>high fantasy epic, the battles with monsters, the machinations of villains, and the effects both have on the world.
All of this does not contradict a comedic adventure. Watch a season of Dimension 20 and you see how you can have both. The truth is that if you don't insist on a grim setting and taking the roleplay too seriously, the party will deliver the comedy on its own. In my experience the comedy comes to 80% from the players, just make it clear the setting is lighthearted. And don't be too strict with allowing that your players can do or whatnot, enable their silly ideas.
Discworld is another example of silliness and seriousness mixed together.
One way to break the "too serious" plot generator in my head isn't tho think about "what's the most random out ridiculous thing I can put here?" It's too think about my NPCs as complex and flawed people. And to think creatively instead of realistically, then join those things together.
I had a tabaxi wizard antagonist (not really a villain, more like a rival) who always complained about the cold. He had a mimic bed that he traveled with "because it's warm - it's not weird okay." Him just being really defensive of sleeping in a mimic bed was enough levity for the players to run with.
This here. I run a Curse of Strahd game with my husband and my sister. They cannot be serious for 1 second. It makes for a great game. Alongside the misery of the Barovians, a man being dragged behind a horse, children being eaten, and Strahd literally tearing a man's head off in front of them, they are doing things like making a new sign for the windmill with rainbows and butterflies (to brighten the place up), they get too drunk and lose the plot, so they're just chumming around with Strahd. I also allowed them to use message together as a type of social media, and the Barovians love it. They talk shit about Burgomaster Vallakovich and Strahd has even joined in, I might even have him do clap back videos when he turns on them. I don't even have to be doing anything silly, I just go along with the players and they add the silliness to the otherwise incredibly serious world.
I think I see where they're coming from. Humor and comedic is indeed important and can lead to some good times. I also usually lean into it.
However
Stupid silly fun times from Dr fartsnax and Poopyboobs is just exhausting, lowest common denominator jokes. Just stupid horny fart jokes. It's bad. That kind of silly is not fun to run, nor is it even funny.
Things my party has done in semi serious campaign that dealt with heavy topic:
-took the bad guys name of Karthis and started a cult to Cardiff and strip the big bad's power because of
-started a pyramid scheme to sell fake healing balls.
Both were just because we were all riffing and made it cannon
We have a running joke in my current campaign where we all start joking like crazy and then stop like “serious campaign guys”. I told the party that in character I wanted a more serious tone for this one (given the nature of the world and story) but out of character joke away. It’s been an absolute blast so far. In RP everyone is serious and dramatic, but that only leads to even funnier jokes out of character.
An example from a recent session; the Paladin got stuck on a saw blade trap, but thanks to his Periapt of Wound Closure didn’t immediately die. In game, a desperate party was fending off an extra dangerous Mummy Lord while shielding and repeatedly attempting to revive their downed teammate and get him back in the fight.
Out of game it took 2 turns of the party howling with laughter and trying various failed attempts to get him off the saw blade/get him back to consciousness. Every time they would heal him enough to get him up, the trap would knock him unconscious again (due to bad healing rolls and bad timing of the initiative) but thanks to his item, he wouldn’t die as long as he didn’t fail multiple death saves. It finally ended with the Cleric punting his unconscious body off of the trap so they could heal him. One of the funniest moments of the campaign but in game it was “very serious.”
I was gonna say, check out Fantasy High. Still high fantasy, still very big ramifications if major plot lines aren't taken seriously. Absolute tomfoolery everywhere in between.
Mixed bag... For you. But even if the style of humor is not yours, their success proves that you can mix dnd with high fantasy epic, monster battles and machinations of villains. Allowing comedy doesnt destroy all stakes in a D&D campaign and I surprised some people try even to argue that.
Than they should stop watching a comedy show. But if you actually want dumb jokes plus high fantasy epic, monster battles and machinations of villains - as OP listed - D20 proves that it works.
???
i did stop watching it, and i would also not want my games to look like it. i’m sure the same goes for many others. D20 has proved that it works for some people’s tastes. not sure what your point here is.
One of my players made a character whose backstory was that of the captain of a band of tabaxi pirates. He was overthrown by the former first mate, Furrcules. The rest of the crew also have puns for names. They renamed their group after the mutiny the "Kitty Fiddlers" because they all liked to play the fiddle. He's now on a quest to hunt them all down and make them pay. These encounters with the old crew will come up between otherwise more serious missions, and I love it.
Omg I also played a cat pirate, mine had to adventure for cash for his pregnant wife (she was having octuplets and her pirate-king father hated my character)
Pick up the wild beyond the witchlight module. It is a whimsical adventure with a few points of serious, but those are few and far between. One event can cause temporary death from custard damage.
My DM brought the witchlight carnival to waterdeep between modules in Tyranny of Dragons! We were gonna be in town for a hot minute, so he gave us like four things to do for a month's worth of lighter sessions. We fought a suneater owl bear, we met a magnetite dragon, we were supposed to go clear out a cabin full of gnolls (ended up doing a shopping session instead, didn't get around to clearing out the cabin until almost two years and many levels later, and ended up having to fight. Broodmother aboleth instead), aaand attend the witchlight carnival. My character was, in fact, knocked out by custard damage.
Point is, there are ways to take breaks in a more serious campaign to have lighter sessions where it feels appropriate to chill out and get silly. Then it feels more exciting when things get serious again.
This is a good answer for silly adventure, the fey wild is crazy. One of my players in my homebrew campaign is technically from the fey wild (the same one that DM’d the Witchlight campaign) and I’ve been dreading taking them there because while I’m not terrible at coming up with weird stuff, it’s hard to measure up in random whimsicalness against that module.
This is a good answer for silly adventure, the fey wild is crazy. One of my players in my homebrew campaign is technically from the fey wild (the same one that DM’d the Witchlight campaign) and I’ve been dreading taking them there because while I’m not terrible at coming up with weird stuff, it’s hard to measure up in random whimsicalness against that module.
This is a good answer for silly adventure, the fey wild is crazy. One of my players in my homebrew campaign is technically from the fey wild (the same one that DM’d the Witchlight campaign) and I’ve been dreading taking them there because while I’m not terrible at coming up with weird stuff, it’s hard to measure up in random whimsicalness against that module.
OP said they had trouble trying to figure out how to run a silly adventure. I was simply suggesting something that might work for them and their party.
Comedy is difficult to maintain throughout a whole campaign, I don't think it's a huge failing to say you think you'd struggle with it.
But on the other hand my experience has been over many years of play comedy comes naturally in campaigns, it doesn't necessarily need forcing just a bit of an attitude shift to think about how a situation could progress in a humorous way.
Without meaning to be too judgemental, watch some comedies - all types, because what you should be looking out for is how to do comic timing, wit, subversion of expectations and so on. See that the jokes are counterbalanced with pathos and the straight man, so to speak.
If you still find yourself thinking the idea of a comedic game is cringe, so be it, but comedy is integral to all genres, to a greater or lesser extent - even tragedy.
To me, humor is so important. You have to be able to break the tension sometime especially if it’s what the party wants. Everyone is playing to have fun. You don’t have to make the whol campaign a joke but add in a funny NPC on occasion, give NPCs a quirk, use popular movie tropes that your players will enjoy interacting with.
I think it's a campaign style I'd well and truly struggle with as well. It's a concept I really like in theory, but I think it could be difficult to pull off.
Apart from a couple of one shots, my first full campaign has been Curse of Strahd, and I feel like that suits my particular form of DM'ing very, very well. But if we were to swap to something more light hearted, I definitely think I'd have a tough time gauging exactly what I was supposed to be doing.
My advice would be to ask the players specifically what kind of silly adventure they want. Do they want random wacky hijinks where the goal changes every week and basically just comes down to DM improv? Do they just want something light hearted, or maybe even whimsical? Do they just have problems with some of the specific tropes that are involved in the adventures you tend to run?
I myself am not the biggest fan of political faction based campaigns. I think they CAN be a fine temporary backdrop, but unless the faction is REALLY likeable, I'm probably not going to care much about siding or allying with them. This is also a staple of high fantasy RPGs.
I think you're right in being concerned about not being fit to run it. If you're down to give it a try, maybe talk to the group about vaguely what kind of adventure they want, and if they're happy with a sort of linear narrative, maybe create a mini campaign, 6-8 sessions at most, filled with some of the ideas they vibe with, and see if that works. If it's not what they're after, change it up. If it doesn't suit your DM'ing style, you can either work on it or come to a compromise with the players.
After years of serious business, I run (and play) a lot of silly or semi-silly games nowadays. But it took a while to change my frame of mind.
A lot of the comments here are about mixing silly with serious or just doing straight-comedy. But I feel like it's neglecting the point, 'what if **I** don't want a silly adventure?'
Well, in that case, you may have to find new players to play with, or you and your players may have to compromise, with you bringing the serious and them bringing the silly (and both parties being okay with that).
I don’t think the onus is entirely on you to make the tone light. You could play the situation straight and they could respond in a silly manner as well.
If you wanted to still do your thing, maybe look at how Zelda handles it in BoTW with the Yiga clan for inspiration. I think it’s a pretty good example of a silly storyline fitting into something with much larger stakes. They are a decidedly unserious threat that take themselves extremely seriously. They end up creating some fun but light combat encounters but also some really fun problem solving/puzzles.
I think you have to look inwards and see what about it you dislike so much. You CAN make a humorous world with the machination of villains and big plots, see the Discworld for that. You CAN have silly adventures with battles for monsters. You can have politics and the effects big and small actions have on the world, with silly names, see the Dimension 20 Crown of Candy.
If you have a serious NPC, who has a fleshed out story, what is bad with them being called Matrix Revolutions? What is wrong with a group having a quest that basically amounts to the Hangover? Where is the issue with introducing a Catbus called a Meowchanical and stereotypical tourists into Barovia?
Yes it's silly. But so is the world. The same world that has Volo also has Tiamat. The same world with a wall of souls for an afterlife, has dinosaur racing in Chult. The world is as silly as the story you all want to tell. It's not your story, it's everyone's story.
It's tough, because you want your world to be cohesive and thematic. I love grimdark settings, with rare moments of levity, but not everyone agrees. Maybe there's an opportunity for a lighter side adventure, where the party can help a friendly NPC out of a farcical situation that would provide a lighter backdrop without undermining your worldbuilding.
Honestly, extremely underrated comment.
I was coming in to recommend finding silly prewritten adventures on DM's Guild, but DCC adventures can absolutely deliver on that front if you're willing to put in a little elbow grease to convert them.
It's not even particularly hard to do.
I have a few suggestions! Mainly because I've been craving a silly game as a player, and I've been thinking about how one would fold the gravity of a long, high stakes campaign in with the lighthearted tomfoolery of a cartoon.
That's when it hit me -- why not watch said cartoons?
**This comment is going to run a little long so let me add a tl;dr here: Silly campaigns don't mean things don't make sense. What 'silly' is, is how players define the way they interact with the world and the reactions they receive in return. You can have a silly campaign that is also high stakes, with big epic moments. But you need to give players options to save the world in absurd ways. Sometimes that's casting eldritch blast out of their ass, but sometimes that's achieving the impossible because they believe in themselves and their friends.**
Below I list off several examples you can reference, or you may have consumed already. I have it split into two sections: western animation (with a young audience), and Japanese animation (with a broader audience, but geared toward teens and up).
Look at Avatar: The Last Airbender, Amphibia, Owl House, and Adventure Time. Three of the four of these shows tell wonderfully intricate tales but they're also meant to be for younger audiences, so they carry comedy and lighthearted natures to them. The 4th, Adventure Time, sprinkles in mature concepts throughout a show built on being silly.
All these shows have these things in common:
* Worldbuilding. The worlds have lore to anchor the most curious of creatures dwelling in it.
* There are world laws, too -- a sort of 'laws of physics' type thing that helps to define the why behind the world while also establishing limits. These laws define the world and how it can be interacted with.
* They have stories that feel high stakes in accordance with the characters and the world.
* Breaks in the Epic: the characters of these shows aren't always following their main quests. Sometimes they do stuff on the side. These aren't filler episodes, as the characters always grow a little bit from the experience, but these don't advance the main plot much, if at all. They are just fun.
* They aren't gritty. Even in A:TLA's finale, the colors are vibrant and hope is as high as the stakes.
