Comedy Games- Are Lite rules the way to go?

[btrc]

Okay, how about separating the 'mechanic' from the 'mechanics'? That is, the goofier the way the -player- actually rolls the die, the more likely the GM will give them a bonus to the roll. Doing a backhanded dice ricochet off your friend's forehead while doing a Three Stooges Curly "woo-woo-woo" is worth +2 on your roll, etc.

Greg Porter
BTRC

[quozl]

To answer the original question, it depends.  If the mechanics you use produce comedy, then go ahead and use "heavy" mechanics.  If the mechanics do not produce comedy, use "light" mechanics.

As for a suggested light mechanic, I would use the Feng Shui system.  Because of the exploding dice at the extemes (both positive and negative), you can describe both amazing success (which could be funny) and amazing failure (which could also be funny).

[Mike Holmes]

...I disagree with both you and Mike about TFOS, and agree with Ralph about your game. I think TFOS is a funny game, it is a funny game because of the system, and that any comedy game designer can learn from it.

TFOS's basic success/fail mechanic, I will admit, does not bring teh funny in any significant way, but I think that this is largely because of the designer's rather ill-fated attempt to shoehorn it into the Fuzion / Interlock structure.

You don't disagree with me. To be clear, TFOS is hilarious to play. It's precisely the "shoehorning" that I was saying wasn't funny.

Mike

[Latigo]

Do play mechanics add to the fun?  You bet...

In the spirit of hilbilly sharin', here's a swell play mechanic we use out here in the Swamp lands.

Jus' play spin-the-bottle, but with the bottle (preferably an empty 40 oz.) on top of a piece of cardboard devided into 4 sections.

These are labeled "Yes", "No", "Yee-Haw!", and "Doh!" and corespond to success, failure, critical success, and critical failure respectively.  Figure the story out from there.

Anybody can unnerstan' thet one, cuzin!

Best of all,

Latigo

[Olibarro]

In answer to the original question: on average, I find rules-lite to be better than rules-intense when it comes to playing a game for comedy. (To be fair, on average, I prefer rules-lite for most things.) There's exceptions, but in your shoes, I'd work to make the rules mostly unobtrusive except inasmuch as they can contribute to the tone and humor of the game.

Depending on the game, there's also the possibility of the rules /forcing/ too much of the humor. I'm struggling to think of a good example from my own experience, but basically, you don't want the players feeling too constrained or railroaded by specific "humorous" mechanics.

[Callan S.]

Hi Ryan,

Have you considered that say something like a hill billy driving around a sharp corner at high speed can just be determined by the GM as to whether it works?

Think of it this way: The players aren't trying to overcome a challenge by using tactics that work. You don't want to reward them for being sensible drivers. You want to reward them for being funny.

So leave the success/failure of the truck driving up to the GM. You can: because simulation of this is not the important part of your game. The funny is!

The thing is, if speeding around a corner would end up being funny, but you put some skill check in, it doesn't reward the funny behaviour. They are going to slow down and take it at a reasonable speed that doesn't require a check. In fact they are going to slow down and be sensible all over the place, because skill checks reward tactical thinking, they don't reward funny thinking.

Instead, you can have mechanics that reward funny thinking. For example, lets say that failure is funny. Okay, and make the rule that all tasks fail...those that pass were only there to get you to the failure (driving to the hill doesn't fail because its there to get you to the hair pin turn). Then you could have a rule that says everyone at the table suggests a funny way to fail and you use dice to randomly determine which one is used. Then the player has to use that in a narration of what happened.

Well, that's pretty rough. But the idea is not to model reality, its to model the thing you want to model. And if you want to model funny, you don't want rules that instead model reality.