Why your RPG Campaign is a Joke

 

I tend to follow GURPS blogs, which means I mostly read my own stuff and Toadkiller Dog's blog, because we seem to be the most active ones in my reading list (we've diminished a lot from the heady days of the surge of GURPS blogs back when this blog started).  And, of course, reading up on Dungeon Fantasy, especially the "Rogue-like" approach he seems to favor, got me to thinking about randomness.  We tend to associate that sort of gameplay with very grimdark games, but my experience is that they often lead to hilarity and a lot of jokes.  Of course, most campaigns do, and I think I've made the connection between why, and why so many RPG campaigns "devolve" into comedy, and it is this:

Anytime you introduce randomness into a story, you create the opportunity for the unexpected subversion of expectations, typically in a hilarious way. Also, players need a release valve for tension.

"We are the Knights who Say Monty Python Qoutes!"

When I cut my teeth on RPGs, Toonami was still a thing and all of us grew up with action anime, and we often sought to emulate it in our RPGs (in this regard, not much has changed, I suppose).  Part and parcel of action anime is its tendency to take the piss out of its own characters. Certainly, they get to have cool moments, but there's often moments where characters make fun of the main character, or the main character ruins his own tension, or the creator of the anime conceives of the series as a parody (most action anime seems to begin as a parody and devolve into a cliche action series, rather than the other way around).  So I've always included a sense of humor in my games, little outtakes, joining in when players make ridiculous quotes, etc.  To me, this was just part of gaming.

But when I began to converse with the rest of the community, I was often surprised by how seriously a lot of other GMs took their games.  I suppose it makes sense: you wouldn't put a lot of work into something you didn't take seriously, so you might expect others to treat your work with the same dignity, and it can be frustrating to work out an intricately detailed set of NPCs, mythmaking and worldbuilding, only to have players cracking jokes at your world's expense in the first session.

The trend, I noticed, was to blame players.  The idea was that if only the GM could find players that took his campaign seriously, it would work.  Some blamed themselves: if they had made a better world, this wouldn't have happened.  I think both are off.  I've put a ton of work into my campaigns.  I'm on a blog that you're reading, likely because you think I'm an insightful and witty GM.  Likewise, I've played with the sort of players I think most GMs would envy: prepared, with thorough-but-useful backstories, who listen to one another and work together, not just as characters, but as players, falling silent for the shy players, stepping forward to lead the group when they're at an impasse, talking to me about problems, etc.  And yet, we still get lots of quotes and wisecracks and outright belly laughter. So if it isn't me or my players, what is it?

 

I don't think the "problem" is you, nor your players.  I think the humor of RPGs are inherent in how they're constructed, and in the human condition.  With a few exceptions, I think anytime you put an RPG together with human beings, you'll get jokes.

 

Life is a Joke; Laugh a Little! 

A lot of times when we create an RPG, we set out to engage in mythmaking.  This is not universal, of course, but generally RPGs emulate fiction, especially mythic works.  They're typically stories of a small band of adventurers against impossible odds, trying to save the world, or trying to explore some dread place, or battling some dark evil, something like that.  These narratives have beats that we expect to be in place.  If you're trying to defeat a great evil and save the world, you expect escalating challenges, you don't expect to defeat the Big Bad in act 1, you expect the final battle to be difficult, but you also expect to win (typically at the last moment), etc.

But real life doesn't work like that.  In real life, the "hero" isn't guaranteed to survive, nor is he guaranteed a final confrontation with "the villain." The problem my be resolved by something completely out of either the hero's or villain's control.  There may be no climactic clash, and even if there is, there's no guarantee for it to be especially satisfying, or to simultaneously and symbolically resolve a secondary arc in the hero's life, etc. We seek and hope for the satisfying symbolism of mythical narrative, but the real world is complex and filled with too many variables for there to be an easy narrative.  There are literally billions of people who all want to be the protagonist, none of whom see themselves as the villain, and even when you explicitly set things up for climactic confrontations (such as a sport's tournament), they often don't work out in satisfying ways.  And when we find ourselves confronted by the tragic absurdities created by these mounting complexities that makes our life hard or humiliates us, we break the tension by cracking a joke, by laughing at it.

