Comical/Humorous RPGs done right.

[Illetizgerg]

Hey everybody. I was somewhat inspired by some of my friends' comments and I've starting thinking about creating a humorous 1960s B horror movie RPG, and I was wondering if somebody could recommend some good RPGs that are intentionally funny, or make fun of themselves. I've read through some of the books for Paranoia, but I'm looking for something a little less "Woah, its crazy!", and more... precise, if that makes any sense.

-Gregory Zitelli

[chronoplasm]

Kill Puppies for Satan by Lumpley Games is pretty funny I think.

[Ken]

Hi-

Paranoia would have been my first suggestion, but since you've read it try HOL and Tales of the Floating Vagabond. These games are meant to be funny and their rules reflect that.

I'm not certain what you mean by "precise" humor; could you be more clear there, please? Do you have any system thought, yet? Are the mechanics going to lend to the humor?

Ken

[Illetizgerg]

I've actually been reading over Paranoia and I like it more than I thought I would. I was under the impression that it really only thought it was funny because of the crazy backstabbing attitude it had, however there's actually a lot of clever stuff.

I have started creating the mechanics for the game, although I'll probably get chewed out later because everything hasn't been done to reinforce the setting. Rather than trying to come up with system that models the type of game I want perfectly, I've started by creating a fairly simple set of rules dictating skills and physical/social combat, but rather than asking myself "Will this choice make the game more realistic" I've been asking myself "Will this choice make the game more 1960s B horror movie".

For instance, I have four prime attributes which are determined using a point system, and have different conversions from points (social power is 1:1, physical ability and knowledge are 1:2, and awareness is 1:3). Because awareness is so expensive you can only min-max a character to have a max of 4 (it effects a ton of stuff). Physical ability is maxed at 7, and knowledge is maxed at 6. Lastly, the social power attribute (which covers charisma, beauty, and overall social control) is so cheap that you could min-max a character to have 14 points!

This process reflects the kind of game I'm trying to create. Generally speaking, everybody in a 1960s B horror movie is at least average looking, unless of course we're talking about the shady probably-evil private eye, or the wily old sailor, or the crazy-buff foreigner. Furthermore, there are plenty of incredibly attractive female love-interests who seem surprisingly vacant (and break crazy amounts of ankles).

- Gregory Zitelli

[Marshall Burns]

If I might shamelessly promote myself for a moment, I've got a game called Super Action Now! that's hilarious.  Here's some posts about it:

Playtest #1 (not that funny)
Playtest #2 (hilarious)
Trying to figure out CA from playtest #3 (includes some funny)
some highlights from Playtest #Many, #Lots, and #I Lost Count a Long Time Ago

[Illetizgerg]

Hey, thanks Marshall. Your game is actually exactly the kind of thing my group has been looking for as a filler game, since we often find ourselves with the wrong mix of people and nothing really to play. It's a lot like the deathmatch games we've played, but the thing that I like about your game is that the rules are set up to handle the narration well (in the past it's been two people's words against each other, and then the GM has to play favorites, so it gets ugly). Very nicely done. ^_^

Obviously I'm going for something a lot more rules strict, more like a classic RPG, however reading through Playtest #2 reminded me a lot of how great it can be to have the players make up something funny on the spot, and then play it into the game.

I feel that allowing characters to write their skills however they want is a little too freeform, however I was thinking about having specific, "generic" skills that a character is allowed to have. Specifically, in games that use Stats-->Skills hierarchy, oftentimes rolling a straight stat gives you a lot less than rolling a skill (because there is no skill modifier). To handle this, I was thinking of allowing players to pick their "favorite" prime stat, and then assigning it a special "skill" of their choice, which encompasses their general usage of that stat. These custom skills could be anything, and would probably lend to the character's personality.

I'm still thinking things over, but I appreciate everybody's posts.

- Gregory Zitelli

[greyorm]

I haven't played these, so I can't say if they are/aren't what you're looking for, but you could also take a look at Toon and Teenagers from Outer Space. Elfs is another one you should look at: it parodies old-style D&D brilliantly (and without being D&D), and thus might be helpful in a study of the way the mechanics interact with gameplay and purpose. My own ORX is dark comedy -- however, though the rules don't explicitly support comedy they don't get in the way of it, so I don't know if it would help to take a look at in your circumstance. Unfortunately, I can't think of any other comedic RPGs off the top of my head that haven't been listed already.

