Humor in Exile (LOL)

By YMA

As a player of BoE for a long time, I know what I like in a scenario, and I am also interested in what other people like. Therefore I often inspect review pages, such as the ones here at the Lyceum. Another good review page is Brett Brixler’s which contains a guide for reviewing scenarios under separate categories, a rubric. These included town design, node work, characters, plot line, and so on. I though that this seemed quite a good outline, until I noticed one element was missing. Humor.
This made me consider the nature of humor in the BoE world, what it gives to a scenario, and what it takes away.
The thing is, it’s easy for me to say ‘there should be an extra rating for humor’ but when you look at it from all points of view, it soon occurs that humor is not necessarily a good thing.
In the average scenario, humor can provide something light hearted and memorable. It’s easy to forget another crypt full of undead, it’s not easy to forget a crypt full of undead doing a west-end musical (this happened in Truffle Days, I think.) Some scenarios are specifically given over to humor, such as Back to Normal, and are certainly non-the worse for it. Sure, there are monsters to kill and puzzles to solve, sure there’s a story line and characters and even mission, but, in Back to Normal, all of this takes back seat to the humor of the situation. The whole scenario is just one long, very entertaining and original, joke.
However, whilst humor is good in these kind of situations, it’s not always good all the time. Imagine, say, Silence of the Lambs with full jokes, or Shindler’s List with a laugh track.
The mood would be ruined.
Humors great for most scenarios, but in some it just falls flat. For example, whilst humor worked well in Truffle days or Back to Normal, it wouldn’t work well in Falling Stars, or Doom Moon II. This is not to say that these scenarios have no humor in them, or that they are not good, merely to say that the humor is limited in them because it would not fit their genre very well. Both of these, especially Falling Stars, are quite dark scenarios. People die, places crumble, bad things happen. Cracking long jokes in them would be like having a pie fight at a funeral.
In my view, it is not about whether or not to have humor in a scenario, it is about the type of mood you want to set. The best place to draw an example from here is the winner of the first scenario design contest, Tatterdemalion.
Tatterdemalion was so good because the three stories within it encompassed the three kinds of basic mood, in my opinion.
You could be the priests, and have a tragedy, or the fighters, and have a normal adventure type mood, or you could be the mages, and have a comedy.
Admittedly, in Tatterdemalion the mage story did not work out all that well, but this is partly because, to get a funny scenario, often the plot must suffer. I found Back to Normal a lot of fun, but I can’t say that the story was that fantastic. This is simply because it’s often harder to sympathies and root for funny characters than tragic ones. Therefore humorous scenarios sometimes suffer on the rating boards. It’s the same with other media, ask yourself this, which do you prefer, a serious, heart-rending drama, or a side splitting comedy show? I bet the answer would either by “I don’t know” or would depend on your mood. Few people can live on nothing but humor, or nothing but drama.
What I’m saying am that scenarios without any humor aren’t necessarily bad, just different. And Scenarios that are jam-packed full of humor, even if the story line suffers slightly, aren’t bad or simple, but deserve full credit for entertaining us in a different way.

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