[Any] How Light Is Too Light?

[Finarvyn]

I see these names as having a couple of purposes in a campaign:

(1) They provide some "in jokes" and/or levity for some situations. (I have a "Kevin's Bar & Grille" in almost every campaign I run, named after a friend from high school whose aspiration in life was to be the manager of a McDonalds just like his older brother.)

(2) The give me as DM a clue as to what might be found there. At "Arrakis Spice & Curios" I might have a shopkeep named Stilgar, for example. Easy to make up NPCs and such.

[Vile Traveller]

Now that you mention it ...

In the Traveller games I've played or refereed, names were almost always a joke (some more "in" than others) - Santos Saggitarius, Natty Blackhat, Ruger Redhawk, Arnold Argleblaster, etc. The same went for corporations and planets. Yet the games were never anything but serious, unlike D&D which always involved a fair amount of foolery.

[tkdco2]

I've done that in some of my campaigns. One of my players suggested not overdoing it because it can break the immersion in the game/genre if used too often. But occasional use should be okay.

[coffee]

I like an inside joke as much as the next guy, but it seems to me that Traveller and other such games could easily break immersion with such things.

On the other hand, you could use such examples to create your own.

Having brand names is a big part of having a consistent, living world.

[doublejig2]

Mar 7, 2020 22:35:57 GMT -6 Vile Traveller said:

Now that you mention it ...

In the Traveller games I've played or refereed, names were almost always a joke (some more "in" than others) - Santos Saggitarius, Natty Blackhat, Ruger Redhawk, Arnold Argleblaster, etc. The same went for corporations and planets. Yet the games were never anything but serious, unlike D&D which always involved a fair amount of foolery.

They sound like tough customers! 

[Vile Traveller]

None more so than Stanislav Pirx, veteran of 4 (!) terms in the Scouts.

[Piper]

I think Marc Miller wrote this one, but I recall seeing a Scout referenced in Traveller literature as being named "Flash Indepan." It gave me a bit of a chuckle.

[hamurai]

Our games of Dungeon World and related games (The Sprawl etc.) tend to be very heavy on jokes and over-the-top characters and ideas. The fact that players get to make up facts for the game world usually leads to that.

I remember a Sprawl game where we first joked about some Biotech corp which experimented on cows (we live in a cow-heavy region and played there, in the future - cows were more common than rats by then) and dumped the failures into Lake Constance, but one of them survived and evolved into cow-thulhu. At first it was a joke but during the game we actually got to Lake Constance and suddenly were fighting of the cow-thulhu spawn...

In another game (Tiny Wastelands mini-campaign) I had a certain president be responsible for the apocalypse because he attempted a literal deal with the devil in his hubris, and while he succeeded in getting more power he pretty much handed over earth to the forces of hell. The players would encounter several undead or demon versions of known celebrities over the campaign which was a lot of fun for me as the GM and for the players.

And way back in the 90s I remember our Das Schwarze Auge / The Dark Eye GM was so bad coming up with NPC names, he just took words from the GM Screen and read them backwards. I definitely remember we fought two guys named Hsif and Daerb once...

So... depending on your group I'd say you have to decide yourself what's too light. One of our D&D 5E group left because the jokes were too much of an immersion-breaker for his taste.

[tkdco2]

I lost credibility with a player after running an adventure featuring vampire rabbits.

[doublejig2]

Mar 15, 2020 2:20:52 GMT -6 hamurai said:

And way back in the 90s I remember our Das Schwarze Auge / The Dark Eye GM was so bad coming up with NPC names, he just took words from the GM Screen and read them backwards. I definitely remember we fought two guys named Hsif and Daerb once...

The Kaiser Soze approach...

[hamurai]

Mar 15, 2020 17:41:24 GMT -6 tkdco2 said:

I lost credibility with a player after running an adventure featuring vampire rabbits.

We played Meikyuu Kingdom (I was the ref) and laughed so hard when I rolled an encounter featuring a group of Vampire Veggies and the Mayonnaise King who had the ability to apply the "obese" status.

That game is full of creatures like that. And places, come to think of it.

[tkdco2]

The problems with running a comedic campaign are:
1. Everybody has to be willing to play it.
2. People have different ideas of what is funny.

Not that there isn't a place for lighthearted moments. One of my old groups quoted lines from Monty Python movies during the game. And someone making a joke about what's going on in the campaign can lighten the mood. But most of the folks I gamed with prefer to keep those things to a minimum. That's one reason I never bought the Toon rpg. No one was interested. Likewise, I couldn't get a Stuperpowers game going.

[bexley]

This reminds me of the anecdote of an early campaign where someone complained to the dm that the monsters in the dungeon had nothing to eat so the dm put a McDonald’s that the monsters would eat at. I think this kind of thing is pretty cool and would err on the side if there’s no such thing as too light.

[Piper]

Mar 22, 2020 6:23:47 GMT -6 bexley said:

This reminds me of the anecdote of an early campaign where someone complained to the dm that the monsters in the dungeon had nothing to eat so the dm put a McDonald’s that the monsters would eat at. I think this kind of thing is pretty cool and would err on the side if there’s no such thing as too light.

That was old guard notable Michael Mornard.