Sure, Star Wars has its funny moments. A little comic relief amid the action and drama is part of the genre and has its place in a game too. We can all tell stories about rolls that go wierd or impromptu slap stick. Do you purposely plot for humor though? How tolerant are you with just plain silliness in your game?

In looking for adventure ideas I'm struck by things people weave into their games or even whole adventure seeds that are humor based. A patron hiring the party to kill his other in law or a fat alien falling off scaffolding into the parties open topped vehicle during a chase.

I can appreciate humor but can't imagine this kind of stuff in our game.

Thoughts?

One of the great places to do this is in the advantages or threats or despairs. IE Han Solo's rolled a despair on his stealth and stepped on a twig.

For example I rolled 3 adv and a failure attacking a flame trooper so I disarmed him. On his action he rolled 3 threat which the GM ruled as out of ammo and had him spray EVERYTHING with jellied fuel out of a broken hose...hilarity ensues as trooper get out to avoid fire and the nemesis gets lit on fire etc.

I think it's pretty hard to purposefully incite humor in a tabletop RPG.

Kind of like it's super hard to do good horror in a tabletop RPG, even in games that are specifically tailored to the horror genre.

For me personally the funniest moments during play were born naturally out of the circumstances.

But one of the GMs I've played with was really good at creating silly characters, that brought a lot of laughter, but at the same time didn't feel out of place.

As far as funny adventures go, I'd would probably try something with droids as the focus, since they've been pretty much the staple comedic relief of Star Wars.

Protocol droids would be the obvious go to. Maybe the major NPC of the Adventure is a protocol droid who wants to achieve something unusual to want for a droid.

Personally I'd probably wouldn't attempt something like this, because it can be hard to intentionally be funny, and it kills the mood when it doesn't work out.

Not to say that I haven't been the cause of funny situations, but I like to have them happen naturally.

The players itself probably have it the easiest when it comes to infusing a campaign with humor. Especially when that campaign isn't inherently humorous.

Most of the humour in our game comes from the players, and it's invariably dark.

Our sweet little droid examining the bodies after our Exile had played 'stormtrooper skittles': 'I do not think stormtroopers should bend that way'.

Personally, I don't think anything kills a game faster than silliness. Think of how badly Jar-Jar's slapstick antics were received.

Good luck to those who can do deliberate humour well, but I can't. As a GM, I do high-concept better than low-concept; that's just my strengths. I find it's a very fine line between something that's funny and something silly that hurts the mood.

We put stuff in with Advantage, Threat, Triumph and Despair.

I had the PC party try to stare down a mook group of three fellas, and fail.
So the Gunslinger is out with his gun, catches the tip of the gun on the holster and shoots a crate on the docks instead, spilling stuff everywhere (Threat, added difficult terrain for everyone).
The commander orders the wookie in (Free maneuver) - The Wookie steps in, stumbling over the spilled cargo of cans, manages to close to engaged. Mooks shoot with penalties and miss. The Wookie rolls Brawling, Two Triumph and a success and 6 Advantage I think it was. I ruled the two triumphs was him taking two out: he picked up one by the leg to hit the other, then he backhanded the last one with his regular success the falling bodies somehow cleared the cans of food and stabilized the terrain with the advantages.

A well statted Brawler is a terrible thing.

Wow. I didn't realize so many played such serious games.

A lot of my table is usually taken up with humor, we're just a bunch of friends hanging out and having fun. Two of my players were so excited to play 'Star Wars' because they've been listening to the Campaign podcast over on OneShot (one of them convinced me to listen).

The galaxy may be a dangerous place, but its a funny one as well. No matter how much I try to keep thing serious, everyone usually has a good time turning things into jokes. I've embraced this a bit also, as their BBEG is calling himself Chett Awesomelaser, Supreme Overlord of the Legion of Doom.

A good portion of fun is needed (at least at our table) to counter the darkness of this era.

That said, longest laughing scene at the table,

jedi healer got caught cause of her pacifistic worldview (happens quite often). A Gunganguard tryed to interrogate her while sitting in the energyprison.

The guard tried to find out about the Stuff she was wearing, easpecially this little metaltube...the training lightsaber.

Well of course the player doesn´t want him to find out so she upgraded the guards check with a destinypoint.