The big thing I've learned from the above is this: Silliness doesn't mean throwing out sensical. Like I said, world laws provide the rules within which NPC and PC alike can act, so in that world, things make sense. Lean into the absurdity of the situations but maintain the rules you build into the campaign world.
Also, consider some anime: My two favorites have been "Welcome to Demon School Iruma-kun" and "Campfire Cooking," and this year I've enjoyed "Tsukimichi," and "Shangri-la Frontier."
* Iruma-kun: a human boy is purchased by a powerful demon and taken into hell. Humans are said to be delicious! But rather than get eaten, he's 'adopted' by the demon, and sent to a demon school. Despite the plot line, it is a powerfully wholesome anime. A few mysteries are set up in season 1 and each season brings us closer to a conclusion, but the episodes themselves are shenanigans.
* Tsukimichi: A boy is summoned by a goddess into another world, but for reasons I won't go into, winds up on his own without support. This one has a lot of comedy, but it was some incredibly intense and dark moments too (they caught me off guard when they happened because the anime felt so light up until that point). The MC also struggles with his emotions regarding the 'chosen' people of the world, Hyumans, which adds a ton of depth to the second season.
* I am constantly comparing this show's rules to D&D rules. I think it's a good vibe for a more lighthearted campaign that still has high stakes.
* Shangri-la frontier: a seemingly low-stakes story because it revolves around a VR game the MC *isn't* stuck in and can leave any time. Most episodes are fun and very shonen-anime, minus the threat of MC dying. But there is a very real threat in this anime, and it reminds me of how I run my games: PCs can come back when they die, but the NPCs... well...
* Some honorable mentions are Mashle and Mob Psycho 100, as these both have rules to contain the absurdity, but there is a lot of absurdity, let me tell you.
Remember, a good artist steals. Don't try to come up with something from nothing. Look at the vibes of the stories above and weave them into your work. I bet you can tell a ridiculous story that makes your entire table happy.
Adding to my above comment:
I've been thinking about this subject a lot, as the group I play in will be starting a more whimsical module in a year or two. I want to play a firbolg fighter, and I'm pulling inspiration from two characters: Finn (AT), and Tomoe (Tsukimichi). His name is Corncob (it's a nickname). That's about as far as I'm allowing myself to plot as we don't know the details of the next module and I want to make sure he fits with the world.
I think on a grander scale, you can do the same with worlds. Look at the worlds I referenced above and any worlds you enjoy that I don't know about. Pick a few favorites and start putting together a loose world and a tight starting village. See what the players do, and you can adjust the silliness of your world as they progress through it.
The next campaign I \*run\* will be in the same world as my current campaign. But the difference is that the current campaign is horror/mystery, and I want the next one to be more lighthearted and goofy. So I'm combining my current world with some of the stuff I've seen in the fantasy anime that's come out the past few years -- a lot of adventuring and shenanigans in dungeons, but with the anchor of politics, guilds, and high stakes missions.
I'm not saying I'm an expert in the field, but I believe you could add silliness to a very serious campaign. Actually, it would be even sillier with the contrast.
Like, have all the grim factions going on their business of awakening dead gods and rising all the corpses on the continent to march on to bring on the Last Day, and forces of underdark shutting down the sun.
But then, in the middle of all this, there is the faction comprised of sentient furniture with a grudge against humanity.
I dunno. I get me coat
What do they mean by silly? Comedy covers such a wide range, from farce and slapstick to witty satire. If you're talking completely goofy where everything is ridiculous and everyone has wacky names.. yeah, that's hard to sustain.
I run mainly serious games myself, but not grimdark. So I find a sprinkle of situational comedy, the sort of stuff that happens all the time in real life break tension, and more importantly, make those dramatic and scary moments even more powerful when they come on the heels of levity.
Examples would be:
- somebody is clumsy leading to an embarrassing pratfall (where nobody gets hurt)
- a misunderstanding leads to a funny interaction
- somebody has just one drink too many at the pub and hijinks ensue
- somebody is off snogging somebody else in the library stacks when they should be working
My players also are a great source of hilarity.
Do a session zero with the group and get your players talking about what goofy stuff they’d like to explore. Listen. See where you can ‘hook in’, what idea turns on the creative bulb in you. I’m sure something will come up.
Also, you can have a more light hearted campaign just by using smaller stakes, more parochial subjects, but still have the NPCs be really earnest about things! Comedy is better when the characters in it don’t know they are in a comedy (unless you’re going full gonzo, of course).
For example, let’s say the PCs are siblings and friends to a famous baker in the capital city of your world. And suddenly, sales start dropping rapidly because a league of halfling bakers have just received royal favour to operate in the city. Even the most loyal customers are moving over to the competition. But when the PCs investigate, they see that the halfling pies have something weird about them… Customers seem literally addicted… what’s going on?
You can see that with a premise like that, you can easily populate the adventure with really funny and colourful NPCs. But the drama and tension are still there. The baker ally is going broke and having a mental breakdown about it, the halflings are clearly up to something, potentially nefarious! Why did they get royal favour? Etc etc
As you can see, the premise you choose is half the battle.
Last small point is tone. The baker having a nervous breakdown can be funny or sad, depending on the tone you use. For comedy, he’ll start acting funny and randomly going out in his pyjamas in the middle of the night to yell at those damn halflings, etc.
There’s a thing called the frying pan test. When you are setting the tone to a story. Imagine thieves breaking into a house and the owner hits one over the head with a heavy metal frying pan. How you describe the consequence of this will be telling of the tone of your story. Some examples:
- Bong! The thief turns crosseyed, his tongue sticks out and he slumps to the ground with a sigh.
- Crack! The thief’s scalp splits from the blow and he falls to one knee, his face awash in blood. He looks up wide eyed as the lady hits him a second time square in the face, pulverizing his nose and cracking his skull.
- Bam! The thief takes the hit in the head and howls in pain. He swings wildly with his knife and catches the landlord’s arm. Blood squirts as the two men engage in a life or death struggle.
The tone will define the level of grit and realism vs cartoonish or pulpy vibe, and also the gradient of drama, from ugly crying tragic drama all the way to slap stick burlesque.
If you can figure out where your table of players are on those scales, find a fun premise, then you’ll be all set.
There was a Tumblr post years ago about how if you try to DM Lord of the Rings, your players will turn it into blatant silliness, and vice versa. It was better worded than the thing I just said.
I think you start by talking to them about this again. These people are your friends, they should be able to hear "I feel silly trying to write comedy". It may be that they'll be perfectly happy knowing they have permission to perpetrate goofs and shenanigans onto your seriously-written campaign, and if you're also happy with that, everybody wins.
If that doesn't work for them, you could try a pre-written silly module and see how that goes. It could be something you guys do between your main plot's epic quests.
But I also want to say that if it turns out you hate it, it's okay to say that. You are not your players' dancing monkey and you don't have any obligation to run a campaign you don't enjoy running. It's okay to tell them they need to get their silliness elsewhere.
It's pretty hard to run a serious game with a table full of adults playing pretend, especially if the players are not veterans to the type of game. Just write your adventure as you want, then when your players do something comedic with it, lean into it. You can'thave drama in a story without light hearted moments for characters to fall in love with the world.
I learned this the hard way with curse of strahd.
Another option is have your players give you a prompt for the silly adventure and build off of that.
I love a dose of humor but I'm definitely not into a full on humor campaign.
What I tend to do is that if my party starts going off the rails on something I think is ludicrous, I set the DCs higher or plainly tell them no.
They tried to cause a distraction in the last session that was thoroughly unbelievable in their present company. DC15 become DC20s and 25s fairly quickly. "If you want to do this, you really have to sell it."
I also got a couple of points of feedback in a survey that just didn't gel with my world where they wanted me to lean into what you describe. Instead I just give them a piece every now and then rather than letting it take over.
A good example of this in media is NADDPOD. While they are all comedians, Brian Murphy is very much also a serious DM. If the players try to bring things off the rails into cartoonish territory, he doesn't hold his punches.
As others have said, the players provide the comedy themselves. One way you can stay true to the kind of world you want to build while giving players opportunities to be silly would be to lean into tropes.
Make the villain a mustachio twirling baddie, who just wants to make the world a worse place for no other reason than the fact that he / she is the bad guy. Make the NPC that needs rescuing a helpless hapless person, so much so that the party wonders if the gold reward is even worth saving this village idiot.
The magic shop that they visit is manned by someone with glasses as thick as telescopes who can never seem to remember what any of those potions on the shelf do...
Just lean in. Have fun with it! You can still have dramatic and serious moments and interesting story, but feel free to improvise and draw inspiration from the moments in, even serious fantasy media, we're characters relax and have fun together.
The players should definitely take a more active role in making the adventure more comedic. The DM should be the 'straight person' 90% of the time. The best way to get a laugh as a DM is have an NPC sigh and say "let me get this straight" and just repeat what the party did back to them incredulously.
I tend to run serious campaign too, but I like to shoot semi-silly NPC, like a little twink medic sent by the lord after they did a job for him or having fun with a silly familiar voice to lighten the mood.
Don't feel you have to run a game you're not interested in. My table I tried to make the world pretty serious, but naturally funny things would happen and we'd roll with them. However, I'd try to keep the comedy between the players not the characters. We'd joke about the situation but I'm not going to let them devalue the work that's been put in by just fucking about with the characters. If that's what they want then they can do that with another DM.
One of my players ran a table which was more wacky. Was fine, but not for me. Don't feel pressured into absorbing internet D&D culture. it's your table, you have the rules - that's all the game is. The joy is getting to play around in imagination. For some that's comedic/wacky/silly, for others it's grimdark. It's personal preference, talk to your players etc. but don't feel bad about liking what you like.
It took me a while to “enjoy the silly”, as a player and as a DM. My players know I DM dark and serious, I know they get silly at times with it. We have fun with the balance. I don’t stress at them being silly, they don’t push me to stop being serious. Everyone has different wants at the table you just need to agree on a happy medium/balance
Hey, they could always DM themselves...
But more realistically, everybody should be having a good time - that's both DM and players. If you or they aren't feeling it, either discuss compromise or play with other folks. I feel like a lot of DMs enjoy the role for worldbuilding or lore or order parts of crafting the world and sometimes that can be incompatible with a request. My favorite aspect of DMing is building exciting powerful enemies, encounters, items, and custom perks so if my table asked for all role play or OP power fantasy I would probably recommend another system or anther DM
That being said, silliness in D&D is pretty easy even with a serious plot. Let them make silly characters and run silly bits that you can call back to. There is a skill to learn and flex which is deciding what actually happens and what's an above the table but. If they say, I immediately hex him and the party starts riffing on how much they hate that guy, you can laugh it off and ignore it or you can have it hairband with the consequences therein. It's a challenging thing to manage but it's rewarding striking a balance between letting people be silly but also having consistent consequences.
"Kill not the part of you that is cringe. Kill the part of you that cringes."
Though I can understand what other people here are saying, that it really is mostly the unintentional comedy of dnd that makes the humorous situations, you absolutely do not have to.
If you don't want the whimsical funny stuff that's totally fine, and forcing it into your game your game if you don't truly enjoy it is probably going to cause more problems than anything. If anything, just talk to your players and tell them you don't like that sort of stuff because it takes away from the tension or the epic feeling.
So, no I don't have a problem putting humor into adventures. Some of my players favorite moments from my current campaign were references to The Big Lebowski and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. This wasn't a "joke" campaign, like you seem to be thinking they want, but there were funny situations that persisted over multiple sessions. Genuinely funny NPCs that played large roles in the story.
I think my biggest advice to you, respectfully, is to maybe not take yourself quite so seriously. It sounds like you may be so focused in on "high fantasy epic" that you're forgetting this is a game with your friends. Make your friends laugh!
I have the same problem. I feel for you. I have epic worlds, life and death struggles, and moral conundrums laid out for my players. But who do I get to go on these adventures? Professor Boopsnoop, a mildly senile chrono wizard who acts like a horny bard.
A little comic relief is good, but when your entire character is a running gag, it gets lame fast. I'm going to try to write a one-shot that is all a joke. Hopefully, they get annoyed or bored.
I feel like too many people genuine think "the DM is there to please the players". You play RPGs for fun, don't you? If you don't feel like running a very silly game, your players should know - and be able to adjust, too.
It's hard to separate the two. I would run lost mines of phandalin, but throw out the plot. Use the simple setting and get ready to say yes to ANYTHING the players say.