[Ken]

Gregory-

Though it seems like you're leaning towards more traditional mechanics, I'm still going to recommend that you look at RISUS. Its very simple and breaks characters down into stereotypes; each stereotype is assigned a die pool which they roll when in an appropriate situation. Also, and just to join into the shameless self-promoting (lol) check out Sync in my signature; the basics are a minimalist cinema-style rpg that scores importance to the story rather than trying to gage individual stats. (Omit the sync rules and you can play just about any normal guy level story).

Overall, I would recommend concentrating on genre staples rather than the same old characteristic and skill sets. Why? Well, for one, most characters in the old B movies aren't all that different from each other in the grand scheme of things. There is certainly variation, but maybe not enough branches on the human tree to require a list of ranked characteristics and skills.

Also, I think skills and stats just kind of get in the way of creating a good ol two-dimensional character. The beauty of the B movies is reoccuring character types; professors, pilots, cops, soldiers, damsels in distress, etc. My point here would be that maybe it should be enough that your character is a college professor (or whatever) without (as a player) having the presence of mind to buy every skill they would need to make it believable.

I haven't done an exhaustive study of B movies but it seems to me that the heroes win more due to discovering the monsters' weakness more than any attribute that they possess. This may require more work from the GM; lacing a story with a way out, hoping that the characters will figure it out. I loved the cautionary tales the most, where the near miss and defeat of the monster leaves the heroes lamenting things like atomic energy (or whatever rampant technology that was responsible for the monster) and fearing what may come next.

Just some thoughts; interested in what you think.

Ken

[jag]

I'll join in the chorus and say that I'd ditch traditional skills/stats.  Characters in B movies don't succeed or fail based on their skills -- they aren't picking a door to get in somewhere, or engaging in skilled martial arts, they're running around panicked, and succeed or get chopped up due to the situation and their qualities.  The ditsy city girl tries to run in heels and twists her ankle on the roots, the professor just can't not read the ancient words of power written in blood, the hero(ine) tips over the campstove to light the bad guy on fire, etc.  None of these really fit into a good skill...

So i'd try something like a few archetypes (cheerleader, jock, nerd, misunderstood, helpful teacher, asshole stepparent, etc) which give a bonus to rolls on things they should know, and then some traits people choose.  I would propose that these traits _need_ to be free-form in order to get the ridiculous (and prima facie useless) traits you see in movies.  You, as the game designer/GM, just can't come up with enough crazy things.

To use your own words:

... Rather than trying to come up with system that models the type of game I want perfectly, I've started by creating a fairly simple set of rules dictating skills and physical/social combat, but rather than asking myself "Will this choice make the game more realistic" I've been asking myself "Will this choice make the game more 1960s B horror movie".

What about stats and skills make the game more like a 1960s B horror movie?  It's worth watching your favourite one and think about how you'd model it -- it should be very clear if you have the right rule system.  If you can't tell for most characters whether their Agility should be 7 or 8, then you probably shouldn't have that in your system.  But if you can tell that the Tough Guy stood his ground shooting zombies while the others fled (and of course therefor got eaten) because he has a Square-Jawed trait, then that's a good fit.

[Illetizgerg]

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I've somehow been focusing too much on creating a more universal engine that will run the game, and less of an engine that really supports what I need. Ultimately it boils down to this deep fear I have of games where the rules don't provide enough backbone and the setting becomes awkward because nobody knows how to handle the situation, but this game really deserves more than what I'm been putting into it.

I think that you guys are absolutely right, and the "skills" need to be generalized and created by the players. My one issue with this is that I'm worried that it would make the characters unbalanced, but ultimately I think the amount of fun that it will add to the game will quickly overshadow that. The only problem that I can see easily happening on the first playtest is one player taking the game too seriously, and thus choosing all good skills, and another player taking the game as it should be, and taking all funny (but useless) skills.