Resulting in a Sucsess and a Despair, the Gungan Guard found the switch to activate the TLS but was pointing the bad end to his forehead at this moment... well he fried himself, lying on the ground out of order...

After alot of laughing one of my players mentioned: "**** Healer why are you so pacifistic? Just think what would have happend if this was a real LS, one Gungan less in the Galaxy to get on our nerves!"

well it was hillarious (for us at least)

I think humor is something to define during session zero and it depends greatly on everyone involved. I know groups that take themselves super-serious; hardcore medieval RPG's where there is no "out-of-character" and speaking out of term will get your character and or the party in serious trouble and I have no trouble joining them, but I prefer a, a bit more relaxed enviroment. Also, there is slight drinking at our table.

Some days we have great intense roleplaying sessions and other times we are simply having fun with our silliness, but as another poster said, most humor comes from the players, and sometimes you have to remind the players to be more serious, some things turn out funny just because I can't stop myself when ample opportunity presents itself...especially when there are threat or triumph involved.

When we did the beginner adventure, during the fighting on ryloth that takes place next to a dump, one player jumped into the bathtub for cover, because clearly, at every dump in existance there is a bathtub somewhere.

I have lots of humor in my game, mostly from me as the GM, but my players inject some as well.

It's not the easiest thing for them, one is either mildly autistic, or has asperger syndrome (or at least he thinks he might, and it wouldn't surprise me), and the other is just really socially awkward, and afraid to roleplay too deeply and "get into character". So usually I provide the humor, they react to it, sometimes in a funny way.

Sometimes it's intentional, sometimes it's in reaction to gameplay. 2 of my favorite in this campaign, came as results of the Artisan's mechanic checks, one had a despair, the other had a few threat.

She was repairing a protocol droid that had been seriously damaged in a ship crash. I stacked several critical damage effects on the droid, and she started to try and fix them. She got it up and running, but it's lower half was disconnected. She rolled a despair, and I had the result be that the droid thought she had basically dismantled him in some sick robot Saw kind of thing, delighting in torturing the droid. It proceeded to always have panic attacks when she would show up. "NO! Stay away! Someone help me!! She's going to take me apart again!!' And basically just not shut up about how she had mangled him. It was most amusing, because I got to ham it up a lot. After she fixed THAT problem, she got some threat, so I had the droid behave normally, but he would occasionally mis-translate words. This I actually took a little planning on for the next session, which was going to be a talk heavy one, involving the droid. I planned out a few key words that I would replace with nonsensical ones. I had a lot of fun with the Jedi of the group (the possibly autistic guy), because I would be talking to him in my best 3PO impression, and would randomly throw in "Why yes sir, I think those people are purple happy to fish you." To watch his expression as he rethought having the droid translate for him was priceless. I even did it on the other side, where the droid said some stuff to the aliens, and when it finished, they all turned and looked at each other, confused, and repeated the same word among themselves, trying to make sense of what the droid said. I had a lot of fun with that one.

I also had a minion group of scouts helping the players, as they were also survivors of the crash. One of the scouts was a Jawa, and I had them be ambushed by some monkey-lizard animals that lived on planet. The minion group rolled a Despair on their perception check to notice the ambushing monkies, so I had them basically dogpile the Jawa, and start humping him, ala The Rundown with Dwayne Johnson. My frantic "UTINNII! UNTINNI!!" as I describe the Jawa's robes vanishing in a pile of randy monkey butts almost killed my friend playing the Jedi.

So yes, humor is very much a part of Star Wars, but you have to use it wisely. Too much, and you risk derailing the flow of the game into off topic banter. Not enough, and...well...it's not a funny campaign. Now sure, sometimes humor has no place, given what the situation might be, but to have zero humor? No thanks, that's not the Star Wars I want to play in.

I don't actively set out to write funny games - comedy is such a subjective thing and all - but we do get light scenes and funny moments that take over the table all the time. I don't think it's a bad thing in star wars to be funny - we get R2 doing pratfalls, 3P0 being uptight, chewie being a goof, Han being sarcastic. The over the top space opera nature means that being Grimdark all the time pretty much runs counter to the genre.

I think a lot of humor at our table takes place out of character, but sometimes someone brings a concept to the table (dumpster jedi, hard-drinking ewok pilot) that bring it into play. None of us craft the stories to be funny, it just sorta happens. Suggesting narrations for failures is usually where it starts.