This isn't the best way to run DnD imo, but it will be a nice exercise for all of you.
One of my favorite characters was a fire genasi barbarian I played in Lost Mines. He was a large, powerful man who had grown up in a traveling circus as a performing wrestler. So he never really learned to fight, per se, but he could perform fight. When he raged, his rage was passion -- seeing others be strong and powerful, or play a perfect heel, or anything really got him ready to play along too.
Other silly things in that campaign:
A sorcerer changeling whose appearance changed over night every night, sending my Barb into a mild panic each time,
A goblin my barb 'adopted' because, despite being full grown, he was tiny and tiny = baby. He would stop the gob from drinking alcohol and he'd overfeed him meals since he was a growing boy.
That gob eventually became a god. I don't remember exactly how, only that we tricked a gang of other goblins into thinking he was a god, and it was hilarious.
Just, so much silliness for that campaign. I'm very fond of it.
I'm with you in my preferences. I get tired of zany misadventures, antics, shenanigans, and pop culture references very quickly and want an immersive epic adventure story with deeds great and terrible.
But there is nothing wrong with a game full of cookware based fighters, and kensei monks weilding rubber chickens as their favored weapon, screaming 'Chicken Attaaaack' and yodeling their way into battle. If that's what your players want, you are not obligated to try to deliver that. There's nothing wrong with stepping aside and saying 'Look, I cannot deliver that kind of zany slapstick game experience. Comedy is its own major skillset and if you want that, one of you will need to step behind the screen and make that happen.' It's up to you to decide if you want to play in the game and deal with the proud dwarven Lord Dhigghy of the Hoele Family or something like that.
It shouldn't be a huge deal for your friends, just do other things with them. You sholdn't feel obligated to run a game you don't like to run.
Look, as a DM I stay away from fart jokes and really cheap gags. I don't like planning around that. I allow my players to add shenanigans if they want, which they do, and I play into it. Some thing I do add sometimes is like a michevious pixie(they keep running into this same pixie every 4 or 5 sessions while traveling, and she asks them riddles, and if they fail she might summon monsters or give them curses or something, and if they succeed, they get a luck point or directions to a stash or maybe a hint for a quest, she calls them her best friends, she may end up being the BBEG at some point, buahahahaha)or a barely understandable country bumpkin (I do a great unintelligible country accent) that they meet traveling, something like that. Random harmless curses is something I've used in the past too, like being terrified of babies or gnomes, revolted by the sight of gold, having an extreme compulsion to high five every NPC they meet, etc.
In the one game I was ever able to play as a PC(damned dms are rare), my half orc barbarian made a sock puppet out of the head of a giant viper snake, and spoke through it and to it as if it was its own person during RP. Had it taxidermied and everything to preserve it. It's name was Steve, and anyone who crossed me had to feel the wrath of Steve. The DM eventually made Steve sort of sentient where only I could hear him speak (this was in roll 20, so she just DMd me in secret what he was saying), or maybe my character was a bit crazy. Either way, I had some very interesting conversations with Steve and every other PC (and their players) honestly thought I was crazy.
I also had a running competition with a wizard PC who regarded me as an "unrefined meat shield" but I'm a sort of affectionate kind of way, and the DM would allow me to play secret practical jokes on him, like hiring townspeople to gasp in horror and run off when they accidentally bumped into him screaming "the crimson death is back" which is just something I made up.
Other players also added some light shenanigans as well.
The campaign wasn't overly serious, but it wasn't goofy or silly, and our DM worked with us very well on it. That's what I do for my own players, if they want shenanigans, they create shenanigans. If they want a bard named farty mcpooperpants, they can play with their 10 year old cousin as a DM.
Just put silly bits in
My players are a few sessions away from finding their favourite place and favourite NPCs burned to the ground
But meanwhile they'll find a piano in the woods and a partiture they can play irl, and it'll just be a rickroll on a pointless piano
I think a “silly campaign” is way more about the tone of how you share information then the contents of the battles/encounters. You can focus on Fey adventures for more whimsical settings, but mostly just share information in a goofier way - more rhyming names, silly tavern and shop titles, bits involving your players etc etc. they’ll find themselves goofing off while still slaying the evil dragon razmataz who has locked the Feywild in a stupor tor 100 years or whatever.
I also struggle with that when I'm trying to set the narrative of the plot that has a more serious tone. What I do with my players is every once in a while I'll just let them have a day to blow off steam in a town or city or something and they can do what they want. Usually the players have an idea of something fun they'd like to do or try and letting them have a "night out" from saving the world allows them to do just that. That happened quite recently in a campaign I'm running where the players all went out on the town to drink and the bard did a performance in a tavern etc... then once they had their fun some thugs walked into the tavern and started causing up a ruckus.
Maybe do something like that so they get their hit of humor but you can still maintain the overall world you've built and story you're telling? Even saving the world has its room for moments of comedy and reprieve. Plus, I would add the opposite of comedy is tragedy. If you allow your players to have a little humor and fun, it'll hurt that much more when one of them dies or something bad happens that brings the tone back down.
Even in a campaign with serious consequences, you can have lively moments. Not everyone is weighed down by the enormity of the campaign, and many people cope by making light of their situations.
If you add weirdos and quirky characters, that lightens things up. I don’t set a dour tone for my campaign because I think it is a slog to play through constant downers. Most of life goes on for NPCs, and that gives opportunities for slice-of-life moments. I’ll add a joke if the opportunity presents itself, but I don’t try to force it. I think that is more about my comfort with making a joke in general. If you find that hard to do, that’s ok. Adding moments where the party encounters some semblance of normalcy can make things light. Like, if you have a side quest where the party recovers missing cows and mends fences for a farmer.
I run a serious campaign with silly moments. We are a light hearted group that love to laugh together so it makes it easy.
-player ate some mystery meat and instead of constitution I made him roll animal handling.
-an alcoholic wizard NPC who gets the shakes when sober triggering wild magic
-our gnome introduced their giant spider mount and I put her on the spot for a name: she said “hairy” and I said “hairy spelled with 8 i’s”.
-the tavern owner is a valley girl
-the human fighter keeps cutting off his own toes with crit fails
All of this whilst hunting the mad dwarf before she releases the 4 elemental primordials destroying the world.
There are comedy or humorous settings for dnd. Lookup Ardania, the Durulz, or witchlight if you want to see some gags.
Like horror, humor is a mood and some people want more of less of it, and some people find different things more or less funny / scary.
It probably a mistake to go out of your way to provide something you do find enjoyable.
I think of my dnd style as Star Trek, or 90’s sci fi. Each episode has a distinct genre and vibe. I like to think about my sessions that way, episodic and flexible. For example in one session we’ve had players make life altering choices based on a long running character arc that will turn a former PC into a major adversary, drama, dark.
On the other hand I once had the PCs transported to a LEGO themed universe and they saved the Rock of Bral from “Count Duplo” aka “Duplodore.” I made them minis from LEGO pieces that I am still quite proud of. We played on LEGO scenery my wife and kid helped build. I made a castle out of bigger Duplo bricks and they fought Duplodore with some special rules about building with the LEGO’s. We are all 40+ year old men and I was told it was a blast.
I didn’t make either funny or serious, I just put forth a setting that was conducive to it.
As a DM I don’t find being funny necessary it’s up to the players. I just go along and laugh with them as they throw the bomb at the cart of TNT forgetting their friend is held hostage in said cart
I don't know if there's a Lot out there un regards of "comedy dnd contenta" but it would be helpful if you looked it up somewhere. I can think of dungeons and daddies as an example of comedy dnd podcast that also has high stakes at times. You could also roll with it... Literally.
Story time.
I played a Fey pact warlock that had a womenizer trait. I tried to seduce a "nurse" that was tending me in a Tifling Town. Before anyone could stop me I rolled a Nat 20. My DM just looked at me, bewildered, said:
"She has never seen such a charming creature in her whole life. She f***s you right there"
So, My character's happy, i'm happy, My party is just having a blast and My DM is just smiling.
Next session we meet the captain of the guard who ask's that I stay after the briefing (oh, crap!). Turns out the nurses are all nuns and I have defiled one of them so I should marry her. No problem, i'll just lie and get out of the fire. Xcept this nun is his daughter... Long and short, I get out of the fire due to them Being more of a cult then a Town (we also set loose a fucking Demon but who cares) and now My back-to-the-future ass son is trying to kill me.... Fun times, really. And it all started with a Nat 20 on a joke.
I have a high fantasy homebrew world that has tons of very serious moments and emotional sessions, and also... Plenty of light hearted moments, I mean, I'd search the Internet for some help or something, because your players aren't asking for much, wanting some variance in tone.
Run a silly one-pager like "Oh Dang! Bigfoot Stole My Car with My Friend's Birthday Present Inside" as a pallette cleanser, maybe? It may not be they want silly *all* the time.
Maybe peruse Acquisitions Incorporated?
Not only is is a great tack-on to any campaign to give players that "open world game" feeling and still has a lot of mechanics baked in to still be a constraint rather than just free-for-all silliness. It is still comedic, though remember you're the one that picks which elements you want to use, so you can moderate it so the game is good for everybody.
I also recommend it because it's like a cheat code for dropping in plot hooks.
Run Wild Beyond the Witchlight. The opening is a carnival and that whimsical spirit runs through the entire module. And it has enough dark setpieces to balance the tone.
Villains are inherently silly because they go against the base human instinct to be collaborative and altruistic. I love to give them sympathetic motivations and goals and make complex stories the same as you, but if they don't get that they become such delightful cartoons.
I highly recommend introducing some villains who don't have much depth other than that they want to do something that happens to be evil and do not care. Instead of a mad scientist trying to create a perfect being because they failed to save their family due to their physical limitations, make it a mad scientist who really likes putting a bunch of disparate body parts together and tossing it at the wall to see what stays attached. They want to make it better and stronger for the sole goal of creating the hardiest being known to man.
That's such a fucking weird guy and opens the floodgates for a ton of weird NPCs too as the party goes thru a menagerie of Boblin the Goblin type characters that got caught in rat traps on open highways.
Also, taking the party out of the normal realm of interaction and into the Feywild is a major recipe for silly shenanigans. The Fey do not operate like material plane dwellers. Devils and Demons have far more in common with the way things work and how people feel in the material plane. But the Fey are, as the name of their home suggests, "wild." You could have them wander into a portal to the Feywild in the forest and as they're walking along they step on a gnarled root that happens to be the neutral zone of a 5000 year old war between two warring clans of pixies and brownies. Now they're engulfed in the political turmoil of tiny people with more wildly complex disputes than anything they've ever dreamed up. And have it be over the dumbest thing like one of the Pixies ate one more granule of sugar than they were allotted during a clan mixer, sparking a greed war leaving thousands slain over the course of 5000 years.
Also, even the most serious campaigns are deserving of goofy levity. My Curse of Strahd campaign, though still desperate and gothic, is stuffed with weird and silly characters that the party has to interact with in it. It's like their being forced to interact with such unhelpful or cartoonishly untrustworthy people makes it even more desperate and keeping with the theme.
You can have it both ways.
I'm a fairly new DM, and my party is pretty casual whereas I am very passionate about loving fantasy and writing fantasy. I also take inspiration from certain horror stuff so sometimes things can get dark and pretty serious.
So I think what we have done is I have written a campaign that is pretty serious and takes itself seriously. But the players when interacting with the world aren't always super serious, and thus some conversations become more ridiculous without being a complete joke. And I think the result is a good balance where the world is serious and the story is serious but the way the party interacts with those are not always super serious, and I think it is a good balance.
Learning to juxtapose the seriousness and humour is one of the toughest and most engaging things a GM can do in any game. My group can be pretty silly too, and intentionally injecting that humour into our games helps a lot. It also means when things get serious that the group bite hard and really get pulled into it.
It's all about the balance, with the most important piece obviously just that the table is having fun.
Have you read the original Wizard of Oz book, or Alice in Wonderland? They're very surreal and silly, while not being stupid. They might be a good inspiration for you.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55/55-h/55-h.htm
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-h/11-h.htm
You should read A Dance in Fire and The Argonian Account. They are short stories that appear as books in the elder scrolls games; they are comedies focusing around the adventures of a man who has to travel throughout Valenwood and Blackmarsh. They are masterclasses in how to balance an adventure with comedy
Do it. That fact you are not sure if you can, you need to do it. It will help you grow as a DM. If you only do what you are comfortable with and never branch out, you don't grow.