Do you know what else is filled with variables outside of your control and also high stakes that people invest a lot into? That's right, your RPG campaign.  Every time you roll the dice, you're relinquishing some control and introducing a variable that could ruin your narratively satisfying arc. And even if you eliminate the dice (and play something diceless, for example), you still have to deal with the interactions of your players with your story and with one another.  Each player added adds a new set of variables to deal with, often compounding with one another.  Any one of these interactions could find some flaw in your work, or create an unexpected and absurd situation, thus ruining the majestic dignity you worked so hard to create.

Worse, this is the whole point of RPGs.  People want more engagement from their players, not less, which means they want more variables introduced, not less. Similarly, people tend to ask for more randomness: more tables to roll on, more options for interesting results from rolls, more rolls in general.  There are limits, of course: we tend not to have games with a hundred players where everyone rolls on a complex mega-table every other second.  But still, we also tend to describe games without any roll of the dice where the GM just tells a story to silent, passive and receptive players "boring."  We could just be telling stories, but as a general rule, we want this randomness.  And that randomness creates the tension and unfulfilled expectations, and when that happens, players start to crack jokes to deal with it, and your campaign "devolves" into Monty Python.  The "problem" is baked in.

The Tao of Game Mastering

I think the first step to resolving the problem is to accept it.

The problem isn't really that "the game is a joke," it's that the GM and/or players had very rigid expectations of mythmaking: they wanted the story to go a particular way, and when it didn't, they were disappointed.  That's because the linear "railroad" story where the GM carefully plans everything out, the "failed novelist" approach, as I've heard some people refer to it as, is a fragile approach.  Because it relies on a chain of events to create the payoffs you're looking for, the failure of one of those events can lead to cascading failures because they'll invalidate future events and more planning you created.  Every time you roll the dice, or let your players (who cannot know about the future events, lest the payoff cease to be a payoff) you risk the chance of them blowing up your campaign.  There are ways to make the game more resilient by mitigating the variables and their impact on your story ("If you don't want the players to kill the big bad in act 1, don't let the players interact with the big bad before the climax!"), but they only harden the fragile narrative.

There is a better way.  You must learn to accept your powerlessness to control events, and embrace your power to shape narrative out of events.

What I've found, the longer I've gamed, is that I tend to be happier when I let go of my expectations.  I'm playing 7th Sea right now, and rather than create the sort of character I'd like to play, I created the sort of character I thought my wife might like to play across from, and that might serve the campaign well.  As a result, while I'm invested in the success of the campaign, I'm not particularly invested in what happens to my character.  As a result, I'm free to explore anything that comes my way.  This culminated in a particularly satisfying moment where my mentor seemed to have betrayed me. I expected a typical confrontation and prepared to play my part.  However, given certain strictures my character is under, I couldn't draw my weapons and had to listen to him, and when he tried to kill himself, I went to rescue him "because that's what my character would do," even though I was certain it would fail, and I foolishly invested resources in this, because that's what my character would do... and not only did it work, but we actually managed to resolve the entire thing, almost by accident.  See, the GM hadn't really decided how that whole thing should play out.  The outcome didn't matter to his story and he was prepared to work with whatever happened, and similarly, I wasn't really invested in a particular outcome, so the outcome was decided by what "felt right" for the choices of those involved, and the way the dice fell.  We embraced the chaos... and a very nice story fell out.

