How serious is your d&d?

My D&D recently saw the introduction of tiny exploding turtles that goblins use as grenades.

My recent campaigns have been in a FLGS and always have had teens playing - often with parents too - so appropriate demeanor is in good style/taste/fashion. That has not stopped us from being silly for a bit when something happens in-game and a player riffs off it. My characters are usually very goal-oriented (if I can figure out what the goal of the plot is) so I tend toward serious.

Great first post and question OP. Have some XP.

For me, D&D has a few more serious moments, but for the most part it is a light-hearted game. My group seems to have the most fun when goofy things happen in game.

However, when we play other systems like WFRP or Ars Magica - the games are much more serious. I am sure it is a tone I set based on the rules set or something like that, but that is how it works at my table.

Most of the games I run are like Disc World. Genre savvy. Narrative causality.

So people who blow up leave nothing but thier boots, million to one chances come up nine times out of ten..

dnd4vr said:

Like most were are fairly serious but jokes happen. Our DM puts a lot of time into the game and makes up most of the adventures himself, so he appreciates it when we play seriously much of the time.

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Heh. I put in a lot of prep time for our campaign, and I'd be terribly disappointed if my players took it too seriously.

MarkB said:

Heh. I put in a lot of prep time for our campaign, and I'd be terribly disappointed if my players took it too seriously.

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It does get a bit... heavy... at times. But, we also take breaks to joke around while he's prepping stuff, etc. Our sessions tend to be long, too, typically 10 hours or more. I think the shortest in the current campaign was maybe 7 and the longest over 14. Some players might have a hard time playing so long, but the game is challenging, interesting, and fun so we all love it.

My D&D is pretty serious, which allows for much more relaxing and joking around than the way I run most other roleplaying games, i.e. my horror campaign was treated as DEADLY SERIOUS business (when it was in HERO System for the first two or so seasons before it moved to Delta Green, players even got bonus CP for protecting the mood if they had gone the entire session without joking or laughing; this rule was scrapped when the table basically explained to me that laughter is a DEFENSE MECHANISM against horrible things, and without that defense mechanism, the campaign was too upsetting: I took this as a compliment, but I softened the 'no laughing' rule).

I would say roughly 85% of roleplayers seem to prefer a more relaxed, more goofy, less serious gaming atmosphere than I do. I definitely take this stuff more seriously than average. My goal is to hit as close as I can to the tone and quality of a prime time (HBO) hour-long drama series for each game session. It is a tough goal to hit and I don't always hit it, and maybe impossible now that I've lost the gaming group that I had for more or less my entire life, and am playing with acquaintances and strangers, often in public spaces (FLGS) where I can't control the atmosphere (light, music), but it's still the best way to define what I'm aiming for.

I guess the last thing I have to say is that I am WAY more okay with character-based/in character humor than out of character goofiness. Like if a character does or says something that cracks the table up, I'm fine with that in D&D. It's when the rest of the table starts riffing on it with their own jokes that it gets disruptive IMO.

Oh, one more thing. I am definitely my own enemy sometimes in my quest for seriousness. In that I understand the temptation to joke around and fall prey to it myself more often than I'd like.

We take playing the game fairly seriously, in that we speak in character, make in character decisions, etc, but the game tends not to be overtly or specifically serious in tone.

No one in the group is so into broody characters that their characters can’t have fun, and none of us are remotely interested in grimdark storytelling, at all.

The campaigns are usually serious, but the players are goofballs. We have fun.

My campaign is "moderately" serious but with pockets of levity so that there's some relief. I try to get my players to avoid making overly silly characters as they still need to be functional within the campaign world but I feel that there's plenty of humour as well.