A few weeks ago I saw this meme going around (shoutout to @judd who is regularly posting and boosting great stuff and who I promise I am not trying to dunk on in this post.)
Because this is the internet, my reaction was “this is wrong and I should write a thousand words about why.”
Comedy is the point, actually
…and Dungeons & Dragons is primarily a comedy game.
Search your feelings. You know it to be true.
If you’re reading this blog, then like me you have probably ascended galaxy-brain style into a gaming group where people take this shit seriously. I’ve played a harrowing session of Bluebeard’s Bride. I’ve run a brutal union revolt in Picket Line Tango. I’ve cried the entire drive home from a session of Dialect. RPGs can be about emotions and darkness and drama and love and everything else.
But I bet you also remember a time, or still live in a time, when the game was secondary, an excuse to head over to your friend’s house and hang with the girls, drink Sunkist, eat Gardetto’s, and pass the time with a little structure. I think this is most people’s default instinct with these games. I just started a new group of people who’d never played an RPG before intending to run a fairly serious and tense D&D adventure about ghost pirates laying siege to a town, and by the end of the night one of the PC’s private army of raccoons had decapitated a skeleton king, buried his complaining head on the beach, and was sailing into the sunset on his pirate ship while he sputtered curses at them from the mainland. Sure, maybe that was a failure on my part to set expectations, but it was the natural inclination of the table to bend in that direction. The heart and soul of this past time is memeing with your friends.
Also, it fucking ruled.
Dungeons & Dragons, while maybe not the heart and soul of the hobby, is its unquestionable center of gravity. And D&D is a game well suited for a “shooting the shit with your friends” style of play.
The Rules Are for Comedy
“But Sam!” I hear you cry, for I hear my own brain cry it as well. “D&D is crunchy as heck. It’s a pain in the ass to run all those rules. Making a character is like doing your taxes. There’s so much math.”
Exactly. Few other games make it so easy to completely check out of how any of these stupid rules work and let you focus entirely on your Gardetto’s and memes while the one guy at the table who cares handles all the numbers. The culture and tradition of it is built around putting all that work on the GM leaving the players to reach peak fuckarounditude. And also, zero people in the history of the game have played D&D truly rules as written.
What people do remember is the core mechanic, the d20 roll, and that roll is laden with comedy. Tradition dictates that you have a 5% chance on any given roll of a WILD AND CRAZY SUCCESS, like stopping a war with a single rousing speech. And also, on every single roll, a 5% chance of a FAILURE SO EMBARRASSING AND HORRIFIC that you, a veteran of hundreds of battles, may very well trip and fall straight onto your own sword. Both of these things are glorified slapstick. The variance is HIGH. Comedy comes at the edges of the bell curve, and D&D loves the edges of the bell curve.
The Vibes Are for Comedy
My refrain this season of dice exploder is that vibes are just as much mechanics as any systems or rules, and D&D’s vibes are also full on comedy. All it takes is watching the D&D movie or googling “barrelmancy” to know how true this is.
This is not a game interested in thinking about the serious topics baked into its premise like racism or colonialism. This is a game about vampire puppets in Lord Strahd’s castle, taking dragons clubbing in Waterdeep, and goblins stacking themselves up into columns like totem poles (please don’t think about the racism there or how you’re probably about to murder them, kthx). Many of the most popular D&D actual plays are full of comedians. The first sentence of the preface to the Player’s Handbook begins with a joke:
Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a realm called the Midwestern United States…
Moreover, D&D is a game where getting wrong any or all of the things mentioned in that initial meme probably leads to jokes. A failure of rules and system plays like this, or an episode of Monster Factory. A failure of technique commonly leads to a Benny Hill routine like the one imagined in our showcase meme. A failure in expectations is literally an accepted definition of what comedy is.
One of the main points of playing D&D is to get to memes like the one Lisa Simpson is railing against. Decades of culture are pointing you in that direction.
And that’s a good thing.
I have this separate theory that so many RPGs, at least campaign-length games, tell found family stories because the real life story of organizing an RPG group is the creation of a found family. The reason we play these games is because hanging out with our friends rules, and it’s kinda nice to have a reason to meet every week and a structure for hanging out when we do. Sure, I have some groups I like to play feelings-heavy games with. Sometimes I want a group therapy session. But even in those games, you can bet your butt that the Discord chat is full of a running commentary of memes and gifs.
We like vibing with the lads and making each other laugh. That’s what we crave in life. D&D may not consciously understand this, but its culture has evolved to fit that shape by instinct if not intent. I love that for it.