See, the real world is chaotic, this is true, but we also create myths out of real world events.  Some of this arises from the sheer number of events: you do not wake up to an action movie opening every morning, and thereafter go to work in high octane chase scenes. Most days are humdrum, but if you have enough days, some will be more interesting than others.  Similarly, an RPG that has a lot of randomness in it, from a lot of active players and a lot of interesting dice rolls that all have interesting outcomes, eventually something interesting will pop out.  But we also construct narratives out of events.  I have kids, and I tend to look at everything they do through the lens of "growing up," and so the first time they see an airplane, or they play with a frog, in the back of my mind, some saccharine music is playing and the whole scene plays out in sepia, a home-video that I'm seeing in real time, because I assign importance to these utterly mundane events.  All parents do this on some level, I think, which is why we can be so tedious ("Look!  A video of my kid playing with a frog! Isn't it sweet?!") but it highlights the fact that you can make nearly anything feel narratively meaningful if you try hard enough.

The easiest narrative to construct out of entirely random but otherwise mundane events is comedy.  If you were to stop and look at your previous day and think "If someone made a TV show out of it, what genre would it be?" the answer would probably be either "Slice of life" or "Comedy." Even if you have a high-octane profession, such as an actor or a soldier, chances are you spent yesterday not doing much of consequence: you swept some floors, or argued with your agent, or woke with a hangover. Funny stuff!

 

If something unusual happened, chances are it wasn't good: most people rely on stability, so a sudden change disrupts their life. Most of these events tend to be mundane ("The printer is out of ink, and I needed to be at the meeting 5 minutes ago!") which makes comedy more appropriate, but intense events tend to be intensely bad. An accident on the freeway is more likely to put your in the hospital than it is to make you richer or happier as a person.  Thus, the second most easy narratives to construct are tragedies or horror.  Events can pile up and destroy you and your character, wiping away your hopes and dreams, or at least threatening to do so.  This creates dread, fear and deep unhappiness that can be cathartic to experience with another life.  That said, I rarely see tragedy as an especially popular genre, and "hopeless horror" tend to get a pretty visceral reaction from people who tend to hate it.

But you can still extract a heroic narrative from these random events: you can rise above the tragic events, or find that your mundane, tedious chaos in your life begins to mount in a particular way that lets you tell a story about growth, maturity and overcoming obstacles.  In a lot of ways, it's about attitude, the "soundtrack of your life."  Someone who gets to work late because of a traffic jam and then is unable to print up the reports needed because the printer is out of ink, and misses the vital meeting which means their company is likely doomed and is sent home early to sort their life out is a comedy if you play it with yakkety sax and have a sad trombone after you're sent home, but it's a tragedy if you play those tragic moments in slow motion with sad violins, and it's a heroic story if each moment of trial becomes increasingly tense with rapid, thrilling music ("Will he make it to work on time? No? And the printer is out of ink? And they sent him home because the company is in trouble? Dun dun dun, how will our hero get out of this one?!").

How to Run an Awesome Game

A good RPG can help you use the randomness of the game to construct the sort of narrative you're looking for.  A comical game tends to have lots of whacky tables to allow you to introduce random elements in the game ("The printer is out of ink... because it broke down and sprayed ink all over your face! Wah wah waaaah!") while tragic games often have mechanics that slowly grind characters down towards their inevitable doom, like the Jenga mechanic of Dread, which at every turn ensures that even with success, the characters come closer to ultimate defeat. And heroic games often give you the tools you need to barely overcome the impossible odds ("Despite being late and the printer being out of ink, I barely missed the "I make my meeting on time" roll by 1 point...fortunately, I still have a hero point!") and offers the tools necessary to overcome the problems characters face, typically turning a hopeless scenario into a hopeful one ("Our company is going under. I'm sending you home to take a break." "Okay, but I'm going to take these files with me because I took the Epic Manager perk, and I think I can still save the company.  Or, you know, I could switch over to the Epic Entrepreneur build and start my own business with all the XP I gained from this job...").  Good RPGs know what they're supposed to be about, and give you the tools to create that story.

