Case Study: DIscworld

Kind of a follow-up to my last post.

I can see why a lot of comedy games fall flat, in much the same way that I've seen a lot of horror games fall flat.

 

(no pun intended) 

Every time I've seen an interpretation of Discworld for a tabletop RPG it has been a thin veneer of the people and places from the setting thrown over an existing rule set which has been designed for a very different style of storytelling.

D&D is not a good fit for Discworld, the core mechanisms of play are too serious, too self important...I guess that makes it ripe for violation, but with the rules lawyers I've encountered over the years there's a really good chance that any violation won't be considered benign. Sure you could house rule ideas into the system and establish them as canon in a session zero, but that starts drifting away from the rules as written. It's not quite as bad as the "D&D/Green Lantern" post I made a few days ago, but the same kind of compromises to system need to be made. Either you're not playing D&D, you're not playing Discworld, or you're playing a hybrid that doesn't full match either of the paradigms and is somewhere that kind of maintains moments of both... from a story perspective, this could work, having moments of the type of story D&D is known for, with the moments of absurdity and morality that Discworld is known for, but this would be a delicate balancing act for a GM and group of players who were all on a very tight wavelength together, knowing one another's boundaries and all willing to push the story in the same direction, or at least get caught up in the scene to push boundaries forward. The issue with D&D then becomes the erratic nature of the die rolls, character abilities have a limited ability to affect outcomes (often with +3 to +10 on the outcome) while the majority of the outcomes is derived from an arbitrary d20 (flat variability from 1 to 20). If you accept that the violation comes from the random input of the d20, this could work, and technically it's benign because the players aren't being impacted, only their characters are. However, the arbitrary nature of the d20 roll in D&D either functionally works to push the story forward or stagnate it (proficiency check), or risking penalise the character/player (saving throw). Discworld stories are fast flowing, often not allowing the reader to catch their breath before moving forward to a new situation. The stop-start nature of D&D rolls opposes this. Again, this can be overcome, but only by houseruling the game, and breaking away from D&D's intended play style. Finally, I'm trying to think of fight scenes in Discworld, compared to fight scenes in D&D... a single hit from a troll in Discworld to move the story along just doesn't compare to a two hours slogfest in D&D. 

The Discworld expansion(s) for GURPS were much the same, a Pratchett-esque veneer of people and places thrown over a very utilitarian set of rules that relied on the players at the table to bring the comedy into it rather than any specific mechanisms inherent in the system. This is despite Pratchett being one of the writers on the product (meaning that elements of the Discworld humour were prevalent in the rules, but had trouble translating to the table). That was my experience anyway.

To be honest, the SNAFU system I'm working on would not be a good fit for Discworld either...not without modification to the core systems. Yes, the intended cookbook shows a group exactly how to modify the system for different genres of play, perhaps adding a system where a player can set up a long term joke to be resolved later, then other players can try to conclude the joke through actions by their character..if they spend a success to do so, they may resolve the joke... if they address the joke in their action but don't spend a success on it, their actions magnify the joke and prolong it but don't resolve it. At the time when someone does resolve it, they might get a bonus experience point immediately. This isn't inherent in the basic system, but fits the way Pratchett meanders around a joke before hitting the point home later in the story... and sometimes doesn't land the joke at all, but leaves us hanging (I remember this happening in "Moving Pictures" and I'm pretty sure there was a point in "Soul Music" where I was expecting a specific pun to be landed, but it never came). You could probably do the same with inspiration points in D&D, but it doesn't have the scope of multiple degrees of success to work with.

Something fairly abstract as a storytelling system like Fiasco might be a better fit. Again we're looking at the right group of players with a common agenda, but at least with this game we don't have the system actively pulling in a completely different direction (and we certainly don't have a game that's actively resisting the contributions of the players).

With this in mind, I'm really interested in seeing how the new Discworld RPG translates to the table.