LogFAQs > #939493279

streamofthesky posted...

It's been almost universally my experience that players will make things light-hearted and eagerly derail a serious moment if there's a joke to be made or they can build off one someone else has made. (I'm very "guilty" of this myself when I'm a player, too)

So I think in general, the DM should mostly keep things serious and on track, b/c the players will be pulling the lion's share of the weight in turning the game into a campy comedic romp regardless. The occasional humorous event or NPC is fine, though. I enjoyed in my last campaign running duels between summoner mages/psions as pokemon matches w/ a running gag that all of the rival pokemon trainers were super sketchy weirdos and delinquents that probably belong on some kind of watch list.

This sounds about right. Having something more serious to act as a backbone for the whole thing is good, but players will inevitably do stupid things to have fun with it, and it's important to be able to roll with that instead of trying to shoehorn them into "no-fun-allowed" mode. Trying too hard to make the whole thing ridiculous is also risky, because the players will also be silly and then the whole session ends up being one note, which gets boring. Don't take your campaign too seriously and feel free to throw some jokes in where appropriate, but still try to keep it grounded so it can have some direction.

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