But in the end, it is you and your fellow players that create that story.  The easiest way to do that is to accept the absurdity of the game, but to use it as the raw material for your myth making.  I remember a story on RPG.net about why a particular guy hated randomness in his game: he had created an archer in D&D who literally missed every shot he made.  He pointed out this could never happen in a game where you could fudge the dice.  Others pointed out that in a campaign without randomness his character would have been another "also ran" archer who had no interesting qualities; now he has an awesome story to tell about the archer who could never hit.  The player had the expectation of being a good (or at least competent) character, but the dice gave him the opportunity to create something he never would have thought of: an epic joke of a character.  And imagine if he'd kept playing with that character, and actually managed to land a hit: at some point, it doesn't even matter what the character hit, that hit was significant, because it broke his bad luck.  There's a story to tell there.

This is why you'll often see me advocating "sandbox" and "improvisational" play.  I definitely believe in prep and even overprep, and I don't even mind creating detailed story-beats, but I recommend doing it all in the service of that eventual improvisation, to allow you to take whatever happens and kick it up a notch.  By embracing the chaos and planning to support yourself whenever something happens that you can't anticipate, you create an anti-fragile game, where the chaos itself, instead of breaking your game, makes it better. Instead of having an "also ran" campaign filled with cliches and standard beats, you get something unusual and special, because weird things are always happening in RPGs, but rather than downplaying them, you're seizing onto them like little story nuggets and blowing them up into the core beats of your campaign in a way that keeps your players, and yourself, excited and engaged.

I will also say that if you plan a detailed campaign and players show up and begin cracking jokes about it, they're engaged.  I mean, first of all, they showed up, and second of all, they're engaging with the material enough to crack jokes about it.  That's more than can be said about a lot of campaigns.  These jokes show you where tension lies in your campaign, and what player expectations are, and what you can do to facilitate the game.  If people joke about your adventure beginning in yet-another-tavern, maybe start your next adventure somewhere else, or lean into it and explore why so many adventures seem to start in this particular tavern, because clearly the trope of "starting adventures in taverns" speaks to your players on some level, more so than the fact that, say, the guy who gave them a map was a dark old wizard who was clearly going to betray them in the end.  What are your players quoting? Is it Star Wars? Star Trek? Firefly? Monty Python? Princess Bride? Labyrinth? Do they break out into Disney songs or numbers from musicals (if that seems weirdly specific, it's based on real life)? That tells you a lot about their culture and you can glean what sort of stories to run for them based on that.

The core point here is the humor only ruins your campaign if you let it.  Humor represents a fundamental tension in how RPGs work, and they pose a deeper question to you on how you want to deal with the fundamental chaos of life.  You can either try to minimize it to tell the story you want to tell, or you can embrace the chaos and be the voice of the story the game and its chaotic interactions seems to being trying to tell.  I think humor and absurdity represent opportunity.  Their presence makes the game feel more real and authentic, and exploring the unexpected usually leads to a vastly more satisfying game than in putting everything in a box.  People, after all, will talk much more about a TPK or that time they never hit anything than they will of an adventure that runs exactly as the expected.

Post-Script

I anticipate two comments, but if there are more, I'll try to address them here.  The first is that this seems to suggest that more randomness and complexity is always better.  This is not what I'm saying.  I'm saying that you need to accept what randomness and complexity comes your way. Stories are built out of unexpected events. But you're also human, and complexity creates stress.  Too little stress is "boring," and too much stress is "overwhelming." Thus, low complexity games with mitigated variables tend to be better for beginners, who are just learning the game, and as you get better, we tend to want to ramp up the complexity to the edge of what we can handle, but no more. You're the best judge of where that line lies; I just encourage you to push your way out of your comfort zone and try to allow some of that chaos to unfold; see where it takes you.

The other is "Okay, but how do I create interesting stories out of random events?" Ah, that's a matter of experience. This is why I focused on teaching the essence of story telling in my "How To" series. If you can tell a story, if you can be a good "failed novelist," then you can understand enough to improvise some story beats when you see an opportunity ("Oh no, he critically failed his influence roll with his love interest.  Wait, I've seen enough romantic comedy to know how this needs to go!").  But that's not something I can really explain in one post. It's something you just have to learn.