "8-bit Theatre" (if this works out as I'd like, I'm considering contacting him about an 'offical' supplement for 8-bit). Sample characters from the system would be:
DaMoose: Personality(Clueless, Booksmart) Skills(Build Stuff, Hack, Acting) Obsessions(Root Beer) Special Ability (Shape-shift)
Imp: Personality(Evil) Skills(Build Evil Stuff, Scheme) Obsessions(World Domination) Special Ability (Laser Blaster)

I can send out my VERY rough (this would "VERY ROUGH" to the 10th power) draft or explain more to anyone~ Just wondering what you thought about this kind of system (and I'm aware its probably been done before. I just came up with this sleeping at work ^_^)
Check out the comic archives to see what kind of material I'm working with: http://www.neoproductions.net/comic/

[age_of_dissent]

That sounds like a great idea to me. It adds more entertainment value to the game, so long as your players are mature enough not to try powergaming. This kind of thing deserves greater popularity.

Good luck :)

Tangentially relevant anecdote: I once ran a game of BESM with a highly vocal player group and had the dice-rolling app on my computer reconfigured so it would roll higher when the microphone picked up noise. I don't think they actually realised how it worked, but they quickly got used to the fact the descriptions which make other players laugh or cheer were more likely to succeed.

[Mike Holmes]

In Toon, you get points for making people laugh. And it doesn't work well. This looks precisely the same.

The problem is that some people - OK, me - just can't be funny on demand. That's not to say that I'm not funny, just that I'm sorta randomly funny. So a system like this is actually painful for me to play. I usually feel that my feeble attempts on my turn to make funny stuff up result in charity from the other players, and nervous smiles. Really uncomfortable. And then nobody can be funny.

I think just saying "be funny" would work as well in a system like this. I mean, everyone knows that's the objective of play. If they're funny people they'd be funny anyhow. All I see the system doing is rewarding the funny people with better character success. And, in any case, what's funny about success? Failure is funny.

The RPGs that have been funniest are ones in which the situation produces ironic play. Situation comedies are funny because of the situations - hence the name. Paranoia is a "situation RPG" in that the characters are incompetents in a situation where a paraniod computer expects them to accomplish impossible tasks, while they all try to advance secret agendas. As they say, "And hilarity ensues!" The point is that all you have to do is play your character "straight" and it's garunteed to be funny - whether you are or not.

So, if you really want comedy, then try somthing like this. Trying to incentivize funny produces at best stilted play, and at worst dull, dull, dull play.

Sorry to be so pessimistic, but I just don't think that it'll work. Test it on your least funny friend, and see for yourself.

Mike

[daMoose_Neo]

Point noted ^_^ I asked for thoughts, so appreciated ^_^
Will take note of that and play with something to combat that or award bonus' for playing it straight as well.
Little defence of this particular idea though:
With NBS, at least the comic, I had said that most of it came from our own chats. One member of the group, Mike/Heff, is like you: Cannot be funny on demand. He actually started writing Backstage and we made a collective agreement to move from short-story "sagas" to the daily strip, but he ran out of gas quickly. Still, anytime we have a chat it ends up hilarious because he does play the part of the straight man, and that makes it even more hilarious. One conversation thats kicked off some new ideas for a "second season" of the comic started out along the lines of his saying "It'd be cool if we were in the Star Trek world...I could go "Computer, code this!"" From that, a whole conversation spawned between him and the "computer" thats actually quite amusing.
If you check the comics, you'll probably notice its not all cartoony slap-stick. Most of it is nonsence disguised as sense and logic~ One of (I think) the funniest plays on a little known fact: Fred Dust of Limp Bizkit supposidly has Sailor Moon dolls in his room. (http://www.neoproductions.net/comic/?p=main&n=71) That one starts more along the lines of slapstick, but also has a little thought behind it ;)
Noted though: In this instance, for the RP, Moose would get some kind of bonus whereas Heff wouldn't. Can do some tinkering to try to work out bonus' for someone like Heff (and yourself).
And come to think of it, the most fun (even in the comics) is us blowing it...*wanders off pondering*

*Edit* I love being a space case. Reviewing the rules, I noticed I forgot to explain Obsessions. (This plays into the part about how blowing it is funnier). While Personality acts as a guide, an Obsession is something the character HAS to abide by (or suffer penalty...and that can only last for so long), usually with interesting results.
Look at Imp or Kyle from the comics- Imp will ALWAYS try to take over the world. Kyle will ALWAYS believe he is Spiderguy. In an RP setting, Something might happen where Kyle, believeing he has Spiderlike Powers goes "I'll shoot webbing out of my butt and swing across the new webrope!"
Wouldn't happen, but I'd probably do well to include something like a "dumb luck" system for such instances, whereby his trying to do something results in some(stupid)thing happening, but does manage a "success". (thinks back to the last example)

Moose : "Um, nice chicken?"
Narrator: "The chicken charges you-"
Moose : "AHHH!" *runs in circles with the chicken chasing*
Narrator : *somekinda check* "The chicken finally catches up and attacks you! It starts pecking at your eyes!"
Moose : I start swating it away. "Stupid chicken!" If that doesn't work, I try running.
Narrator: You can't run, but while trying to swat away the chicken you back into the door forcefully, knocking it open!

Failures can be success as well ^_^

[Mike Holmes]

Failures can be success as well ^_^

Have you, by any chance, seen Elfs from Adept Press?

Mike

[daMoose_Neo]

Nope, have not~
Linkee?

[Mike Holmes]

http://www.adept-press.com/elfs/

The Adept Press forum is on the Independent forum page.

I mention it because one of the main sources of fun in elfs is succeeding by failing.

Mike

[Doctor Xero]

Please go into more details.  This sounds intriguing.

