T w e n t y S i d e d
From The Archives:
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
In Defense of Crunch
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
The Best of 2019
I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
Silver Sable Sucks
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
Man, I forgot how miserable that campaign was.
I don’t know what drew Shamus to write these horribly dysfunctional roleplaying groups, but boy he didn’t hold back on the “horrible” and “dysfunctional” parts.
It’s funnier that way?
Writing about a normally dysfunctional group wouldn’t be funny, because we had encountered similar things happening. I’ve been gaming since the 70s, and yes some of these happened. It’s just what happens.
But if you turn all the dials up and have everything happen to the same group? And then make it worse, to the point where no one really would put up with it? Yeah, that can be funny.
I shouldn’t have to explain this.
I mean, there are more choices than “horribly dysfunctional group” and “normally dysfunctional group”; a third would be writing about a (more or less) well-adjusted and functional one. The absurdities of tabletop RPGs are still plenty to derive a humorous comic out of such a setup (I think Darths & Droids is a pretty good example).
There’s absolutely a lot of humor to be mined in this comic’s basic premise of “DM puts their long-suffering friends through an epic campaign that none of them really care about”, but every so often the characters come off as just plain mean-spirited and it’s less funny and more cringey.
Interesting. I’ve always found the situations in DMotR funny, rather than cringey. And it’s precisely because the group is dysfunctional.
This is the basis of comedy, which is why you see a dysfunctional group as the protagonists in 99.99% of sitcoms and comedies. At most, you get one normal person (a.k.a. “a straight man”), but that’s only because the rest of the group is insane and you need to have someone to contrast that insanity against.
This is also why I’ve never liked Darths and Droids (and also partly why it’s never been even half as popular as DMotR) – the group dynamics just aren’t as funny.
It is one basis of comedy, others exist as well.
There used to be sitcoms without dysfunctional groups (might still be as well? I’m not really following the genre these days). Yes, tension and drama and humour come from differences in attitude and viewpoints, but there is no need to take to levels of full-on dysfunction to make it funny.
Darth’s and Droids is a different tone of humour yes, but I also think it never hit the same peaks as DMotR because it asks a lot more in keeping up with the lore (ironically doing the thing the very first panels of DMotRs lampooned) and the unseen players as distinct from their characters. It’s harder to get into late, even with their fun recap episodes.
I actually think it’s aging better than DMotRs though (good example is the punchline of the above DMotR episode).
I never said it was the only basis of comedy (hence the “99.99%” part of my comment). Whenever I’ve tried getting into Darths and Droids, I’ve always tried doing so at the beginning. I tried doing it back when it first came out, as well as in more recent years. And it just isn’t as funny as DMotR.
As for the aging bit, I think DMotR has aged really well. It’s just as funny today as it was all those decades ago when Shamus first wrote it.
But humour is subjective, afrer all, and as they say “Different strokes for different folks”. Maybe it’s best if we leave it at that :)
My apologies for misunderstanding then.
When you said ‘This is the basis of comedy’, I read that as ‘singular basis’.
Like a lot of things in life it’s a spectrum, and different people have different levels of comfort with dysfunctional behavior. I find it funny when the players make passive-aggressive snide comments on the campaign world and NPCs which the DM seems completely oblivious to. I find it a lot less funny when Aragorn’s player engages in behavior calculated to rile up another player which had already been indicated to be unwanted at least twice (if I remember correctly). It veers into second-hand embarrassment territory for me. If you find that funny…*shrug* great? I’m not here to judge. Just pointing out that – for all the good laughs in this comic – the constant background of antagonism can wear a little heavy, at times. (I pointed out a few strips ago that I found Legolas’s player’s genuine enthusiasm at the fate of the campaign coming down to an NPC dice roll refreshing, it was a little ray of positivity.)
People complain about the edge of Gen-X but they’re forgetting, or they weren’t here for, what that cynicism was dismantling.
We go through cycles of waxing moral and pure and it gets performative. Once upon a time, it was putting in your appearance at church to be seen attending but there are other flavors of it. It doesn’t allow people the space to get there authentically and the resentment that is bred from being forced into it is masked and growth doesn’t happen.
Some cynicism is an antidote to that. But we’re at the point in the cycle when we’ve spent plenty of time in the excess that can cause.
It may be South Park energy but its also George Carlin energy.
Just want to add that I have been bingeing Cheers because I binged Frasier. And its surprisingly violent. Diane drives Sam so crazy that he ends up in court for assault. He didn’t actually touch her but he chased her after she had goaded him for a season into confessing to her, then demanded that his proposal come with some ceremony and romance, then turned down the proposal she asked him to give. And Carla actually shaved a woman bald out of vengeance and she’s talked about doing worse.
That was a wildly successful mainstream 80s sitcom and all the main characters in that show are arguably much worse than the characters in this webcomic.
The starting point of the comic, as I understand it, is ‘what if the DM asked the players to read as much backstory as Tolkien did of his readers’.
It’s juxtaposition trying to show the difference between writing a framework for a group of active participants in the story vs writing a complete story for a passive audience. And for maximum impact of that, the group isn’t functional.
Back in the days before being able to easily find groups online, having to stick with whoever in your town was also into the same game meant the choice of ‘these guys or no game’ hung over many groups. Most stories of dysfunctional groups come from that time (DMotR started at the tail end of it), and contributed to roleplaying’s stigma.
That’s not to say group dysfunction has disappeared, but between it being easier to find new groups and roleplaying having received a lot healthier high-profile representation in the meantime, it seems it’s no longer a genre defining type of humour.
Even Order of the Stick focused heavily on inter-party fighting early on.
It’s not gay if it’s with an elf.
I can’t imagine what the end of a campaign is like, or caring about what happens to my character “next”. Cross that bridge when we come to it :D