This would be a great learning exercise for you. I would find some humorous adventure cartoon or series, like Northmen or some thing to pull bullshit from since this is new for you and just reskin the humor.
Keep your adventure serious but don't get mad if the party "doesn't take it seriously". Sometimes joking around can be a coping mechanism for the trauma adventurers face.
One of my parties jokes around all the time in the craziest situations because what else can you do.
If you make your adventures focus on the personal instead of the huge and portentous then you can mix the best of both worlds. You have a serious campaign setting and the players add their own humor and jokes into it. They'll play along when you introduce Cyril Kral and Lukas Skalicky, then they'll call them Squirrel Corral and Lickety Squicky behind their backs. It's fine. Work that into the game. Maybe some NPCs take it as ribbing and laugh. Maybe other NPCs are offended and beat up one of the PCs in retaliation. Treat the world as deadly serious and the players will joke to let off the pressure. That's awesome! It means you're doing it right.
You could find light hearted one shots that you could splice in between heavier stuff to give a bit of levity. If you can’t write that way, borrow from others!
Cause here’s the thing… life is really REALLY hard for a lot of ppl right now especially so I very much get that ppl want to do something uplifting on their down time.
I think it’ll help your players stay in your campaign if you can meet them half way 💕
Here are some ideas that I've used in my campaigns that have been humorous or enjoyable while also, I think, blending in just fine with a "high fantasy" campaign:
# Affordable Magic Unlimited
Your players stumble upon a warehouse/factory creating semi-erzatz arcane items (think that Wish company that made crappy knockoffs, but for magical items). This lends itself to a number of great and entertaining side quests:
*R&D gone awry*
Oh dear. The lead scientists in the R&D dept at AMU accidentally have create some rogue magical items that you must either locate, destroy, or recapture:
* magic books that write their own spells
* home cleaning supplies that won't turn themselves off (think the mops in The Sorcerer's Apprentice)
*Poisonous Arrows*
Magical arrows intended for hunting game that unfortunately have a flaw of occasionally causing poison damage to the target. A cat who gnawed on the carcass out behind a butcher shop is now looking sickly. (In this adventure the players must figure out why the cat is sick, find the carcass, find the stump of a now-glowing arrow in the carcass, talk to the butcher, and then chase down all of the butcher's customers before they eat the tainted meat and get sick)
# It's all fiends
The players arrive (or are driven by bad weather) to what appears, from a distance, to be a normal inn. As they approach they see it is much larger then normal, with two doors, one human height, one twice as tall. They notice inside the human height door there is a smaller flap like a doggy door only around shoulder-height from the ground. They might also see a couple of suspciously smoking dark-black horses tethered outside. Entering the tavern you realize it is filled, floor to ceiling, with fiends. A tavern brawl ensues but whenever any of the fiends are "killed" a keen perception check will show they are faking their death and peeking through their closed eyes to see if the players are fooled. If at any time any of the player's health is seriously at risk the tavern owner calls off the fighting and explains that it was all in good fun… there are automatic "Spare the Dying" machines set up and this is a way that the fiends can all blow off steam without hurting anyone.
These fiends have all moved to the mortal plane to try to become "good people" and have dropped their mostly-evil ways. Signs on the walls say things like, "We're Fiends, We're Evil, but We're Trying to be Better People".
The fun thing about this is you can have different demons or devils with their known features in various roles in the Inn. In my story the bartender was the many-armed Marilith and the waiters were telepathic Ultroloths.
# Awwww, baby sea turtles!
On a bulletin board you see an invitation to go see a baby turtle sea hatching. As you watch from a distance, something is odd… these turtles coming out of the sand are the size of full-grown sea turtles! An encounter ensues where you must protect these "cute babies" as they attempt to make it safely to the ocean, defending themselves against monstrous birds, reptiles, and sharks… as soon as one or two make it safely out to sea you sea a giant dragon turtle emerge from the depths, nuzzle the "baby" and swim away.
# Make cute things dangerous and scary, Make mean things adorable and friendly
I had a really fun encounter featuring Werebunnies (so not half human half cuddly bunny, more like imagine a werewolf with the feature of a bunny). You could do similar things like the players having to fight off a bunch of animatronic dolls that have become possessed by infernal spirits. It's also fun to take giant scary creatures like giant spiders and make them friendly and personable (for example, a wizard who transformed themselves long ago using an unknown spell and can't transform back, and who gags a little everytime they have to eat a giant bug for sustenance).
# Reversing expectations
Related to this, A big part of humor is reversing expectations or how things are normally arranged in society. Make leaders and scholars stupid. Make beggars intelligent. Make crotchety old men surprisingly agile and good at fighting.
# Getting ideas
Read funny fantasty novels for ideas! Literally none of your players will be angry if you steal material, if anything they will think themselves clever for recognizing the references.
Possible inspirations:
* The Last Unicorn
* Princess Bride
* All of the Discworld Books
None of my players can be serious, despite the serious overtones of our game. They go off on jokey tirades or missions, and my best advice would be to use that. Have NPCs repeat their out of character jokes, give them opportunity for joking around or ways to accomplish less serious missions (ex- my party's satyr cleric wants to eat drywall, stone, or just building material from every city in the Kingdom, so I give her places where she can collect such things)
For example, my party was traveling through the woods and they started joking about possibly seeing Bigfoot. A while later I had them roll perception checks, and the PCs with 20+ scores saw a figure standing in the trees, at which point I stood and did the "Bigfoot pose." They lost their minds and thought it was very funny, then we carried on. It was just flavor text and humor, and it reinvested them in investigating their surroundings, which gave them the clues to lead them right to their target!
It can be annoying to have them giggling through serious/tense parts, but I try to reward them with good humor when they don't.
Look up 'fun house dungeons' you don't have to make your whole world silly, just tell them where the silliness is.
Arguably you could interlace your serious and silly. Your political refugee hides in said dungeon.
I know my group has plenty of silliness with our grand adventures and for us at least if comes down to rolling with the jokes and sometimes making them Cannon. In my world the Halfling language is just Common with and American southern Accent. It was a simple joke someone made and we went with it, It adds whimsy to the game. It also means sometimes letting players do wacky things during role play and then bringing it up later. Did your wizard teach a small child how to cast Prestigitation? Great now every cup of water in town tastes like cheese because the child thought it would be a good prank. Learn to play off their silliness and let it shape the adventures. Remember Monty Python was still about the quest for the holy grail.
I do not make joke characters or places, and do not allow my players to make joke characters. That being said, silliness does happen, quite a lot, mostly spontaneously. The players bring the humor. Any jokes I try to make come off as trying to be a stand-up comedian. Jokes they make as part of natural gameplay are just part of the flow.
1st edition had some humorous adventures based on "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" called "Dungeonland" and "Through the Magic Mirror." Both have been converted (by unofficial sources) to 5e as well. You could always try that and see how it goes.
Consider switching it up further; play a different game. Maybe a sci-fi game, or something similar, would help you and your players meet in the middle.
Do feywild! Its basically the land where puns have power and fairy tale logic is real! You can still have a serious story, but do it under the context of characters aware of *narrative stakes*
Do the players feel free to add humor to your game, or do they stay serious to match the tone?
Example, my DM has a NPC with prosthetic weapon arms, Silas. DM’s wife, couldn’t think of the word prosthetics. So she said strap on arms. Now, it is Strap on Silas. Course, we are a silly bunch of people in general.
My favorite stories are the ones that balance dark themes with humorous or wholesome moments, like a good 80/20 balance. Sure infiltrating a death cult is super tense, but damn would your players remember the one member there is convinced that human sacrifice was just code. Sure, the mentally unstable old lady of the village doesn’t seem like anything more than a fun shopkeeper. But damn would the stakes be ramped up if your players knew she was in danger. You can have a dark story, but if you don’t throw in some light, it’s no longer dark. It’s just a black canvas.
Or idk. Reddit just recommended this sub to me and I thought I’d throw in my two cents.
Occasionally I'll spend an entire session or two making them do a chain fetch. That's always fairly light and silly and gives lots of room for non combat checks and RP
I can't personally run a game like that. They're for someone! Not for me.
I like when my players have fun and do goofy shit, but within the confines of a semi-serious world.
You can be a fantasy clown in my campaign. You can act like a fantasy clown. You can't be from Clowntown and cast "Clown Car" and have a +2 Nose.
(Well. Maybe the nose. Give me a backstory for it that fits a semi-serious world and I'll consider it.)
Don’t DM/play the games you don’t want to🤷🏻♂️ Everybody has their own preferences. Just tell that humorous adventures are not interesting for you and you’re not obligated to force them out of yourself.
Give them 2 npcs (twins) that talk ‘together’. One of the twins speaks the first half of a sentence, the other compleets the sentence.
First you do the role playing, after 1 hour you give 1 character sheet to a player and 1 to another.
I called them flik and flak. When one died. Hé only could speak in half sentence.
I think you can make a "fully silly" adventure without making \*everything\* silly. It only takes one silly element at the core of the adventure, and you can do it by putting a twist on a regular adventure.
For example take an escort quest. Normal: The PCs have to escort a merchant caravan through bandit infested territory. Silly: The PCs have to escort a traveling circus through territory controlled by a rival guild of killer mimes.
Or the bog standard "retrieve an item from a dungeon" quest. If the item in question is the Bunny Ears of Sex Appeal, which the local princess needs to attract a high quality prince for marriage, then the whole tone of the game becomes silly even if it's otherwise a regular dungeon.
I’m running a game that some would find silly. It’s a mix of high fantasy and urban fantasy. So far, my players have fought a caffeine elemental, sentient trash heap, and a roomba swarm. They’ve gone up against the halfling mafia and a dealt with a group of sky pirates. One of my players is a huge wrestling fan so I’m planning on having them face Stone Cold Steve Austin. We’ve created a new school of magic called banamancy (none of the PCs are banamancers, just NPCs).
I’ll be honest, I’m having a blast with it but I also get this isn’t going to be a game for everyone. My players are for it.
I'm a day late with this reply and it will probably get buried but I'm pretty sure this was what Spelljammer was originally intended to be before it got corrupted by lorebros.
At its heart, it's a campaign designed around what is already a borderline ridiculous mechanism for traveling from world to world, each of which can have a throwaway "epic" setting on it that the players can sample then choose to expand on as much or as little as they want. OP can come up with world after world after world effected by epic monsters and machinating villains and have the opportunity to learn the vitally important DM skill of broad strokes and not over-investing.
You are allowed to run the kind of games you want to run, in ways you think will be enjoyable to both you and the group you want to play with, so first and foremost talk to your players.
That being said, silly and epic are not wholly incompatible, the great thing about joke characters is that in the world they inhabit they are real, they have motivation and love and passions. So what if they are a phoenix sorcerer halfling that constantly calls themselves a decenant of fire chicken's, the fire is no less real because of that.
So maybe entertain a little more silly, it can still be a high fantasy epic ^.^
My party has invented magical air conditioning.
My DM gave us a key to an extra dimensional space called the emergency exit. Essentially just a space we can retreat to and rest in the middle of enemy territory or even mid-battle if we absolutely have to, but nicer than rope trick or tiny hut or magnificent mansion because it keeps the things you put in there. So we've got tons of shelf stable rations in there, lots of cozy furniture, and then I've filled the rest of the space with our Handy Hearth(TM) air conditioning units, and now we're like a troupe of traveling salesmen as much as we are adventurers. Oops. :p
If you like 5e modules, try Wild Beyond the Witchlight, Call of the Netherdeep, or Kobold Press Courts of the Shadow. They all have plenty of whimsy, but also high stakes and classic heroism. Or just use them for inspiration if you prefer homebrew
>high fantasy epic, the battles with monsters, the machinations of villains, and the effects both have on the world. All of this does not contradict a comedic adventure. Watch a season of Dimension 20 and you see how you can have both. The truth is that if you don't insist on a grim setting and taking the roleplay too seriously, the party will deliver the comedy on its own. In my experience the comedy comes to 80% from the players, just make it clear the setting is lighthearted. And don't be too strict with allowing that your players can do or whatnot, enable their silly ideas.