How would one game master this, or would it  be more GMless?

Could you provide examples of play?

What about experience points et al.?

A humor-based game has the disadvantage that you need all players in a mood for humor at the same time.  For that reason, when I had a group which enjoyed Toon, we always had a different game ready as well, because it seemed that about three out of four times we weren't all in a mood to play such a fun but hectic game.  (Ah, but those one out of four times we did play . . . !)  How would you address this?

Doctor Xero

[daMoose_Neo]

I don't have all of the details for a GM/Narrator worked out.
The game DOES need one, though I am playing with some GMless ideas. For the most part though, one is needed to 'impose' (so to speak) some of the strangeness (like the panels of writers on a sitcom, lol).
One way I'm looking at the GM-less is an optional ruleset that kinda has a Narrator, kinda doesn't- the players would act as the Narrator. IE, one 'character' starts out narrating an adventure. Modeling after some of the Neo comics, this would also include the ability of another player to take control of the game (in the comic one of the characters and Narrator actually get into a fight, wherein the Narrator gets his butt beat). Still playing with that.
As I said, this is part of the combating 'not feeling funny', a Narrator/GM is needed in some fashion to create the unusual situations. If you have players at least willing to stick to character, the game can start rolling and hopefully get people into the mood. Start out with something odd, get the players reacting, and the ball starts rolling ^_^
Also, I'm not looking at this as a 'main system' so to speak~ This is shaping up to be more of a "Have some spare time? COOL!" type. For people interested in running something more with it, it is possible. I'm working with some ideas for some professions/class structures and such. Fun part about this though is until I have some more concrete definitions on skills and abilities, its a little too open (though this could be interesting in and of itself...).
We haven't actually run anything with this, though it is only a slightly regulated/quantified version of the tangents we get off on (I could post some of those chats, those are interesting), in which case I have a lot of material.
In terms of setting up adventures, the formula that worked for the comic can easily work here:
1) Start with a simple conflict (AGH! We're out of Coffee! [being caffiene adicts, this would be a HUGE issue])
2) Complicate it ("Lets see...thirteen cents, some lint and a two week old candy bar...maybe we could sell pencils on the street?")
3) Make it weird (An alien race has overtaken the local convience store in preperation for world domination).
If the game follows suit of us (though we are an odd bunch), shouldn't matter too much if no one's feeling 'funny', getting into it would lighten spirits and people would start feeling in the mood~

[daMoose_Neo]

Hmmkay, I'm gradually piecing something together I can share with people and I'm going to attempt an adventure or two on my group's forum. First up I posted the character("Castmember") creation.
Browsing through here, I saw a number of mentions of 'freeform' abilities and rather like that- lets the player personalize the character more, take into account things I might not, and can allow for more of the insanity Backstage represents ^_^ After a while, if we can pull together a decent list of abilities I might make an 'Appendex' with possible abilities and descriptions, at least enough to give a 'feel'.
Anywho, here's the castmember creation steps and example (along with a fellow Neo member's character 'Kyle') Backstage Castmember Creation!

[orbsmatt]

The idea definitely sounds interesting, but would be hard to play out.  As already mentioned, all the players would have to be in a comedy mood to get anything out of the game, and all players would have to be good at improv comedy.

If you have a group like that, then go for it!  Otherwise, I think the average player would get bored and / or frustrated rather quickly.

Funny enough (no pun intended), I find that comic relief happens quite often while we are roleplaying, and I really don't need to encourage that!

Those are my 2 cents.

[daMoose_Neo]

Its been my experiance, and opinion, that improv isn't all that hard honestly. Straight improv can be a nightmare, but you can start off with something and just go with it.
I'm really involved with acting and can see some fun/strange stuff even from a most serious discussion.
NBS really needs one good Narrator to get the ball rolling. From there, no it might not be a barrel of monkeys, but it'll still be humorous and the players can still accomplish something. After all, in Neo we DO have goals, just have an odd way of getting to them ^_^

[orbsmatt]

I definitely agree that improv isn't a very hard thing to do if you have somewhere to start.  That's what RPGs are all about!

Anyways, I think my main point was simply that not all players would be able to get into it as easily as your group, but if it works for your group, then go for it!  Not everybody is going to like the same system.

[daMoose_Neo]

This wasn't so much theft from Monkey Island as it was realization: All things considered, in BS, we do NOT engage in physical combat- we insult each other or throw around some (cheap) witty banter. That lead to the MI combat system by which you exchanged insults to gain footing/score hits (know if it vaugly, my brother played the games).
Being we don't actually fight in NBS, I was looking at something similar, but not too sure how to impliment it. I want to connect it to a Weapon Value (like Metal Bat has a value of 8, plus the resulting value from the banter)
Idea A (and best current one): Create a leveled table of insults/phrases. At each level, a player has access to X phrases. Part of this would also be that over-using phrases would lower the value of that phrase. Using it in a unique way could also add bonus points to the value. An opponant can defend it with the proper retort, possibly edited given the character (a couple demo adventures I'm working out involve aliens and blue crack monkeys). Finally, the score from the witty banter is added to the weapons value to see who actually lands a blow, and the severity.
In my mind, toying around, 'damage' would be with the Victors value - the Losers value, and that subtracted from their Sanity. Sanity is the more important of the two stats (Sanity and Caffine), as when you hit 0 Sanity you're a blubbering idiot for a certain amount of time (BREAKDOWN!) or without control of your actions.
All I've come up with thus far is the table or letting them make up their own. As we've agreed, not feeling 'funny' would seriously hamper the ability for combat, meaning a pre-generated set of phrases would work the better of the two.
Just wondering if anyone's tried something similar. If anyone has suggestions, do try to remember I'm keeping this diceless.