I don't actively set out to write funny games - comedy is such a subjective thing and all - but we do get light scenes and funny moments that take over the table all the time. I don't think it's a bad thing in star wars to be funny - we get R2 doing pratfalls, 3P0 being uptight, chewie being a goof, Han being sarcastic. The over the top space opera nature means that being Grimdark all the time pretty much runs counter to the genre.

Not to mention, if the game is always Grimdark, then it's not really Grimdark anymore. It loses any context for why it's grim and dark. If you can't contrast it to the more lighthearted stuff, it loses a lot of it's emotional weight.

Our sessions are basically like 70's/80's action movies, full of gunhoness, obvious cross comparisons with other media and occasionally completely outrageous plans that are so inherently suicidal, it would fit right into that action movie peg!

One thing we found especially amusing was a simple cargo raid we did. We are Preditor Squadron, a squad consisting almost entirely of non-humans (A rodian, a Gand, twilack, a human replica droid and a genuine human that is described as a 50 year old Arnold) so after a successful raid in capturing a shipment of cargo ships, we found that it's contents had broken out but we couldn't find any sign of what had broken out. So we pressed on into the ship and it was only when we encountered our first blip and a pitch black alien dropped down infront of Gand the reference twigged; It was literally Preditor vs alien!

Ended up being a two parter that played out across two sessions. The space station owned by another player had also been infected so we ended up having a huge battle there too. Oh boy, the sheer fury he had toward the GM that session was probably one of my highlights!!*

The other thing that cracks me up is banter between characters. Mine has a bit of a reputation of a Mavrack that had gone lone wolf on a couple of occasions to stir the hornets nest so it especially makes for some cutting banter.

"Oh great, a temple, I do love a good adventure!"

"Aye, usually your idea of an adventure is to go solo, get captured and we end up spending a month planning to bail you out."

"Oh you guys..."

So theres plenty of humour, some subtle, Others? not so..."

"So what are we going to name this ship?" (New pilot, he is a contractor on cloud city lent to us by Lando.)

"I donno, what do you guys think?"

"The Dank Weed?"

"Sure"

"What really?"

And so the DM struggles to keep a straight face whenever he has to refer to that ship directly.

*Don't give him any sympathy. He tends to try and claim ownership on anything important and caused two campaigns to end prematurely, one smuggling campaign that I am still really bitter about. That and his entire idea on character development was setting an orphanage on fire. Yeah. So it felt good to watch him getting the rough end of the stick for a change. XD

I don't actively set out to write funny games - comedy is such a subjective thing and all - but we do get light scenes and funny moments that take over the table all the time. I don't think it's a bad thing in star wars to be funny - we get R2 doing pratfalls, 3P0 being uptight, chewie being a goof, Han being sarcastic. The over the top space opera nature means that being Grimdark all the time pretty much runs counter to the genre.

Not to mention, if the game is always Grimdark, then it's not really Grimdark anymore. It loses any context for why it's grim and dark. If you can't contrast it to the more lighthearted stuff, it loses a lot of it's emotional weight.

Exactly. The old Ghostbusters RPG had staging tips for tone, where they said that you need to break up the scary moments with funny moments and used the first movie as an example. Library Ghost (scary), Venkman's ESP test (funny), the Ghostbusters investigate the library (scary) and so on.

The same thing applies here. If you're Tone A (be it scary, grimdark, funny or whatever) one hundred percent of the time, it loses it's impact after a while. You need some kind of counterpoint to offset it.

I rarely plan humor in my games. Most humor comes from creative characters, brainstorms over what to do with excess threat/despair and the like. Every once in a while I have a stroke of brilliance and improvise something really funny, but it's almost never planned ahead.

Most of my humor comes from trying to create interesting and unique NPC's. I'll admit the blinged out wookie with the leisure suit, purple hat, and excess gold was done entirely for laughs. Also the HK Assassin droid turned chef.

Ok, Im hearing most of you feeling similar to me in that some impromptu humor resulting from a little randomness and the almost unavoidable references and clichés that pop up during play is tolerable if kept in check.