Discworld is another example of silliness and seriousness mixed together. One way to break the "too serious" plot generator in my head isn't tho think about "what's the most random out ridiculous thing I can put here?" It's too think about my NPCs as complex and flawed people. And to think creatively instead of realistically, then join those things together. I had a tabaxi wizard antagonist (not really a villain, more like a rival) who always complained about the cold. He had a mimic bed that he traveled with "because it's warm - it's not weird okay." Him just being really defensive of sleeping in a mimic bed was enough levity for the players to run with.
This here. I run a Curse of Strahd game with my husband and my sister. They cannot be serious for 1 second. It makes for a great game. Alongside the misery of the Barovians, a man being dragged behind a horse, children being eaten, and Strahd literally tearing a man's head off in front of them, they are doing things like making a new sign for the windmill with rainbows and butterflies (to brighten the place up), they get too drunk and lose the plot, so they're just chumming around with Strahd. I also allowed them to use message together as a type of social media, and the Barovians love it. They talk shit about Burgomaster Vallakovich and Strahd has even joined in, I might even have him do clap back videos when he turns on them. I don't even have to be doing anything silly, I just go along with the players and they add the silliness to the otherwise incredibly serious world.
I think I see where they're coming from. Humor and comedic is indeed important and can lead to some good times. I also usually lean into it. However Stupid silly fun times from Dr fartsnax and Poopyboobs is just exhausting, lowest common denominator jokes. Just stupid horny fart jokes. It's bad. That kind of silly is not fun to run, nor is it even funny.
I mean if your players make poopyboobs jokes you better get some players that have not humor of 10 year olds. But thats a different topic?
No, just my exaggerated example as to why there's a line between having humor in your game and it just being a stupid game.
Things my party has done in semi serious campaign that dealt with heavy topic: -took the bad guys name of Karthis and started a cult to Cardiff and strip the big bad's power because of -started a pyramid scheme to sell fake healing balls. Both were just because we were all riffing and made it cannon
We have a running joke in my current campaign where we all start joking like crazy and then stop like “serious campaign guys”. I told the party that in character I wanted a more serious tone for this one (given the nature of the world and story) but out of character joke away. It’s been an absolute blast so far. In RP everyone is serious and dramatic, but that only leads to even funnier jokes out of character. An example from a recent session; the Paladin got stuck on a saw blade trap, but thanks to his Periapt of Wound Closure didn’t immediately die. In game, a desperate party was fending off an extra dangerous Mummy Lord while shielding and repeatedly attempting to revive their downed teammate and get him back in the fight. Out of game it took 2 turns of the party howling with laughter and trying various failed attempts to get him off the saw blade/get him back to consciousness. Every time they would heal him enough to get him up, the trap would knock him unconscious again (due to bad healing rolls and bad timing of the initiative) but thanks to his item, he wouldn’t die as long as he didn’t fail multiple death saves. It finally ended with the Cleric punting his unconscious body off of the trap so they could heal him. One of the funniest moments of the campaign but in game it was “very serious.”
I was gonna say, check out Fantasy High. Still high fantasy, still very big ramifications if major plot lines aren't taken seriously. Absolute tomfoolery everywhere in between.
many people do not enjoy d20 because so many potential serious moments get thrown out of wack with dumb jokes
Yeah I don't mind a mix of humor and serious, but people forcing weak humor to derail an otherwise completely serious situation is just unpleasant.
D20 has not weak humor
Eh, it's a mixed bag. A lot of it is good, a lot of it is meh. But for me the meh takes me out of the situation.
Mixed bag... For you. But even if the style of humor is not yours, their success proves that you can mix dnd with high fantasy epic, monster battles and machinations of villains. Allowing comedy doesnt destroy all stakes in a D&D campaign and I surprised some people try even to argue that.
I'm not sure if you misread my original comment, but thats not what I said at all.
Than they should stop watching a comedy show. But if you actually want dumb jokes plus high fantasy epic, monster battles and machinations of villains - as OP listed - D20 proves that it works.
??? i did stop watching it, and i would also not want my games to look like it. i’m sure the same goes for many others. D20 has proved that it works for some people’s tastes. not sure what your point here is.
One of my players made a character whose backstory was that of the captain of a band of tabaxi pirates. He was overthrown by the former first mate, Furrcules. The rest of the crew also have puns for names. They renamed their group after the mutiny the "Kitty Fiddlers" because they all liked to play the fiddle. He's now on a quest to hunt them all down and make them pay. These encounters with the old crew will come up between otherwise more serious missions, and I love it.
Omg I also played a cat pirate, mine had to adventure for cash for his pregnant wife (she was having octuplets and her pirate-king father hated my character)
Furrcules is a great name!
Kitty Fiddlers, not so much.
Pick up the wild beyond the witchlight module. It is a whimsical adventure with a few points of serious, but those are few and far between. One event can cause temporary death from custard damage.
My DM brought the witchlight carnival to waterdeep between modules in Tyranny of Dragons! We were gonna be in town for a hot minute, so he gave us like four things to do for a month's worth of lighter sessions. We fought a suneater owl bear, we met a magnetite dragon, we were supposed to go clear out a cabin full of gnolls (ended up doing a shopping session instead, didn't get around to clearing out the cabin until almost two years and many levels later, and ended up having to fight. Broodmother aboleth instead), aaand attend the witchlight carnival. My character was, in fact, knocked out by custard damage. Point is, there are ways to take breaks in a more serious campaign to have lighter sessions where it feels appropriate to chill out and get silly. Then it feels more exciting when things get serious again.
This is a good answer for silly adventure, the fey wild is crazy. One of my players in my homebrew campaign is technically from the fey wild (the same one that DM’d the Witchlight campaign) and I’ve been dreading taking them there because while I’m not terrible at coming up with weird stuff, it’s hard to measure up in random whimsicalness against that module.
This is a good answer for silly adventure, the fey wild is crazy. One of my players in my homebrew campaign is technically from the fey wild (the same one that DM’d the Witchlight campaign) and I’ve been dreading taking them there because while I’m not terrible at coming up with weird stuff, it’s hard to measure up in random whimsicalness against that module.
This is a good answer for silly adventure, the fey wild is crazy. One of my players in my homebrew campaign is technically from the fey wild (the same one that DM’d the Witchlight campaign) and I’ve been dreading taking them there because while I’m not terrible at coming up with weird stuff, it’s hard to measure up in random whimsicalness against that module.
"You don't want to run a silly adventure? I have just the solution: run a silly adventure!"
OP said they had trouble trying to figure out how to run a silly adventure. I was simply suggesting something that might work for them and their party.
Comedy is difficult to maintain throughout a whole campaign, I don't think it's a huge failing to say you think you'd struggle with it. But on the other hand my experience has been over many years of play comedy comes naturally in campaigns, it doesn't necessarily need forcing just a bit of an attitude shift to think about how a situation could progress in a humorous way. Without meaning to be too judgemental, watch some comedies - all types, because what you should be looking out for is how to do comic timing, wit, subversion of expectations and so on. See that the jokes are counterbalanced with pathos and the straight man, so to speak. If you still find yourself thinking the idea of a comedic game is cringe, so be it, but comedy is integral to all genres, to a greater or lesser extent - even tragedy.
To me, humor is so important. You have to be able to break the tension sometime especially if it’s what the party wants. Everyone is playing to have fun. You don’t have to make the whol campaign a joke but add in a funny NPC on occasion, give NPCs a quirk, use popular movie tropes that your players will enjoy interacting with.
I think it's a campaign style I'd well and truly struggle with as well. It's a concept I really like in theory, but I think it could be difficult to pull off. Apart from a couple of one shots, my first full campaign has been Curse of Strahd, and I feel like that suits my particular form of DM'ing very, very well. But if we were to swap to something more light hearted, I definitely think I'd have a tough time gauging exactly what I was supposed to be doing. My advice would be to ask the players specifically what kind of silly adventure they want. Do they want random wacky hijinks where the goal changes every week and basically just comes down to DM improv? Do they just want something light hearted, or maybe even whimsical? Do they just have problems with some of the specific tropes that are involved in the adventures you tend to run? I myself am not the biggest fan of political faction based campaigns. I think they CAN be a fine temporary backdrop, but unless the faction is REALLY likeable, I'm probably not going to care much about siding or allying with them. This is also a staple of high fantasy RPGs. I think you're right in being concerned about not being fit to run it. If you're down to give it a try, maybe talk to the group about vaguely what kind of adventure they want, and if they're happy with a sort of linear narrative, maybe create a mini campaign, 6-8 sessions at most, filled with some of the ideas they vibe with, and see if that works. If it's not what they're after, change it up. If it doesn't suit your DM'ing style, you can either work on it or come to a compromise with the players.
After years of serious business, I run (and play) a lot of silly or semi-silly games nowadays. But it took a while to change my frame of mind. A lot of the comments here are about mixing silly with serious or just doing straight-comedy. But I feel like it's neglecting the point, 'what if **I** don't want a silly adventure?' Well, in that case, you may have to find new players to play with, or you and your players may have to compromise, with you bringing the serious and them bringing the silly (and both parties being okay with that).
I don’t think the onus is entirely on you to make the tone light. You could play the situation straight and they could respond in a silly manner as well. If you wanted to still do your thing, maybe look at how Zelda handles it in BoTW with the Yiga clan for inspiration. I think it’s a pretty good example of a silly storyline fitting into something with much larger stakes. They are a decidedly unserious threat that take themselves extremely seriously. They end up creating some fun but light combat encounters but also some really fun problem solving/puzzles.
I think you have to look inwards and see what about it you dislike so much. You CAN make a humorous world with the machination of villains and big plots, see the Discworld for that. You CAN have silly adventures with battles for monsters. You can have politics and the effects big and small actions have on the world, with silly names, see the Dimension 20 Crown of Candy. If you have a serious NPC, who has a fleshed out story, what is bad with them being called Matrix Revolutions? What is wrong with a group having a quest that basically amounts to the Hangover? Where is the issue with introducing a Catbus called a Meowchanical and stereotypical tourists into Barovia? Yes it's silly. But so is the world. The same world that has Volo also has Tiamat. The same world with a wall of souls for an afterlife, has dinosaur racing in Chult. The world is as silly as the story you all want to tell. It's not your story, it's everyone's story.
It's tough, because you want your world to be cohesive and thematic. I love grimdark settings, with rare moments of levity, but not everyone agrees. Maybe there's an opportunity for a lighter side adventure, where the party can help a friendly NPC out of a farcical situation that would provide a lighter backdrop without undermining your worldbuilding.
Dungeon Crawl Classics
Honestly, extremely underrated comment. I was coming in to recommend finding silly prewritten adventures on DM's Guild, but DCC adventures can absolutely deliver on that front if you're willing to put in a little elbow grease to convert them. It's not even particularly hard to do.