What I think I might do to prevent this is give players a certain number of "useful" and "useless" skills, in order to nudge them in the right direction. I know many of my players will probably be worried about combat, and so I want to give them the opportunity to center their characters around certain fight'in styles, however if this works out it should cost them their useful skills. With the use of useless skills the characters can then be fleshed out even further, but to a comical end (the war vet who's handy with a gun but wakes up at 2am sharp every morning screaming about Cthulhu).

I also wanted to ask Marshall something. I read over your rules and it looks like you use DitV style traits, however in your second write up you used the phrase "Something or other Skills" a couple times. I was wondering if you minded it I used this way of writing out skills for this game (ie players name things like "Bullet Dodgin' Skills", "Emotionally Implosive Skills", etc). I'm not a huge fan of Napoleon Dynamite, but I know my friends would get a kick out of it if they could write "Computer Hacking Skills".

To address what Ken said, I should probably clarify that I'm leaning more to 1960s B sci-fi horror movies, so yes, there will be extra special monsters. In fact, I really wanted to design the game as a sort of monster-of-the-week style game, so each of the creatures you battle will be very unique and have its own little quirks (it won't be creatures all the time, but you get the general idea).

This brings me to another point, having to do with health. While talking to my friends today I had a discussion about handling certain things when designing a system, and one of my friends talked to me about the importance of how health is handled (among other things). I thought over how I wanted the whole health and dying situation to be handled in my game, and I got an idea that I think I might run with. One of the things I decided early on was that your health in game decreases your stats as it depletes, however I never really figured out what I wanted to happen when you lost all of it, and I think I have a solution.

What I want to do is have your health (physical health in particular, as there is social health which I think I mentioned before) be a measure of how close you are to being unable to defend yourself. As you loose your health your ability to attack and deal damage goes down, until eventually you have zero health. At this point you can no longer defend yourself, and this can mean anything from you tripped, fell, and have no energy, or you were shot and you're bleeding out, etc. In this situation the monster/creature/murderer-on-the-loose "gets you", which can mean anything from death to egg-host to zombie slave. Furthermore, this in no way means that your character is finished, and there will probably be many chances to get him/her back, and I would prefer that characters lasted quite a while. This also adds more opportunity for the monsters to be given more personality, as each one could have multiple things it does when it "gets" a character, and you could even roll to have one happen randomly.

I've done a lot of work on trying to find a good, balanced way for prime stats and combat to work in a way that is fast, fun, and makes the players feel involved, and I think I have that down, but I'm going to go over it and really make sure that nothing contradicts the setting in any way. When it comes to archetypes, I would actually like to avoid anything that resembles classes or templates, just because I would prefer that my players aren't bound to anything and are totally free to run with any ideas they have.

The last thing I wanted to mention is that I wanted to have both physical health and social health, with the social health tied to your social power prime stat (I've named everything already, I'm just paranoid that someone will steal my incredibly precise and awesome names and then I'll grow old by myself). They would basically be analogous to your physical stuff, however they are used in situations where you get into an argument with another player or an NPC.

The reason for this is that I've found that diplomatic discussion bogs a lot of games down, especially with my group. The Diplimacy skill in D&D is absolutely useless, even with a good GM, and I wanted to fix that. Literally what I want to do is have DitV style arguments where each person says something or takes an action when in a social conflict, allowing them to make an attack on their opponent's social health (which can also be defended with social armor, which has its own sweet name which I am also too paranoid to reveal). When one character is brought down to zero social health then the other person wins the conflict, period. I think this would make for an incredibly fun environment, because many arguments that would normally take forever for the players to work out can be terminated in humorous and nonsensical ways.

Once again, thanks for the suggestions and comments. I'm eager to hear what you guys have to say about this post.

- Gregory Zitelli

[Krippler]

I recently played lots of a zombie mod to HL2 were players do typical things like pile up ammo, build blockades and get eaten by zombies. All the players that get eaten play as zombies so you're never inactive (unless the zombies run out of respawns and you get shot in the head but by then the end is usually near anyway). So, what if players who got their character taken out of the story somehow got to join the GM in narrating and throwing horror at the other players. Thus the more people die the more and more intensely the game focuses on the fate of the remaining characters till it's only that black guy left sitting in the attic greeting his executioners in the morning.