(Fleeing guy hits electronic door switch and finds guard immediately on the other side when it opens. Both stare at one another for a second in shock, but then he smiles and closes the door again.)

That sort of thing is a nice stress relief and very 'Star Warsy' and certainly welcome at our table too.

What isn't welcome, is the over the top stuff. Im not trying to highlight anyone above so please don't be offended is these remarks resemble you or your group but..

Funny Names (This is Butt Backside, captain of the Ripsnorter)

Rediculous Costumes (The Chancellor enters wearing what looks like a plastic trash bag and hip high boots)

Dumb Voices (The bartender talks quite a bit like Mickey Mouse - and the GM imitates him.)

Comical Characters (The Utai crewman who humps the female Captain's leg whenever he can)

Lame Plot Points (The Imperial General tells you he will let you all go, IF... you will fetch his favorite snack food which is currently unavailable as its primary manufacturing planet is under quarantine.)

This kind of stuff provides a lot of fun Im sure in some games and Im not knocking it, only saying that it just doesn't work in ours. My campaign is, at the risk of sounding cliché and melodramatic myself, a litte dark. It takes place right after Yavin and the Empire is tightening its hold everywhere in some really nasty ways. Call it a Palpatine fit and the people are catching it. Enslavement, inquisition, orbital bombing, hostile occupation. kidnapping and torture of suspects, trade controls, travel limitations etc. (The Empire is very much Striking Back) Frivolity and giggles just don't seem to fit, at least not a lot of them.

What isn't welcome, is the over the top stuff. Im not trying to highlight anyone above so please don't be offended is these remarks resemble you or your group but..

Funny Names (This is Butt Backside, captain of the Ripsnorter)

Rediculous Costumes (The Chancellor enters wearing what looks like a plastic trash bag and hip high boots)

Dumb Voices (The bartender talks quite a bit like Mickey Mouse - and the GM imitates him.)

Comical Characters (The Utai crewman who humps the female Captain's leg whenever he can)

Lame Plot Points (The Imperial General tells you he will let you all go, IF... you will fetch his favorite snack food which is currently unavailable as its primary manufacturing planet is under quarantine.)

This kind of stuff provides a lot of fun Im sure in some games and Im not knocking it, only saying that it just doesn't work in ours. My campaign is, at the risk of sounding cliché and melodramatic myself, a litte dark. It takes place right after Yavin and the Empire is tightening its hold everywhere in some really nasty ways. Call it a Palpatine fit and the people are catching it. Enslavement, inquisition, orbital bombing, hostile occupation. kidnapping and torture of suspects, trade controls, travel limitations etc. (The Empire is very much Striking Back) Frivolity and giggles just don't seem to fit, at least not a lot of them.

I think you can just look to things like Star Wars Rebels, and the Clone Wars, on how you can inject a little levity into a tense situation. The common thing that Star Wars usually does is "snarky banter while tense things are happening". Just look at the back and forth between Han and Leia on Hoth as they are trying to escape. "No time to discuss this with the committee!" " I am NOT a committee!!" Or how Han tries to blow out the torch as the Ewoks try to cook him alive and eat him . Snarky back talk while being shot at is a perfectly acceptable method of adding a little levity to a situation. Sure you don't do it all the time, and the above examples you gave, I wouldn't think should be allowed at all. I mean seriously, one sentient being humping their captain's leg? I don't see that happening more than once before the captain just fires them, or fires AT them. And in some scenes, having any levity breaks the mood. Like in Return, when Luke is having his tense conversation with Vader and Palpatine. Having one of them do a prat fall or something would be poorly timed. But that's just Dramatic Pacing 101.

"So what are we going to name this ship?" (New pilot, he is a contractor on cloud city lent to us by Lando.)

"I donno, what do you guys think?"

"The Dank Weed?"

"Sure"

"What really?"

And so the DM struggles to keep a straight face whenever he has to refer to that ship directly.

My group's ship is a Gamma class shuttle called "The Penetrator"...well, I should've seen it coming. During session 0 when we talked about how gritty or serious they want the game to be, and how much combat they would like to see the answer was "We want Blood and Boobies" so yeah, their characters spent quite some time in bars chasing tail

Ed: this is one of the reasons why the "rebell cell" they joined are former pirates who were converted by now-Admiral Arkhan (AoR Beginner) to join the cause while/after he was kidnapped by said pirates. Gives me a good justification for them to be a bit more lax in general.

