D&D 5E Do you embrace the silly?

[Wednesday Boy]

In my experience if the name can be one Bart uses to call Moe's, it's a joke name.

There might be an element of knowing your players. I've played in a game with a monk named Lo Mein and a bard named Marky Desade. Those players like corny jokes and it was apparent that they thought the names were funny and picked them to make a joke. But really if any of my friends gave their character a homophone name (Marky Desade, Lo Mein, Dat Man, Hugh Manly, etc.) I would have a difficult time believing that they were genuine when naming them.

 

[alienux]

Just like in real life, we enjoy silliness/humor in our games. I wouldn't want to play in an uber-serious game where I felt afraid to break a smile, and I don't want my players to fee that way either.

Having said that, we also don't get so ridiculously silly that it ruins the game, either.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Joke names have increasingly bugged me – if you don’t take your characters seriously, why should I, and by proxy, the NPCs of the world?

That being said, a character concept can be played for laughs, but you have to be true to the concept for it to work. My painfully awkward, cloistered dwarf gets laughs at the table, but the authenticity of the character still matters to me. They have to have an internal consistency, and my dialogue and actions have to be something my character would do, not something that I as a player would do “for the lolz.”

Now, in my Out of the Abyss game, I’ve definitely embraced some silliness. Not only is it again, authentic to the tone of the module and its Alice in Wonderland influences, but it counteracts what could otherwise be an oppressive, dark tale of demons and madness. So yes, there’s Glabagool with his googly eyes and funny voice. The answer to a riddle involved fish & chips. Maybe that demon has a Brooklyn accent. This list goes on. But again, I strive for consistency. The Underdark is a strange place, bizarre and threatening.

I'm down with silly jokes and stuff at the table. What I try to avoid/stamp out is silliness in the fiction - like characters with joke names and the like.

 

[discosoc]

i dont mind silliness, but i hate things like pun names and stupid accents or Mel Brooks inspired personalities. I dont spend time writing cool or interesting lore and NPCs and adventures just to have some guy named Flity Harry show up with a Yiddish accent. That stuff can be funny as an aside, but when it's the entire concept for the character it just tells me the player is bot worth spending in-game time with. So while everyone else gets plot developments, his/her character gets ignored.

 

[BookBarbarian]

I enjoy having jokes in the Game. I don't enjoy the game becoming a joke. I think there is a lot of room for a happy medium ground between the two extremes displayed in the meme. For me it's somewhere around The Princess Bride.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Sometimes, the silly simply emerges...

He described evidence of a orcish border invasion and noted that- conspicuously different from the other mountain passes- there were no orcs in the northern pass. Several of us subbed those words into Chris Rock's "No Sex in the champagne room"

Later, the DM described a scene with some salient room details being described as "on the dais"

One player thought he hadn't heard it clearly, so asked, "On the dais?"

That's when my inner 12 year old went full on Falco.
[video=youtube;cVikZ8Oe_XA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVikZ8Oe_XA&sns=em[/video]

 

[Sunseeker]

I think groups devolving into Monty Python parties is exactly related to not embracing the silly. As [MENTION=6799371]hejtmane[/MENTION] says it's one of the many ways humans deal with the stupid stuff in reality and it's completely reasonable that PCs should do so too. And lets face it, sometimes life is just funny. If you don't let yourself laugh about it, you're going to eventually be unable to take yourself seriously anymore. Once you laugh, you can go back to being serious again.

 

[BookBarbarian]

I think groups devolving into Monty Python parties is exactly related to not embracing the silly. As [MENTION=6799371]hejtmane[/MENTION] says it's one of the many ways humans deal with the stupid stuff in reality and it's completely reasonable that PCs should do so too. And lets face it, sometimes life is just funny. If you don't let yourself laugh about it, you're going to eventually be unable to take yourself seriously anymore. Once you laugh, you can go back to being serious again.

I think this is pretty true, and sounds like a plausible origin story for the Joker to boot.

 

[AverageCitizen]

We make a lot of jokes but we always circle back and say "ok no, but seriously, what do you do?" so the canon of our story is pretty serious.

That being said, I've recently considered running a game that is more of a humorous pastiche of fantasy so we can turn into the skid of silliness. Similarly, as a player I have a half-elven bard character that I really like to play because a lot more of my humor can be in-game.

 

[Warmaster Horus]

We venture into the absurd all the time. But it doesn't dominate the game, only flavors it.