[jag]

You definitely seem to be figuring out better what you want and how to get there.  However, i still see some contradictions in your description.  Initially, you were describing a funny B-movie game that makes fun of itself and is hilarious.  But then in this last post you say...

The more I think about it, the more I realize that I've somehow been focusing too much on creating a more universal engine that will run the game, and less of an engine that really supports what I need. Ultimately it boils down to this deep fear I have of games where the rules don't provide enough backbone and the setting becomes awkward because nobody knows how to handle the situation, but this game really deserves more than what I'm been putting into it.

I think that you guys are absolutely right, and the "skills" need to be generalized and created by the players. My one issue with this is that I'm worried that it would make the characters unbalanced, but ultimately I think the amount of fun that it will add to the game will quickly overshadow that. The only problem that I can see easily happening on the first playtest is one player taking the game too seriously, and thus choosing all good skills, and another player taking the game as it should be, and taking all funny (but useless) skills.

What I think I might do to prevent this is give players a certain number of "useful" and "useless" skills, in order to nudge them in the right direction. I know many of my players will probably be worried about combat, and so I want to give them the opportunity to center their characters around certain fight'in styles, however if this works out it should cost them their useful skills. With the use of useless skills the characters can then be fleshed out even further, but to a comical end (the war vet who's handy with a gun but wakes up at 2am sharp every morning screaming about Cthulhu).

...and then i'm thinking of a Delta-Green/d20 Modern sort of campaign.  Bad nasties come in, we fight and defeat them.  Now, you can do this in d20, or Call of Cthulu, or GURPS, and this can be a great game, and maybe even a game that has its funny moments, but i don't think it'll be a "funny" game.  To the extent that its funny, it'll be because the GM and the players are trying to make it funny.  But the characters will still be oriented to kick monster ass.  Forcing them to take 'useless' skills that aren't tightly integrated into the mechanics will probably mean that people will reluctantly take the skill of 'Blueberry Scone Baking' that will provide a tiny bit of colour but will otherwisely go unused.  The fact that 'balance' is an issue probably means the game is not oriented towards humor.

See, there's no 'balance' if the goal is to make things funny.  In SAN!, for example, no one is balanced and no skill is useless.  The whole hilarity is in making your 'Blueberry Scone Baking' skill useful as you whip up 1000 scones to bury your opponent in a heap of blueberry baked goodness.  You could make a bad-ass ninja commando whose skills are "Bad-ass with guns", "Bad-ass with swords", and "Bad-ass with karate", but he wouldn't be funny.  And the rules make it so that your "Bad-ass with guns" is probably less powerful than Cretty Bocker's "Blueberry Scone Baking" -- the latter is better to make people laugh, which is ultimately the aim and the rewarded activity in SAN!.

So i guess my question to you is: Do you want to make a "kick alien ass" game, or a "The alien slimed my prom dress!" game?  Or perhaps a different sort?  What do want play to be like?  How do you envision a play session to go?


james

[Ken]

Gregory-

Some more thoughts. Again, these comments are based on my perception of the 60s B Movies as a genre, and may not be the same as yours, so take them for what they're worth. Also, I may not be thinking of the same movies as you, so maybe you should list some of your inspirations.

Ultimately it boils down to this deep fear I have of games where the rules don't provide enough backbone and the setting becomes awkward because nobody knows how to handle the situation,

Does anybody in these movies really come equipped to handle the situation at hand? Soldiers shoot (in vain), women (no matter what their job is) scream, and college kids jump in their car and drive really fast. The beauty of these situations is watching how the most ill-equipped characters deal with these weird situations. The monsters and situations usually defy the characters' ability to handle things competently; they usually win by the skin of their teeth (and only here by outlasting the monster long enough for it to undo itself.

I think that you guys are absolutely right, and the "skills" need to be generalized and created by the players. My one issue with this is that I'm worried that it would make the characters unbalanced, but ultimately I think the amount of fun that it will add to the game will quickly overshadow that. The only problem that I can see easily happening on the first playtest is one player taking the game too seriously, and thus choosing all good skills, and another player taking the game as it should be, and taking all funny (but useless) skills.