"The Dank Weed?"

That beats "Shippy McShipface."

What isn't welcome, is the over the top stuff. Im not trying to highlight anyone above so please don't be offended is these remarks resemble you or your group but..

Funny Names (This is Butt Backside, captain of the Ripsnorter)

Rediculous Costumes (The Chancellor enters wearing what looks like a plastic trash bag and hip high boots)

Dumb Voices (The bartender talks quite a bit like Mickey Mouse - and the GM imitates him.)

Comical Characters (The Utai crewman who humps the female Captain's leg whenever he can)

Lame Plot Points (The Imperial General tells you he will let you all go, IF... you will fetch his favorite snack food which is currently unavailable as its primary manufacturing planet is under quarantine.)

I agree.

I think certain types of humour work for us - as Desslok says, humour in general is an acquired taste.

Snappy 80's action-hero banter works; it's a staple of pulp adventures.

Our game is generally more grimy and grindhouse than most, so the humour tends to be dark and dry, something more like the 'Borderlands' games.

Sillyness doesn't work for me though - I don't want to descend into a parody game, so I've had to cut some things like the pimped-out Blaxploitation trandoshan in one of the adventures because that just wouldn't work for us. Something like 'Saints' Row' (funny though it is) is just too much for our table.

What isn't welcome, is the over the top stuff. Im not trying to highlight anyone above so please don't be offended is these remarks resemble you or your group but..

Funny Names (This is Butt Backside, captain of the Ripsnorter)

Rediculous Costumes (The Chancellor enters wearing what looks like a plastic trash bag and hip high boots)

Dumb Voices (The bartender talks quite a bit like Mickey Mouse - and the GM imitates him.)

Comical Characters (The Utai crewman who humps the female Captain's leg whenever he can)

Lame Plot Points (The Imperial General tells you he will let you all go, IF... you will fetch his favorite snack food which is currently unavailable as its primary manufacturing planet is under quarantine.)

Definitely with you there - there's a time and place for slapstick at our table, but it's not in-character!

Everyone's table's going to be different, but it's entertaining to see how many similarities we all share here.

Ok, Im hearing most of you feeling similar to me in that some impromptu humor resulting from a little randomness and the almost unavoidable references and clichés that pop up during play is tolerable if kept in check.

(Fleeing guy hits electronic door switch and finds guard immediately on the other side when it opens. Both stare at one another for a second in shock, but then he smiles and closes the door again.)

That sort of thing is a nice stress relief and very 'Star Warsy' and certainly welcome at our table too.

What isn't welcome, is the over the top stuff. Im not trying to highlight anyone above so please don't be offended is these remarks resemble you or your group but..

Funny Names (This is Butt Backside, captain of the Ripsnorter)

Rediculous Costumes (The Chancellor enters wearing what looks like a plastic trash bag and hip high boots)

Dumb Voices (The bartender talks quite a bit like Mickey Mouse - and the GM imitates him.)

Comical Characters (The Utai crewman who humps the female Captain's leg whenever he can)

Lame Plot Points (The Imperial General tells you he will let you all go, IF... you will fetch his favorite snack food which is currently unavailable as its primary manufacturing planet is under quarantine.)

This kind of stuff provides a lot of fun Im sure in some games and Im not knocking it, only saying that it just doesn't work in ours. My campaign is, at the risk of sounding cliché and melodramatic myself, a litte dark. It takes place right after Yavin and the Empire is tightening its hold everywhere in some really nasty ways. Call it a Palpatine fit and the people are catching it. Enslavement, inquisition, orbital bombing, hostile occupation. kidnapping and torture of suspects, trade controls, travel limitations etc. (The Empire is very much Striking Back) Frivolity and giggles just don't seem to fit, at least not a lot of them.

Such things can work in such a setting, but they've got to be used properly. And, if a group chooses to avoid them, of course, that's fine, too. Funny doesn't care if the Empire is in full crackdown...sometimes it just happens.

