D&D 5E Whimsy in your game?

[Jhaelen]

I prefer the whimsy to come exclusively from my players while playing an adventure. Believe me, that's certainly more than enough whimsy - regardless how dark or serious the scenario actually is!

 

[MagicSN]

My own experience is that "jokes" in the prepared adventure throw my players EXTREMELY out of the game-world. My players have an extreme requirement that everything "fits into the world". This does not make them humorless. There are a lot of funny stuffs happening at the game table, initiated by the players (!). Often what reads funny as a text just "does not work" on the game table. Especially if you play a "gritty/dark" gameworld. Every single time I used something like that it ended in the players being thrown out of gameworld immersion.
My experience really is: Make funny stuff "on the go" (situation comics works best), do NOT bring a NPC which is not meant seriously from his whole concept. So that the players take a NPC serious, he needs to fit into the world.

I am aware of course there are different kind of gamegroups. Maybe others play with less immersion and more with joky stuff. For them something like this might be fine.

 

[Celebrim]

My major influences are JRR Tolkien, the Grimm's Fairy Tales (and similar sources of ancient folk belief), and HP Lovecraft. It's a world where the fear/horror/madness rules of Ravenloft are in effect.

It doesn't leave a lot of room for whimsy. There are many things that are comic, I suppose, from a certain point of view - one of the PC's retainers is a goblin chef often played for humor, even when he's talking about the delightful dishes that he can make of man meat and would the PC's like to indulge. And there are self-absorbed highly pretentious talking cats, and fairies that argue during combat over which of them will get to eat which of the PC's and why that PC's is the tastier. And there are characters that are presented as characters - eccentric, comical, over the top stereotypes, with goofy Southern or Irish or Cockney accents or what passes for such as I can manage them. And their are Jesters that mock the PC's that go around blessing people with the Holy Parsnip - which ironically or not, really is Holy. In one famous scene in the game, a police officer tried to give a parking ticket to a PC's illegally parked bear. In another scene, the party was an attacked by an angry animated armoire that tried to swallow the PCs (and at times succeeded). And of course, the players themselves are filled with comic whimsy and silliness and often as not slapstick stupidity that they inflict upon their own characters.

But whimsy itself I associate with Chaotic Good and especially Chaotic Neutral and not Chaotic Evil. Of course, Chaotic Evil would like to present itself in an attractive, quaint, appealing, fanciful, and childish manner because it wants to down play how horrific it is. But I'm not sure I'm on board with it being actually whimsical or presented as being in its basic nature whimsical.

But even more than I'm not onboard CE = 'whimsy', I'm really not into going beyond inspiration into the things that are derivative. I don't know anything about the work under discussion, but I'll be much more forgiving of elements of the work that are inspired by the style of Alice and Wonderland than I will be anything that appears to be content directly lifted from it. Often as not I find making derivative works is a sign of lack of respect for the original, and equally lack of ability to or trust in your own creative resources.

I can remember when the height of my own creativity was that every closet in every dungeon had skeletons in it, because "they have skeletons in the closet" - har har har. I guess my biggest fear regarding an 'Alice in Wonderland' inspired work, is that it will remind me of my own work as a 12 year old.

 

[Fralex]

I think the whimsy works here because there's a legitimate reason for it. The Underdark is now the Wonderdark because demonic insanity has infused it. Craziness that results is not supposed to feel like it fits in; the whole point is that something is horrifyingly wrong here, and with the Underdark, that's saying something.

What I mean is, humor is heavily dependent on how emotionally detached you are from it. Craziness especially is only funny at a distance (haha, this isolated soldier still thinks it's World War II!); up close it's either horrifying (oh god, this person is both highly unstable and very well-armed) or tragic (wow, this person's lost years of their life and might never be able to fully reintegrate into society). And the players can choose the distance. In fact, individual players can play the game at varying levels of seriousness, and it can still all be reconciled fairly easily. You can choose to take the insanity seriously and have your character find it repulsive, or choose to join in by allowing your character to go a little nuts down there. Either way, your playstyle will be justified by the story. It's actually pretty clever.

 

[Corpsetaker]

I prefer scary madness, not Looney Tunes.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I prefer scary madness, not Looney Tunes.

So, what's your opinion on whimsy in D&D?

 

[Fralex]

So what do you pull D&D out for? For me, I've had a range of campaigns with different themes and tones. It doesn't do gritty realism well, admittedly, but the comedic scale is well accommodated at both ends.

Have many of those been done with 5th edition? I remember the DMG had some interesting advice for adjusting the tone of the game (i.e. messing with rest duration, using inspiration to encourage certain genre conventions). Did you try any of that out, and if so, how well did it work?

 

[Fralex]

I prefer scary madness, not Looney Tunes.

WAIT. Bit of a tangent, but I just got an amazing idea: Whimsy inspired by Fleischer-era cartoons. They have a sort of uncanny, dream-like quality to them that you rarely see nowadays that makes them so wonderfully eerie.
I realize a lot of this is in the animation style, something hard for a tabletop game to mimic, but man, if I could think of a way to pull this off...

 

[This Effin’ GM]

Personally, I love it. I have always been under the mindset that Chaotic creatures are just as likely to invite you over for tea as they are to tear your insides out through your throat, which is how I have always ran CG, CN, and CE (granted, the good/evil access somewhat changes those impulses, but you get the point). I love that the demons are included in this idea, as they are my favorite type of creature to run. I just wish there was more baubau to prescribe to my fever.

 

[Mallus]

Glancing back at this thread, it's funny to see someone mention not wanting "Looney Tunes" in their D&D.

I wonder if they know where the classic D&D magic item, the venerable Portable Hole comes from?

Gygax and Co. didn't make it up.

Hint for the young and/or culturally illiterate: it comes from Looney Tunes, specifically, Road Runner/Coyote.