What I think I might do to prevent this is give players a certain number of "useful" and "useless" skills, in order to nudge them in the right direction. I know many of my players will probably be worried about combat, and so I want to give them the opportunity to center their characters around certain fight'in styles, however if this works out it should cost them their useful skills. With the use of useless skills the characters can then be fleshed out even further, but to a comical end (the war vet who's handy with a gun but wakes up at 2am sharp every morning screaming about Cthulhu).
- Gregory Zitelli

Is there really any such thing as a useful or useless skill? For instance, in THE BLOB you had an entire town of people and a huge pool of skills and experiences, and the hero turns out to be the teenager who just happened to see that the monster didn't like cold. Here again, he really didn't beat the monster himself; the army did that; he just had to live long enough to see it. Having a list of skills (useful or not) may be a waste of time; ingenuity and luck are really the currency for action in these stories, and maybe THAT is what you need to gage.

The other thing here is when you're fighting a seamonster, an ant the size of an army tank, or a 50-foot man, you might as well be the world's strongest mosquito rather than person. Being a crack shot with a normal gun basically just robs you of your ability to run away. There are no fair fights between humans and monsters; its run and scheme, run and scheme. This formula may create more hopelessness than the players can bear, and I'm not sure how you combat that.

Also, normal rpg staples run kind of counter to those of the B Movies in general. Namely, you don't see strings of movies centered on a reoccurring character or group of characters. The characters are not insanely skilled or interested in monster-hunting; they're just random people caught up in an incredible life-or-death situation.

My experience in horror gaming has been that it gets less fun when the characters get used to danger and are no longer scared of the monsters. In this vein, I would think it almost mandatory for each scenerio to take place somewhere different with a different cast of characters. While I wouldn't make it a rule, I think it would be fun for players not to choose the same character archetypes from game to game, but switch up; the high school rebel last time/ the stodgy professor this time.

The other thing to think of here is that the heroes are really not the stars of these movies, its the monsters. I'm not trying to make a minimalist of you, but just think putting too much emphasis on the characters may drain focus from the story, and that is really the most important factor here, right? It seems like you are trying to draw mechanical inspiration from your source material; and I think that is definitely the right track. Thats the way I'm going with my super game (see my blog; its in my signature), and I think its the best advice for any game designer. Generic or universal systems were very stylish for a while, but I think there is a lot of charm in games that are inexorably wrapped around their chosen genre.

Keep it up,

Ken

[Marshall Burns]

I also wanted to ask Marshall something. I read over your rules and it looks like you use DitV style traits, however in your second write up you used the phrase "Something or other Skills" a couple times. I was wondering if you minded it I used this way of writing out skills for this game (ie players name things like "Bullet Dodgin' Skills", "Emotionally Implosive Skills", etc). I'm not a huge fan of Napoleon Dynamite, but I know my friends would get a kick out of it if they could write "Computer Hacking Skills".

I think that they're DitV-style traits, but my knowledge of DitV is limited.  They're called "Skills" in the earlier drafts so that I could say things like "Blue Berry Scone Baking Skills" (thank you, James, for that excellent example) because it struck me as funny.  But I call them "Traits" in the latest drafts, so that the "Quirks" section could just become Personality "Traits," and you could have a Brawn Trait like "Weighs a ton."  You can use "Bullet Dodgin' Skills" all you want, though. 

Oh, also, James is right:  "balance" is not funny!

And his comments re: d20, Cthulhu, etc. bring to mind a conversation I had with my player Stephen after a few games of SAN!.  He remarked that, yes, the game was very funny, but he also said that you could be funny with any game.  I heartily disagreed; I believe my words were, "Calculating your THAC0 is not funny."  On the other hand, just reading your SAN! character's Traits out loud results in laughter.  All of which is to say, yes, system does matter.

And this:

Does anybody in these movies really come equipped to handle the situation at hand? Soldiers shoot (in vain), women (no matter what their job is) scream, and college kids jump in their car and drive really fast. The beauty of these situations is watching how the most ill-equipped characters deal with these weird situations. The monsters and situations usually defy the characters' ability to handle things competently; they usually win by the skin of their teeth (and only here by outlasting the monster long enough for it to undo itself.

is gold.

-Marshall