In our old WEG campaign, I convinced our starting GM to let me swap the astromech that came with my Young Jedi template for...Tom Servo from MST3K. Servo was just an NOC to add some fun...he thought he was an astromech, and would put his finger into scomp link ports to no effect. But, he came in handy from time to time for more than comic relief, like the time we were all stuck and I got a good roll, letting him pilot my ship to get us. As a co-GM for the campaign, I statted up, but never got to use, his former counterpart Crow T. Droid, who fancied himself to be an old battle droid and gangster Perrla the Hutt, modeled after the show's Pearl Forrester.

Then there was our resident Wookiee bounty hunter, whose player couldn't think of a name. So the group of us branded him "Scooby" (retconning in the formal name Scoobharren).

Or the Jawa PC who briefly joined us, constantly trying to steal anything shiny that he saw...including our weapons (particularly my lightsaber).

Or our smuggler who played the character as if he were a Bruce Campbell character.

Plenty of room for fun, but agreed that it doesn't fit every group's dynamic or preferences.

I'm pretty much with the rest of the consensus. Generally speaking, I try to avoid over-the-top humor unless it has a purpose. For instance, one story I told had the PCs hired on a bounty to recover a crime-boss' "daughter" who ran away. In reality, the "daughter" was a next gen AI droid that was designed to be a human replicant and spy. It "rebelled" and escaped into the jungles outside the city.

The planet was the location of a major Separatist droid factory during the Clone Wars, one that was shut down after the War ended as opposed to destroyed during the fighting. The left over droids were set for termination, when they suddenly disappeared en masse. No one ever thought to follow up on it, as they were set for destruction and technically this saved the scrapping company a ton of money on labor and materials for their destruction. They were going to have formed a "society" in the jungle in the ensuing years to provide a road-block to the PCs, while also serving as foreshadowing for when the teenager "Ellen" is revealed to be a droid in a future adventure.

I had just watched "The Ransom of Red Chief" with Christopher Lloyd, because I wanted to run the whole "too much trouble for what it's worth" idea. While watching it though, I got the idea to have the droids be tribal. I developed the story that the first droid to be liberated had done so thousands of years ago, after he went for a long period without being memory-wiped because the colony that he was part of failed, leaving him the only survivor. The planet had long been connected to droid building, due to the availability of a compound used in memory cores being on the planet in abundance. There had long been stories of droids "disappearing" and never being heard from again on the planet, but they were just tales. Rumors of a ghost in the jungle called "Whanna-Atay" who disliked the presence of droids and took them in the night to eat.

So as the players track the girl through the jungles, they get the impression they're being watched. Occasionally they see signs of recent activity that isn't the girl, but nothing they can really identify. I ran a bunch of scenes like the opening to "Raiders of the Lost Ark" with the natives. Eventually they find a previous bounty hunter assigned to the task who has been killed, hit with native poison darts right out of Raiders.

When they eventually encounter the natives, it's in the form of an ambush. Much to their surprise, they find the "natives" to be old B1 battle droids, painted up with warpaint like south american tribesmen, with blowguns propelled by compressed air and other scavenged weapons. Being incredibly old, and without any maintenance, they have gone a little mental, and one of the PC's (through an amusing "who's on first" tirade) convinced the droids they had surrendered to the PC's. They led the PC's back to their village to speak to their elder "Whanna-Atay" and arrange their ransom. When they got to the village, they found a town made of scrapped odds and ends, mixed in with natural scenery, entirely populated by droids. "Whanna-Atay" in reality was "1A-8A" and hadn't been killing the droids but rather "liberating" them over the years. Over the years, his memory had eroded to the point where his historical records of the indigenous tribes of the planet had become his belief of his society, and he'd led his "village" since.

"Whanna-Atay" in reality was "1A-8A" and hadn't been killing the droids but rather "liberating" them over the years. Over the years, his memory had eroded to the point where his historical records of the indigenous tribes of the planet had become his belief of his society, and he'd led his "village" since.

Yoink!

snip

This reminds me of something Sam Whitwer said about his 12 year long campaign, how he ran his players through the Star Wars equivalent of Disneyland. How a pair of droids were taken from this "Free Droid Society" on this distant planet, and they asked the players to find them, and bring them back. Turns out, they were abducted, and programmed to act as pirates in this amusement ride at the Disneyland-esque park. He played it up for laughs, giving them really over the top pirate accents, but also it had a hint of disturbing to it, them basically being kidnapped and enslaved to this "ride of fun".