D&D 5E Do you embrace the silly?

[GameOgre]

Our games are not silly but often our table is.

We keep 99% of the silliness in Out of character. They might nickname the charging two headed troll (Blue Balls) and Identify him as a target with that name and chuckle but in game its all seriousness.

Every great once in a while the joke might spill over in game and that is fine. Like the time the Drow Assassin they nicknamed "Slapp Happy" was identified as such to the king. They didn't know his name and so had to I.D. him in some way.....shrug.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Do I embrace the silly?

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?513789-Give-me-your-craziest-most-GONZO-PC-concepts!

 

[Mistwell]

Yes, there is silly in most sessions we play, both based on things in the game, and outside the game.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Quoted from elsewhen, our Brutal Slaughter of the Harpies:

...at the beginning of a campaign.

We were attacked by Harpies, and the quick-thinking Druid hit them with an Entangle as they did a strafing run through some foliage- snagged them all!

That was when the dice went sour.

We only had a few PCs with ranged weaponry- a guy with a bow, a guy with a throwing hammer, one with a sling, and the Wiz had a dagger.

The guy with the Hammer is venturing into the area of the Entangle to retrieve his hammer and the Wiz' dagger.

Most of the to-hit rolls were low. When we did hit, no attack did more than 3HP damage. We finish off the first Harpy just as the Entangle is starting to expire...

So the Druid does Entangle #2...and our futility continues. The dice continue to stay as low as a soldier under fire.

The guy with the Hammer is, by now, having to venture into the area of the Entangle to retrieve arrows that have missed. The PC with the sling is now using rocks.

Harpy #2 is near death but still fighting and Harpy #3 is untouched when Entangle #2 is expiring, so the Druid pops Entangle #3.

My PC and the hammer-thrower are apologizing to the Harpies- in character- for the cruel deaths that we are inflicting upon them...especially after the hammer-thrower retrieved the Wizard's dagger out of the still-living Harpy#2 so the Wizard could throw it again. But he doesn't leave the Entangle area until after he stabs the dying Harpy with that dagger to finish it off.

By now, all of the arrows have been used, either striking the Harpies or being broken downrange. EVERYONE ELSE IS THROWING ROCKS.

The last Harpy dies just before Entangle #3 does.

All of this time, our DM has been flabbergasted- absolutely red faced and flustered- at the action. "F$%^&ing Entangle! That spell is broken!" *rant*rant*rant*

To which the Druid's player huffily responded "Well, it was either that or Create Food & Water! The Harpies could have had a meal and a bath!"

LOLs abounded.

I gotz more...

 

[seebs]

I will generally run with it. One of my players made a luchador. He has enemies, which is why he is always masked. Recently, there was an encounter with thugs. They recognized him (because he was wearing his mask). So they attacked him.

The thugs attacking him switched from short swords to folding steel chairs. It's tradition.

 

[ccs]

I don't know about silly. One of my players is playing a Kobold Assassin, and just about every attack he makes involved making an Acrobatics check first. However, it is still early days for us. I am sure it will eventually devolve(or is it Transcend?) to a sillier state.

Transcend.

 

[Illithidbix]

Yes.

But, I find most of the humour in roleplay games is when you're laughing out of character at the incompetence/ignorance of the party or their entirely undeserved success rather than deliberately being comical. Mostly if something is done/said deliberately for humour, it is meant to be taken *entirely seriously* by the characters themselves.

Emergent humour is often just funnier than *trying* too hard at being humourous.



(A key example is a adaptation of The Three Musketeers from the 70's where D'Artagnan attempts to sweep the rug from under the feet of some guards... only to rip instead causing the distraught guards to exclaim "He ripped our rug!" "Why would he do that?") - that's exactly what I aspire to in a game.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

From the same DM and campaign as The Battle of the Brutal Slaughter of the Harpies came more silliness:

He had our party encountering a tribe in the wilderness, and he was struggling with the Chief's welcoming speech, which had a part something like "We are a tribe of hunter-gatherers...well, more hunters than gatherers...um...well we gather a lot too..." I interrupted (mimicking his "Chief voice") with "Argh! "more hunters than gatherers?" Who wrote this speech? Bring me the royal speechwriter's head! This is CRAP!"

My shenanigans started a gigglefest that took a good 15-20 minutes to end.

*****

And when we were playing RIFTS:

...one player had lost track of the fact that someone else had already found what the party was looking for and was bugging out. He burst into the camp's mess hall, all fierce, black and deadly in his captured SAMAS armor...only to encounter unarmed kitchen workers. They had no clue as to what he was looking for, despite his demands and threats, backed up with displays of physical violence (breaking tables, firing his weapon, etc.) FINALLY, someone in the group got his attention and told him we had accomplished the mission and he left.

We chose that moment to break to get drinks for the kitchen, and I started with: "Imagine these guys, 10 years from now...(w/Mexican accent- we're in Texas, after all) "Miguel, Lupe and I were just minding our business, when some madman burst into the mess hall firing his big gun and making threats. We had no idea what he wanted...I think he was high!" "Yeah...maybe he had the munchies something fierce...and he was all like "Where are the Oreo Cookies? C'mon M-F! WHERE ARE THE OREO COOKIES!"

At that point, everyone lapsed into similar accents and "role-played" aspects of his attack as a stoner in SAMAS with the munchies...with him supplying the appropriately altered dialog for his PC.

We laughed like it was a Cheech and Chong movie, and didn't game for the rest of the night.

"WHERE ARE THE OREO COOKIES!" is still a show-stopper for that game group.

 

[Lanefan]

If something silly (in or out of character, doesn't matter) doesn't happen in a given session we're probably doing it wrong. And yes, we embrace it lovingly.

As for names, a few that have gone by during our long and chequered history:

Revelations
Loser
Drunken Danny Druid (a.k.a. DDD)
Knottwoor Thmutch
Sir Kalvin of Hobbes
Fozzdyk Fizzdip
Broken
Mediocrates
Rainbow Moonbeam Tuesday

And when a name just won't come but is needed anyway, and right now:

Stilth Incan
No'ei Deyeyet
Anonymes
NoName
X
Generic
Sodoff

All the above are/were PC names; I could fill the same list again with NPC names. Most of these characters, as one might expect, didn't last long; but Sir Kalvin went on to a long and excellent career while X has been going for years and is still active today.

There's also been about 20 characters and NPCs named after various hockey players; never mind the one named Puck and another named Stick.

Lanefan

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

Context.

...okay, but I haven't given any context to the name examples you've made declaration of being jokes, so that doesn't quite create a clear picture for me how it is that you've determined real people's names are jokes.