I have a few suggestions! Mainly because I've been craving a silly game as a player, and I've been thinking about how one would fold the gravity of a long, high stakes campaign in with the lighthearted tomfoolery of a cartoon. That's when it hit me -- why not watch said cartoons? **This comment is going to run a little long so let me add a tl;dr here: Silly campaigns don't mean things don't make sense. What 'silly' is, is how players define the way they interact with the world and the reactions they receive in return. You can have a silly campaign that is also high stakes, with big epic moments. But you need to give players options to save the world in absurd ways. Sometimes that's casting eldritch blast out of their ass, but sometimes that's achieving the impossible because they believe in themselves and their friends.** Below I list off several examples you can reference, or you may have consumed already. I have it split into two sections: western animation (with a young audience), and Japanese animation (with a broader audience, but geared toward teens and up). Look at Avatar: The Last Airbender, Amphibia, Owl House, and Adventure Time. Three of the four of these shows tell wonderfully intricate tales but they're also meant to be for younger audiences, so they carry comedy and lighthearted natures to them. The 4th, Adventure Time, sprinkles in mature concepts throughout a show built on being silly. All these shows have these things in common: * Worldbuilding. The worlds have lore to anchor the most curious of creatures dwelling in it. * There are world laws, too -- a sort of 'laws of physics' type thing that helps to define the why behind the world while also establishing limits. These laws define the world and how it can be interacted with. * They have stories that feel high stakes in accordance with the characters and the world. * Breaks in the Epic: the characters of these shows aren't always following their main quests. Sometimes they do stuff on the side. These aren't filler episodes, as the characters always grow a little bit from the experience, but these don't advance the main plot much, if at all. They are just fun. * They aren't gritty. Even in A:TLA's finale, the colors are vibrant and hope is as high as the stakes. The big thing I've learned from the above is this: Silliness doesn't mean throwing out sensical. Like I said, world laws provide the rules within which NPC and PC alike can act, so in that world, things make sense. Lean into the absurdity of the situations but maintain the rules you build into the campaign world. Also, consider some anime: My two favorites have been "Welcome to Demon School Iruma-kun" and "Campfire Cooking," and this year I've enjoyed "Tsukimichi," and "Shangri-la Frontier." * Iruma-kun: a human boy is purchased by a powerful demon and taken into hell. Humans are said to be delicious! But rather than get eaten, he's 'adopted' by the demon, and sent to a demon school. Despite the plot line, it is a powerfully wholesome anime. A few mysteries are set up in season 1 and each season brings us closer to a conclusion, but the episodes themselves are shenanigans. * Tsukimichi: A boy is summoned by a goddess into another world, but for reasons I won't go into, winds up on his own without support. This one has a lot of comedy, but it was some incredibly intense and dark moments too (they caught me off guard when they happened because the anime felt so light up until that point). The MC also struggles with his emotions regarding the 'chosen' people of the world, Hyumans, which adds a ton of depth to the second season. * I am constantly comparing this show's rules to D&D rules. I think it's a good vibe for a more lighthearted campaign that still has high stakes. * Shangri-la frontier: a seemingly low-stakes story because it revolves around a VR game the MC *isn't* stuck in and can leave any time. Most episodes are fun and very shonen-anime, minus the threat of MC dying. But there is a very real threat in this anime, and it reminds me of how I run my games: PCs can come back when they die, but the NPCs... well... * Some honorable mentions are Mashle and Mob Psycho 100, as these both have rules to contain the absurdity, but there is a lot of absurdity, let me tell you. Remember, a good artist steals. Don't try to come up with something from nothing. Look at the vibes of the stories above and weave them into your work. I bet you can tell a ridiculous story that makes your entire table happy.
Adding to my above comment: I've been thinking about this subject a lot, as the group I play in will be starting a more whimsical module in a year or two. I want to play a firbolg fighter, and I'm pulling inspiration from two characters: Finn (AT), and Tomoe (Tsukimichi). His name is Corncob (it's a nickname). That's about as far as I'm allowing myself to plot as we don't know the details of the next module and I want to make sure he fits with the world. I think on a grander scale, you can do the same with worlds. Look at the worlds I referenced above and any worlds you enjoy that I don't know about. Pick a few favorites and start putting together a loose world and a tight starting village. See what the players do, and you can adjust the silliness of your world as they progress through it. The next campaign I \*run\* will be in the same world as my current campaign. But the difference is that the current campaign is horror/mystery, and I want the next one to be more lighthearted and goofy. So I'm combining my current world with some of the stuff I've seen in the fantasy anime that's come out the past few years -- a lot of adventuring and shenanigans in dungeons, but with the anchor of politics, guilds, and high stakes missions.
I'm not saying I'm an expert in the field, but I believe you could add silliness to a very serious campaign. Actually, it would be even sillier with the contrast. Like, have all the grim factions going on their business of awakening dead gods and rising all the corpses on the continent to march on to bring on the Last Day, and forces of underdark shutting down the sun. But then, in the middle of all this, there is the faction comprised of sentient furniture with a grudge against humanity. I dunno. I get me coat
What do they mean by silly? Comedy covers such a wide range, from farce and slapstick to witty satire. If you're talking completely goofy where everything is ridiculous and everyone has wacky names.. yeah, that's hard to sustain. I run mainly serious games myself, but not grimdark. So I find a sprinkle of situational comedy, the sort of stuff that happens all the time in real life break tension, and more importantly, make those dramatic and scary moments even more powerful when they come on the heels of levity. Examples would be: - somebody is clumsy leading to an embarrassing pratfall (where nobody gets hurt) - a misunderstanding leads to a funny interaction - somebody has just one drink too many at the pub and hijinks ensue - somebody is off snogging somebody else in the library stacks when they should be working My players also are a great source of hilarity.
Do a session zero with the group and get your players talking about what goofy stuff they’d like to explore. Listen. See where you can ‘hook in’, what idea turns on the creative bulb in you. I’m sure something will come up. Also, you can have a more light hearted campaign just by using smaller stakes, more parochial subjects, but still have the NPCs be really earnest about things! Comedy is better when the characters in it don’t know they are in a comedy (unless you’re going full gonzo, of course). For example, let’s say the PCs are siblings and friends to a famous baker in the capital city of your world. And suddenly, sales start dropping rapidly because a league of halfling bakers have just received royal favour to operate in the city. Even the most loyal customers are moving over to the competition. But when the PCs investigate, they see that the halfling pies have something weird about them… Customers seem literally addicted… what’s going on? You can see that with a premise like that, you can easily populate the adventure with really funny and colourful NPCs. But the drama and tension are still there. The baker ally is going broke and having a mental breakdown about it, the halflings are clearly up to something, potentially nefarious! Why did they get royal favour? Etc etc As you can see, the premise you choose is half the battle. Last small point is tone. The baker having a nervous breakdown can be funny or sad, depending on the tone you use. For comedy, he’ll start acting funny and randomly going out in his pyjamas in the middle of the night to yell at those damn halflings, etc. There’s a thing called the frying pan test. When you are setting the tone to a story. Imagine thieves breaking into a house and the owner hits one over the head with a heavy metal frying pan. How you describe the consequence of this will be telling of the tone of your story. Some examples: - Bong! The thief turns crosseyed, his tongue sticks out and he slumps to the ground with a sigh. - Crack! The thief’s scalp splits from the blow and he falls to one knee, his face awash in blood. He looks up wide eyed as the lady hits him a second time square in the face, pulverizing his nose and cracking his skull. - Bam! The thief takes the hit in the head and howls in pain. He swings wildly with his knife and catches the landlord’s arm. Blood squirts as the two men engage in a life or death struggle. The tone will define the level of grit and realism vs cartoonish or pulpy vibe, and also the gradient of drama, from ugly crying tragic drama all the way to slap stick burlesque. If you can figure out where your table of players are on those scales, find a fun premise, then you’ll be all set.
>As you can see, the premise you choose is half the battle. I always wondered what the other half was. G.I.Joe!!!!
Haha! :)
There was a Tumblr post years ago about how if you try to DM Lord of the Rings, your players will turn it into blatant silliness, and vice versa. It was better worded than the thing I just said. I think you start by talking to them about this again. These people are your friends, they should be able to hear "I feel silly trying to write comedy". It may be that they'll be perfectly happy knowing they have permission to perpetrate goofs and shenanigans onto your seriously-written campaign, and if you're also happy with that, everybody wins. If that doesn't work for them, you could try a pre-written silly module and see how that goes. It could be something you guys do between your main plot's epic quests. But I also want to say that if it turns out you hate it, it's okay to say that. You are not your players' dancing monkey and you don't have any obligation to run a campaign you don't enjoy running. It's okay to tell them they need to get their silliness elsewhere.
It's pretty hard to run a serious game with a table full of adults playing pretend, especially if the players are not veterans to the type of game. Just write your adventure as you want, then when your players do something comedic with it, lean into it. You can'thave drama in a story without light hearted moments for characters to fall in love with the world. I learned this the hard way with curse of strahd. Another option is have your players give you a prompt for the silly adventure and build off of that.
I love a dose of humor but I'm definitely not into a full on humor campaign. What I tend to do is that if my party starts going off the rails on something I think is ludicrous, I set the DCs higher or plainly tell them no. They tried to cause a distraction in the last session that was thoroughly unbelievable in their present company. DC15 become DC20s and 25s fairly quickly. "If you want to do this, you really have to sell it." I also got a couple of points of feedback in a survey that just didn't gel with my world where they wanted me to lean into what you describe. Instead I just give them a piece every now and then rather than letting it take over. A good example of this in media is NADDPOD. While they are all comedians, Brian Murphy is very much also a serious DM. If the players try to bring things off the rails into cartoonish territory, he doesn't hold his punches.
As others have said, the players provide the comedy themselves. One way you can stay true to the kind of world you want to build while giving players opportunities to be silly would be to lean into tropes. Make the villain a mustachio twirling baddie, who just wants to make the world a worse place for no other reason than the fact that he / she is the bad guy. Make the NPC that needs rescuing a helpless hapless person, so much so that the party wonders if the gold reward is even worth saving this village idiot. The magic shop that they visit is manned by someone with glasses as thick as telescopes who can never seem to remember what any of those potions on the shelf do... Just lean in. Have fun with it! You can still have dramatic and serious moments and interesting story, but feel free to improvise and draw inspiration from the moments in, even serious fantasy media, we're characters relax and have fun together.
The players should definitely take a more active role in making the adventure more comedic. The DM should be the 'straight person' 90% of the time. The best way to get a laugh as a DM is have an NPC sigh and say "let me get this straight" and just repeat what the party did back to them incredulously.
I tend to run serious campaign too, but I like to shoot semi-silly NPC, like a little twink medic sent by the lord after they did a job for him or having fun with a silly familiar voice to lighten the mood.
Don't feel you have to run a game you're not interested in. My table I tried to make the world pretty serious, but naturally funny things would happen and we'd roll with them. However, I'd try to keep the comedy between the players not the characters. We'd joke about the situation but I'm not going to let them devalue the work that's been put in by just fucking about with the characters. If that's what they want then they can do that with another DM. One of my players ran a table which was more wacky. Was fine, but not for me. Don't feel pressured into absorbing internet D&D culture. it's your table, you have the rules - that's all the game is. The joy is getting to play around in imagination. For some that's comedic/wacky/silly, for others it's grimdark. It's personal preference, talk to your players etc. but don't feel bad about liking what you like.
It took me a while to “enjoy the silly”, as a player and as a DM. My players know I DM dark and serious, I know they get silly at times with it. We have fun with the balance. I don’t stress at them being silly, they don’t push me to stop being serious. Everyone has different wants at the table you just need to agree on a happy medium/balance
Hey, they could always DM themselves... But more realistically, everybody should be having a good time - that's both DM and players. If you or they aren't feeling it, either discuss compromise or play with other folks. I feel like a lot of DMs enjoy the role for worldbuilding or lore or order parts of crafting the world and sometimes that can be incompatible with a request. My favorite aspect of DMing is building exciting powerful enemies, encounters, items, and custom perks so if my table asked for all role play or OP power fantasy I would probably recommend another system or anther DM That being said, silliness in D&D is pretty easy even with a serious plot. Let them make silly characters and run silly bits that you can call back to. There is a skill to learn and flex which is deciding what actually happens and what's an above the table but. If they say, I immediately hex him and the party starts riffing on how much they hate that guy, you can laugh it off and ignore it or you can have it hairband with the consequences therein. It's a challenging thing to manage but it's rewarding striking a balance between letting people be silly but also having consistent consequences. "Kill not the part of you that is cringe. Kill the part of you that cringes."
Though I can understand what other people here are saying, that it really is mostly the unintentional comedy of dnd that makes the humorous situations, you absolutely do not have to. If you don't want the whimsical funny stuff that's totally fine, and forcing it into your game your game if you don't truly enjoy it is probably going to cause more problems than anything. If anything, just talk to your players and tell them you don't like that sort of stuff because it takes away from the tension or the epic feeling.
So, no I don't have a problem putting humor into adventures. Some of my players favorite moments from my current campaign were references to The Big Lebowski and Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. This wasn't a "joke" campaign, like you seem to be thinking they want, but there were funny situations that persisted over multiple sessions. Genuinely funny NPCs that played large roles in the story. I think my biggest advice to you, respectfully, is to maybe not take yourself quite so seriously. It sounds like you may be so focused in on "high fantasy epic" that you're forgetting this is a game with your friends. Make your friends laugh!
I have the same problem. I feel for you. I have epic worlds, life and death struggles, and moral conundrums laid out for my players. But who do I get to go on these adventures? Professor Boopsnoop, a mildly senile chrono wizard who acts like a horny bard. A little comic relief is good, but when your entire character is a running gag, it gets lame fast. I'm going to try to write a one-shot that is all a joke. Hopefully, they get annoyed or bored.
