D&D is easy, social fun. I am not here to prove that my character build is the uberest by taking down your enemy in an empty 20-by-20 battlefield. I am not here to listen quietly to everyone's detailed backstory. Degenerating into laughter for 5 minutes sounds like a great use of game-time to me. If that doesn't sound like a great time to you, I don't think we're using D&D for the same purposes. And honestly, I think you could be doing other things that realize your goals much better than D&D ever will - D&D cannot provide a balanced challenge like a competitive sport. D&D cannot entertain a broad audience like a written novel.
This is
incredibly judgmental: people who approach D&D differently from you are doing so for puerile, boring reasons (taking down enemies on empty 20x20 battlefields, or making others listen quietly to their backstories, or proving that the character builds are the best in a balanced, sport-like challenge);
and they are using the wrong medium for their boring goals, so not only are they boring and/or puerile, but they're idiots as well!
Last night I went to a theatre to see some stand-up comedy. The last time I went to the theatre it was to see Waiting for Godot. Last night I laughed. Waiting for Godot left me devastated and crying. I have some friends who would only go to the comedy, but not the absurdist tragedy. And of course some people experience Waiting for Godot as more comedic than tragic.
When I play D&D (or other fantasy RPGs) I am not generally aiming for laughs. When I need a quick, violent henchman in my Burning Wheel game last year, I brought Athog onto the stage. This got a wry smile from a couple of players (being a variant on "Thug A") - I wasn't looking for and don't need belly laughs.
In my BW game last week, the PCs were trudging through the Bright Desert into the foothills of the Abor-Alz. The orienteering check was failed, and I described them as having arrived in the foothills but east of where they wanted to be; and also described the pool they had found in a cleft in the foothill rocks as having been fouled by defecation. That could have been the trigger for a joke; moreso when a tracking check implied that the footprints around the pool were the light footprints of an elf. But the players played it completely straight, and were outraged and disgusted that anyone, let alone an elf, might do such a thing.
These legitimate ranges of aesthetic response to ingame situations have nothing to do with "uberbuilds", "empty battlefields", or "let me tell you my character's backstory".
I've GMed The Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl. I've also GMed Dungeonland. The latter has more (so-called) whimsy. The former is the better module, and can produce plenty of humour in play, mostly because of the tremendous amounts of both vertical and horizontal space in the rift. Dungeonland I found pretty boring and a bit of a hack-fest.
that's not at all what the cartoons in the rulebooks, the weird suggestions for tricks, or the funny art you might see by Jim Holloway in a module are about. They aren't making a humorous adventure full of jokes that may fall flat when actually played. They're absurdist takes on more serious situations common in games. The adventurers with the mouse disguises are clearly trying to infiltrate a mousey version of the temple on the cover of the 1e PH. It's the game company making a joke about its own product. Jim Holloway art often showed characters humorously failing or suffering consequences of accidents due to situations described seriously in the adventure. In all of these cases, you had the company embracing the idea that players will find humor in these situations even when originally presented in a serious manner
This is insightful.
The humour of Gygax's DMG isn't about trying to enforce one particular sort of experience on D&D players - it's presenting one particular aesthetic response to the sorts of situations that fantasy RPGing serves up.
Dungeonland, in my view, does fall flat. Whereas having the PC who is famous, at the table, for being the one who falls down the pits etc get pushed to the bottom of the Glacial Rift never gets old! (And I'm sure there are other groups who have played G2 and had humour be generated by fireballs melting the ice caves, or had a PC impaled by a bolt from the giants' ballistas, or whatever, though these things have never happened at my table.)
I think WotC's decision to remove humor, idiosyncrasy, and, ahem, any identifiable traces of voice from the official books was disastrous.
There are a lot of ways to avoid po-faced writing other than by writing "funny" adventures, though. Burning Wheel presents itself as a pretty serious game, but has more authorial voice in its rulebooks than any other RPG book I know except perhaps Gygax's DMG. (BW also has humour scattered throughout its character build rules, like the healing talent called Wolverine and the Leper lifepath giving the "White Gold Wielder" trait, but I'm not sure these add very much to the game.)
And while I can't comment on a wide range of 3E books, the 4e books don't strike me as any more "textbook" like than the RQ and RM rulebooks that were written 20 to 30 years before them. And while Tunnels and Trolls 5th ed (1979, I think), in contrast with these rulebooks, has a lot of voice and humour, I'm still more likely to play RM, RQ or 4e than T&T.