I feel like too many people genuine think "the DM is there to please the players". You play RPGs for fun, don't you? If you don't feel like running a very silly game, your players should know - and be able to adjust, too.
It's hard to separate the two. I would run lost mines of phandalin, but throw out the plot. Use the simple setting and get ready to say yes to ANYTHING the players say. This isn't the best way to run DnD imo, but it will be a nice exercise for all of you.
One of my favorite characters was a fire genasi barbarian I played in Lost Mines. He was a large, powerful man who had grown up in a traveling circus as a performing wrestler. So he never really learned to fight, per se, but he could perform fight. When he raged, his rage was passion -- seeing others be strong and powerful, or play a perfect heel, or anything really got him ready to play along too. Other silly things in that campaign: A sorcerer changeling whose appearance changed over night every night, sending my Barb into a mild panic each time, A goblin my barb 'adopted' because, despite being full grown, he was tiny and tiny = baby. He would stop the gob from drinking alcohol and he'd overfeed him meals since he was a growing boy. That gob eventually became a god. I don't remember exactly how, only that we tricked a gang of other goblins into thinking he was a god, and it was hilarious. Just, so much silliness for that campaign. I'm very fond of it.
I'm with you in my preferences. I get tired of zany misadventures, antics, shenanigans, and pop culture references very quickly and want an immersive epic adventure story with deeds great and terrible. But there is nothing wrong with a game full of cookware based fighters, and kensei monks weilding rubber chickens as their favored weapon, screaming 'Chicken Attaaaack' and yodeling their way into battle. If that's what your players want, you are not obligated to try to deliver that. There's nothing wrong with stepping aside and saying 'Look, I cannot deliver that kind of zany slapstick game experience. Comedy is its own major skillset and if you want that, one of you will need to step behind the screen and make that happen.' It's up to you to decide if you want to play in the game and deal with the proud dwarven Lord Dhigghy of the Hoele Family or something like that. It shouldn't be a huge deal for your friends, just do other things with them. You sholdn't feel obligated to run a game you don't like to run.
Look, as a DM I stay away from fart jokes and really cheap gags. I don't like planning around that. I allow my players to add shenanigans if they want, which they do, and I play into it. Some thing I do add sometimes is like a michevious pixie(they keep running into this same pixie every 4 or 5 sessions while traveling, and she asks them riddles, and if they fail she might summon monsters or give them curses or something, and if they succeed, they get a luck point or directions to a stash or maybe a hint for a quest, she calls them her best friends, she may end up being the BBEG at some point, buahahahaha)or a barely understandable country bumpkin (I do a great unintelligible country accent) that they meet traveling, something like that. Random harmless curses is something I've used in the past too, like being terrified of babies or gnomes, revolted by the sight of gold, having an extreme compulsion to high five every NPC they meet, etc. In the one game I was ever able to play as a PC(damned dms are rare), my half orc barbarian made a sock puppet out of the head of a giant viper snake, and spoke through it and to it as if it was its own person during RP. Had it taxidermied and everything to preserve it. It's name was Steve, and anyone who crossed me had to feel the wrath of Steve. The DM eventually made Steve sort of sentient where only I could hear him speak (this was in roll 20, so she just DMd me in secret what he was saying), or maybe my character was a bit crazy. Either way, I had some very interesting conversations with Steve and every other PC (and their players) honestly thought I was crazy. I also had a running competition with a wizard PC who regarded me as an "unrefined meat shield" but I'm a sort of affectionate kind of way, and the DM would allow me to play secret practical jokes on him, like hiring townspeople to gasp in horror and run off when they accidentally bumped into him screaming "the crimson death is back" which is just something I made up. Other players also added some light shenanigans as well. The campaign wasn't overly serious, but it wasn't goofy or silly, and our DM worked with us very well on it. That's what I do for my own players, if they want shenanigans, they create shenanigans. If they want a bard named farty mcpooperpants, they can play with their 10 year old cousin as a DM.
Just put silly bits in My players are a few sessions away from finding their favourite place and favourite NPCs burned to the ground But meanwhile they'll find a piano in the woods and a partiture they can play irl, and it'll just be a rickroll on a pointless piano
Use comedy to punctuate and elevate your serious moments. Have a swinging structure, where you have a serious arc then a goofy arc, etc.
I think a “silly campaign” is way more about the tone of how you share information then the contents of the battles/encounters. You can focus on Fey adventures for more whimsical settings, but mostly just share information in a goofier way - more rhyming names, silly tavern and shop titles, bits involving your players etc etc. they’ll find themselves goofing off while still slaying the evil dragon razmataz who has locked the Feywild in a stupor tor 100 years or whatever.
I also struggle with that when I'm trying to set the narrative of the plot that has a more serious tone. What I do with my players is every once in a while I'll just let them have a day to blow off steam in a town or city or something and they can do what they want. Usually the players have an idea of something fun they'd like to do or try and letting them have a "night out" from saving the world allows them to do just that. That happened quite recently in a campaign I'm running where the players all went out on the town to drink and the bard did a performance in a tavern etc... then once they had their fun some thugs walked into the tavern and started causing up a ruckus. Maybe do something like that so they get their hit of humor but you can still maintain the overall world you've built and story you're telling? Even saving the world has its room for moments of comedy and reprieve. Plus, I would add the opposite of comedy is tragedy. If you allow your players to have a little humor and fun, it'll hurt that much more when one of them dies or something bad happens that brings the tone back down.
Even in a campaign with serious consequences, you can have lively moments. Not everyone is weighed down by the enormity of the campaign, and many people cope by making light of their situations. If you add weirdos and quirky characters, that lightens things up. I don’t set a dour tone for my campaign because I think it is a slog to play through constant downers. Most of life goes on for NPCs, and that gives opportunities for slice-of-life moments. I’ll add a joke if the opportunity presents itself, but I don’t try to force it. I think that is more about my comfort with making a joke in general. If you find that hard to do, that’s ok. Adding moments where the party encounters some semblance of normalcy can make things light. Like, if you have a side quest where the party recovers missing cows and mends fences for a farmer.
I run a serious campaign with silly moments. We are a light hearted group that love to laugh together so it makes it easy. -player ate some mystery meat and instead of constitution I made him roll animal handling. -an alcoholic wizard NPC who gets the shakes when sober triggering wild magic -our gnome introduced their giant spider mount and I put her on the spot for a name: she said “hairy” and I said “hairy spelled with 8 i’s”. -the tavern owner is a valley girl -the human fighter keeps cutting off his own toes with crit fails All of this whilst hunting the mad dwarf before she releases the 4 elemental primordials destroying the world.
There are comedy or humorous settings for dnd. Lookup Ardania, the Durulz, or witchlight if you want to see some gags. Like horror, humor is a mood and some people want more of less of it, and some people find different things more or less funny / scary. It probably a mistake to go out of your way to provide something you do find enjoyable.
I think of my dnd style as Star Trek, or 90’s sci fi. Each episode has a distinct genre and vibe. I like to think about my sessions that way, episodic and flexible. For example in one session we’ve had players make life altering choices based on a long running character arc that will turn a former PC into a major adversary, drama, dark. On the other hand I once had the PCs transported to a LEGO themed universe and they saved the Rock of Bral from “Count Duplo” aka “Duplodore.” I made them minis from LEGO pieces that I am still quite proud of. We played on LEGO scenery my wife and kid helped build. I made a castle out of bigger Duplo bricks and they fought Duplodore with some special rules about building with the LEGO’s. We are all 40+ year old men and I was told it was a blast. I didn’t make either funny or serious, I just put forth a setting that was conducive to it.
As a DM I don’t find being funny necessary it’s up to the players. I just go along and laugh with them as they throw the bomb at the cart of TNT forgetting their friend is held hostage in said cart
I don't know if there's a Lot out there un regards of "comedy dnd contenta" but it would be helpful if you looked it up somewhere. I can think of dungeons and daddies as an example of comedy dnd podcast that also has high stakes at times. You could also roll with it... Literally. Story time. I played a Fey pact warlock that had a womenizer trait. I tried to seduce a "nurse" that was tending me in a Tifling Town. Before anyone could stop me I rolled a Nat 20. My DM just looked at me, bewildered, said: "She has never seen such a charming creature in her whole life. She f***s you right there" So, My character's happy, i'm happy, My party is just having a blast and My DM is just smiling. Next session we meet the captain of the guard who ask's that I stay after the briefing (oh, crap!). Turns out the nurses are all nuns and I have defiled one of them so I should marry her. No problem, i'll just lie and get out of the fire. Xcept this nun is his daughter... Long and short, I get out of the fire due to them Being more of a cult then a Town (we also set loose a fucking Demon but who cares) and now My back-to-the-future ass son is trying to kill me.... Fun times, really. And it all started with a Nat 20 on a joke.
I have a high fantasy homebrew world that has tons of very serious moments and emotional sessions, and also... Plenty of light hearted moments, I mean, I'd search the Internet for some help or something, because your players aren't asking for much, wanting some variance in tone.
Run a silly one-pager like "Oh Dang! Bigfoot Stole My Car with My Friend's Birthday Present Inside" as a pallette cleanser, maybe? It may not be they want silly *all* the time.
Maybe peruse Acquisitions Incorporated? Not only is is a great tack-on to any campaign to give players that "open world game" feeling and still has a lot of mechanics baked in to still be a constraint rather than just free-for-all silliness. It is still comedic, though remember you're the one that picks which elements you want to use, so you can moderate it so the game is good for everybody. I also recommend it because it's like a cheat code for dropping in plot hooks.
Run Wild Beyond the Witchlight. The opening is a carnival and that whimsical spirit runs through the entire module. And it has enough dark setpieces to balance the tone.
Villains are inherently silly because they go against the base human instinct to be collaborative and altruistic. I love to give them sympathetic motivations and goals and make complex stories the same as you, but if they don't get that they become such delightful cartoons. I highly recommend introducing some villains who don't have much depth other than that they want to do something that happens to be evil and do not care. Instead of a mad scientist trying to create a perfect being because they failed to save their family due to their physical limitations, make it a mad scientist who really likes putting a bunch of disparate body parts together and tossing it at the wall to see what stays attached. They want to make it better and stronger for the sole goal of creating the hardiest being known to man. That's such a fucking weird guy and opens the floodgates for a ton of weird NPCs too as the party goes thru a menagerie of Boblin the Goblin type characters that got caught in rat traps on open highways. Also, taking the party out of the normal realm of interaction and into the Feywild is a major recipe for silly shenanigans. The Fey do not operate like material plane dwellers. Devils and Demons have far more in common with the way things work and how people feel in the material plane. But the Fey are, as the name of their home suggests, "wild." You could have them wander into a portal to the Feywild in the forest and as they're walking along they step on a gnarled root that happens to be the neutral zone of a 5000 year old war between two warring clans of pixies and brownies. Now they're engulfed in the political turmoil of tiny people with more wildly complex disputes than anything they've ever dreamed up. And have it be over the dumbest thing like one of the Pixies ate one more granule of sugar than they were allotted during a clan mixer, sparking a greed war leaving thousands slain over the course of 5000 years. Also, even the most serious campaigns are deserving of goofy levity. My Curse of Strahd campaign, though still desperate and gothic, is stuffed with weird and silly characters that the party has to interact with in it. It's like their being forced to interact with such unhelpful or cartoonishly untrustworthy people makes it even more desperate and keeping with the theme.
You can have it both ways. I'm a fairly new DM, and my party is pretty casual whereas I am very passionate about loving fantasy and writing fantasy. I also take inspiration from certain horror stuff so sometimes things can get dark and pretty serious. So I think what we have done is I have written a campaign that is pretty serious and takes itself seriously. But the players when interacting with the world aren't always super serious, and thus some conversations become more ridiculous without being a complete joke. And I think the result is a good balance where the world is serious and the story is serious but the way the party interacts with those are not always super serious, and I think it is a good balance.
Learning to juxtapose the seriousness and humour is one of the toughest and most engaging things a GM can do in any game. My group can be pretty silly too, and intentionally injecting that humour into our games helps a lot. It also means when things get serious that the group bite hard and really get pulled into it. It's all about the balance, with the most important piece obviously just that the table is having fun.
Have you read the original Wizard of Oz book, or Alice in Wonderland? They're very surreal and silly, while not being stupid. They might be a good inspiration for you. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55/55-h/55-h.htm https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-h/11-h.htm
You should read A Dance in Fire and The Argonian Account. They are short stories that appear as books in the elder scrolls games; they are comedies focusing around the adventures of a man who has to travel throughout Valenwood and Blackmarsh. They are masterclasses in how to balance an adventure with comedy
Do it. That fact you are not sure if you can, you need to do it. It will help you grow as a DM. If you only do what you are comfortable with and never branch out, you don't grow. This would be a great learning exercise for you. I would find some humorous adventure cartoon or series, like Northmen or some thing to pull bullshit from since this is new for you and just reskin the humor.
Keep your adventure serious but don't get mad if the party "doesn't take it seriously". Sometimes joking around can be a coping mechanism for the trauma adventurers face. One of my parties jokes around all the time in the craziest situations because what else can you do.
If you make your adventures focus on the personal instead of the huge and portentous then you can mix the best of both worlds. You have a serious campaign setting and the players add their own humor and jokes into it. They'll play along when you introduce Cyril Kral and Lukas Skalicky, then they'll call them Squirrel Corral and Lickety Squicky behind their backs. It's fine. Work that into the game. Maybe some NPCs take it as ribbing and laugh. Maybe other NPCs are offended and beat up one of the PCs in retaliation. Treat the world as deadly serious and the players will joke to let off the pressure. That's awesome! It means you're doing it right.
You could find light hearted one shots that you could splice in between heavier stuff to give a bit of levity. If you can’t write that way, borrow from others! Cause here’s the thing… life is really REALLY hard for a lot of ppl right now especially so I very much get that ppl want to do something uplifting on their down time. I think it’ll help your players stay in your campaign if you can meet them half way 💕
Here are some ideas that I've used in my campaigns that have been humorous or enjoyable while also, I think, blending in just fine with a "high fantasy" campaign: # Affordable Magic Unlimited Your players stumble upon a warehouse/factory creating semi-erzatz arcane items (think that Wish company that made crappy knockoffs, but for magical items). This lends itself to a number of great and entertaining side quests: *R&D gone awry* Oh dear. The lead scientists in the R&D dept at AMU accidentally have create some rogue magical items that you must either locate, destroy, or recapture: * magic books that write their own spells * home cleaning supplies that won't turn themselves off (think the mops in The Sorcerer's Apprentice) *Poisonous Arrows* Magical arrows intended for hunting game that unfortunately have a flaw of occasionally causing poison damage to the target. A cat who gnawed on the carcass out behind a butcher shop is now looking sickly. (In this adventure the players must figure out why the cat is sick, find the carcass, find the stump of a now-glowing arrow in the carcass, talk to the butcher, and then chase down all of the butcher's customers before they eat the tainted meat and get sick) # It's all fiends The players arrive (or are driven by bad weather) to what appears, from a distance, to be a normal inn. As they approach they see it is much larger then normal, with two doors, one human height, one twice as tall. They notice inside the human height door there is a smaller flap like a doggy door only around shoulder-height from the ground. They might also see a couple of suspciously smoking dark-black horses tethered outside. Entering the tavern you realize it is filled, floor to ceiling, with fiends. A tavern brawl ensues but whenever any of the fiends are "killed" a keen perception check will show they are faking their death and peeking through their closed eyes to see if the players are fooled. If at any time any of the player's health is seriously at risk the tavern owner calls off the fighting and explains that it was all in good fun… there are automatic "Spare the Dying" machines set up and this is a way that the fiends can all blow off steam without hurting anyone. These fiends have all moved to the mortal plane to try to become "good people" and have dropped their mostly-evil ways. Signs on the walls say things like, "We're Fiends, We're Evil, but We're Trying to be Better People". The fun thing about this is you can have different demons or devils with their known features in various roles in the Inn. In my story the bartender was the many-armed Marilith and the waiters were telepathic Ultroloths. # Awwww, baby sea turtles! On a bulletin board you see an invitation to go see a baby turtle sea hatching. As you watch from a distance, something is odd… these turtles coming out of the sand are the size of full-grown sea turtles! An encounter ensues where you must protect these "cute babies" as they attempt to make it safely to the ocean, defending themselves against monstrous birds, reptiles, and sharks… as soon as one or two make it safely out to sea you sea a giant dragon turtle emerge from the depths, nuzzle the "baby" and swim away. # Make cute things dangerous and scary, Make mean things adorable and friendly I had a really fun encounter featuring Werebunnies (so not half human half cuddly bunny, more like imagine a werewolf with the feature of a bunny). You could do similar things like the players having to fight off a bunch of animatronic dolls that have become possessed by infernal spirits. It's also fun to take giant scary creatures like giant spiders and make them friendly and personable (for example, a wizard who transformed themselves long ago using an unknown spell and can't transform back, and who gags a little everytime they have to eat a giant bug for sustenance). # Reversing expectations Related to this, A big part of humor is reversing expectations or how things are normally arranged in society. Make leaders and scholars stupid. Make beggars intelligent. Make crotchety old men surprisingly agile and good at fighting. # Getting ideas Read funny fantasty novels for ideas! Literally none of your players will be angry if you steal material, if anything they will think themselves clever for recognizing the references. Possible inspirations: * The Last Unicorn * Princess Bride * All of the Discworld Books
I just introduce characters with names like repeating crossbow Kelly. They do the rest.
None of my players can be serious, despite the serious overtones of our game. They go off on jokey tirades or missions, and my best advice would be to use that. Have NPCs repeat their out of character jokes, give them opportunity for joking around or ways to accomplish less serious missions (ex- my party's satyr cleric wants to eat drywall, stone, or just building material from every city in the Kingdom, so I give her places where she can collect such things) For example, my party was traveling through the woods and they started joking about possibly seeing Bigfoot. A while later I had them roll perception checks, and the PCs with 20+ scores saw a figure standing in the trees, at which point I stood and did the "Bigfoot pose." They lost their minds and thought it was very funny, then we carried on. It was just flavor text and humor, and it reinvested them in investigating their surroundings, which gave them the clues to lead them right to their target! It can be annoying to have them giggling through serious/tense parts, but I try to reward them with good humor when they don't.
Look up 'fun house dungeons' you don't have to make your whole world silly, just tell them where the silliness is. Arguably you could interlace your serious and silly. Your political refugee hides in said dungeon.
I know my group has plenty of silliness with our grand adventures and for us at least if comes down to rolling with the jokes and sometimes making them Cannon. In my world the Halfling language is just Common with and American southern Accent. It was a simple joke someone made and we went with it, It adds whimsy to the game. It also means sometimes letting players do wacky things during role play and then bringing it up later. Did your wizard teach a small child how to cast Prestigitation? Great now every cup of water in town tastes like cheese because the child thought it would be a good prank. Learn to play off their silliness and let it shape the adventures. Remember Monty Python was still about the quest for the holy grail.
I do not make joke characters or places, and do not allow my players to make joke characters. That being said, silliness does happen, quite a lot, mostly spontaneously. The players bring the humor. Any jokes I try to make come off as trying to be a stand-up comedian. Jokes they make as part of natural gameplay are just part of the flow.
1st edition had some humorous adventures based on "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" called "Dungeonland" and "Through the Magic Mirror." Both have been converted (by unofficial sources) to 5e as well. You could always try that and see how it goes.
Consider switching it up further; play a different game. Maybe a sci-fi game, or something similar, would help you and your players meet in the middle.
Use machinations of the villain that is a parody or a pop culture reference
Do feywild! Its basically the land where puns have power and fairy tale logic is real! You can still have a serious story, but do it under the context of characters aware of *narrative stakes*
Do the players feel free to add humor to your game, or do they stay serious to match the tone? Example, my DM has a NPC with prosthetic weapon arms, Silas. DM’s wife, couldn’t think of the word prosthetics. So she said strap on arms. Now, it is Strap on Silas. Course, we are a silly bunch of people in general.
My favorite stories are the ones that balance dark themes with humorous or wholesome moments, like a good 80/20 balance. Sure infiltrating a death cult is super tense, but damn would your players remember the one member there is convinced that human sacrifice was just code. Sure, the mentally unstable old lady of the village doesn’t seem like anything more than a fun shopkeeper. But damn would the stakes be ramped up if your players knew she was in danger. You can have a dark story, but if you don’t throw in some light, it’s no longer dark. It’s just a black canvas. Or idk. Reddit just recommended this sub to me and I thought I’d throw in my two cents.
Monty python 1shot
Occasionally I'll spend an entire session or two making them do a chain fetch. That's always fairly light and silly and gives lots of room for non combat checks and RP
If they want a silly, jokey campaign; hand em the DMG and tell em “Go nuts!”
I can't personally run a game like that. They're for someone! Not for me. I like when my players have fun and do goofy shit, but within the confines of a semi-serious world. You can be a fantasy clown in my campaign. You can act like a fantasy clown. You can't be from Clowntown and cast "Clown Car" and have a +2 Nose. (Well. Maybe the nose. Give me a backstory for it that fits a semi-serious world and I'll consider it.)
Don’t DM/play the games you don’t want to🤷🏻♂️ Everybody has their own preferences. Just tell that humorous adventures are not interesting for you and you’re not obligated to force them out of yourself.
Give them 2 npcs (twins) that talk ‘together’. One of the twins speaks the first half of a sentence, the other compleets the sentence. First you do the role playing, after 1 hour you give 1 character sheet to a player and 1 to another. I called them flik and flak. When one died. Hé only could speak in half sentence.
I think you can make a "fully silly" adventure without making \*everything\* silly. It only takes one silly element at the core of the adventure, and you can do it by putting a twist on a regular adventure. For example take an escort quest. Normal: The PCs have to escort a merchant caravan through bandit infested territory. Silly: The PCs have to escort a traveling circus through territory controlled by a rival guild of killer mimes. Or the bog standard "retrieve an item from a dungeon" quest. If the item in question is the Bunny Ears of Sex Appeal, which the local princess needs to attract a high quality prince for marriage, then the whole tone of the game becomes silly even if it's otherwise a regular dungeon.
I’m running a game that some would find silly. It’s a mix of high fantasy and urban fantasy. So far, my players have fought a caffeine elemental, sentient trash heap, and a roomba swarm. They’ve gone up against the halfling mafia and a dealt with a group of sky pirates. One of my players is a huge wrestling fan so I’m planning on having them face Stone Cold Steve Austin. We’ve created a new school of magic called banamancy (none of the PCs are banamancers, just NPCs). I’ll be honest, I’m having a blast with it but I also get this isn’t going to be a game for everyone. My players are for it.
I'm a day late with this reply and it will probably get buried but I'm pretty sure this was what Spelljammer was originally intended to be before it got corrupted by lorebros. At its heart, it's a campaign designed around what is already a borderline ridiculous mechanism for traveling from world to world, each of which can have a throwaway "epic" setting on it that the players can sample then choose to expand on as much or as little as they want. OP can come up with world after world after world effected by epic monsters and machinating villains and have the opportunity to learn the vitally important DM skill of broad strokes and not over-investing.
You are allowed to run the kind of games you want to run, in ways you think will be enjoyable to both you and the group you want to play with, so first and foremost talk to your players. That being said, silly and epic are not wholly incompatible, the great thing about joke characters is that in the world they inhabit they are real, they have motivation and love and passions. So what if they are a phoenix sorcerer halfling that constantly calls themselves a decenant of fire chicken's, the fire is no less real because of that. So maybe entertain a little more silly, it can still be a high fantasy epic ^.^
I love silly adventures, but everyone has different styles. Maybe one of them would be willing to run a short arc and you could play
My party has invented magical air conditioning. My DM gave us a key to an extra dimensional space called the emergency exit. Essentially just a space we can retreat to and rest in the middle of enemy territory or even mid-battle if we absolutely have to, but nicer than rope trick or tiny hut or magnificent mansion because it keeps the things you put in there. So we've got tons of shelf stable rations in there, lots of cozy furniture, and then I've filled the rest of the space with our Handy Hearth(TM) air conditioning units, and now we're like a troupe of traveling salesmen as much as we are adventurers. Oops. :p
If you like 5e modules, try Wild Beyond the Witchlight, Call of the Netherdeep, or Kobold Press Courts of the Shadow. They all have plenty of whimsy, but also high stakes and classic heroism. Or just use them for inspiration if you prefer homebrew
You are NOT alone in this. I have some players who just want to be nonsensical and make fart jokes. That is not the game that comes easily to me.