User:Oznogon/PaizoCon 2024 Whimsy in TTRPGs panel

JOHN COMPTON: Hello, hello, folks. Welcome to Whimsy in TTRPGs. I'm John Compton.

Basically when we started to decide, hey, we should do a Whimsy panel, and people were asking who should moderate, I volunteered, saying I am one of the less whimsical people on our team.

So sure, I'll come in and be a moderator for a bunch of jackals. And lo and behold, jackals we have.

So today I am joined by three of my delightful colleagues who will be going through and exploring with me what makes Whimsy in TTRPGs, how do we use whimsy, where do we maybe not use Whimsy, and everything in between, how you can incorporate into your games.

So let's get introduced.

And so I'm going to go around, I'm going to ask who you are, what your position is, and then tell me about two intellectual properties that are whimsical, that aren't Paizo stuff, that have kind of shaped how you approach whimsy in RPGs.

JAMES JACOBS: Hi. I'm James Jacobs. I'm the Narrative Creative Director for Pathfinder.

I chatted with a couple of my buddies here to get some whimsy inspiration, but they got way dark and depressing and creepy, so I told them to pipe down.

Instead my two that I'm choosing, the first one is Lilo and Stitch, which is my all-time favorite Disney property, Stitch is on my coffee cup. He's just a great source of just irreverence while at the same point getting across like some really, you know, touching family type value, whatever stuff. So it's a good way to combine that.

But my other one is Fallout, be it the video games or the recent Amazon show. So the thing that I really appreciate about Fallout is it takes this really dark material, you know, the end of the world and just super violent gore and stuff like that, and it makes it fun by having this layer of Whimsy all over it, and that'll be going into how you can use Whimsy to, you know, help moderate some more grim tropics going on. But yeah, it's good times.

>> How about Josh?

JOSH FOSTER: Hi, I'm Josh Foster, a Pathfinder Society developer and responsible for some whimsical things in the works.

I've taken a lot of inspiration from the works of Miyazaki, who just excellently blends the everyday and the fantastical in some of the most seamless things, Spirited Away, as soon as I saw it, I think I was a teenager at the time, that just spoke to me. That was a wonderful movie.

And the Final Fantasy series is really heavy and Whimsy. I've been doing a lot of 14, which in great tradition, you're in serious fantasy world, killing God, and then there's a crazy inspector guy who teaches you a magic dance that helps you overcome a trial. There's some interesting tonal breaks there that they work somehow.

And then for our last panelist, I mean, whimsy sometimes involves shapeshifters or the like, and this is not the Shay Snow that I recall originally being on the panel. Shay had stepped out and he was replaced by a body double.

DUSTIN KNIGHT: Yeah, well, when Shay said that they'd be on your panel, it was me pretending to be Shay. So for the next hour, I will be an honorary Shay, but you can call me Dustin, Dustin Knight, Pathfinder developer.

Picking two properties that influence my Whimsy, I'd say one would be King of Bandits, Jing. It's a very light manga that has very Tim Burton-esque random things always happening and it never needs to be explained. It's just there.

You'll see a snowman in a hot spring in the background and you'll just be like, okay, it's just there. It is what it is. It's like a little dark, but at the same time, it's so lighthearted that you just ignore it.

And then the other one I'm going to pick is Pokemon primarily because I use that constantly as an example for you need to roll with your audience when it comes to that balance between dark and whimsical based on their tastes. And ultimately you could be as whimsical as you want and people might take it far too seriously and you could just roll with that. Also, I like collecting little critters. Entirely.

And there's also the juxtaposition of there's some, there's a Togepi next to a perfectly grown human person. Some art style thing is not talking to the other.

My two examples are going to be the Trigun anime, the older one where Vash the Stampede can kind of turn on or off of whimsy and the idea of whether you're in serious mode or whimsical mode can really heighten both of them.

And the other one that I'll cite will be just some of the older like Nickelodeon style children's show. So Eureka's Castle, hell, even Sesame Street are things where it's just, hey, we're having fun. Things are bright, things are bubbly, and it's unrepentantly gleeful. So no need for that juxtaposition at that point.

>> But we have tossed around the term whimsy a whole bunch. I think a lot of us and our audience have an intuitive sense of whimsy. But what does whimsy do?

JAMES JACOBS: When you take a subject that is normally a serious subject, but you treat it in a way that is not serious, I guess, it's not comedy. Comedy is designed to solicit laughs and make you chuckle.

Whimsy doesn't have to make you laugh, but whimsy does take something that is normally maybe like to go back to my Fallout example, the end of the world. That's the sort of thing that is not a pleasant subject. But when you put it in the context of all of the weird shenanigans that go on in the Fallout universe, it becomes less oppressive and less awful, but it still lets you explore those storylines.

To me, it's a way that you can explore things in a safe way or in a way that doesn't make you feel like you're trying to upset people, but still cover the same sort of topics.

I really like that notion of it not being comedy necessarily, because we certainly have a whole bunch of really bubbly and colorful stuff that's not necessarily comical. Like we have skittermander s in Starfinder, which can be comedy, but they don't have to be, or a piece of art that we can bring up.

The fae child gnome heritage is one where it's just like unrepentantly colorful. And this gnome could be an axe murderer for all I know. I know how you people build PCs. But it's nonetheless vivacious and bring that viv to the play experience.

How about the rest of you? Do you want to add anything to how we define whimsy?

>> Let's say you can, because James is spot on, it's not just about laughing. It's about lightening things, but they can still be serious, they can still be dark.

I had mentioned Miyazaki, Spirited Away is not a movie where the protagonist is in a happy situation at all throughout, but there are those moments of levity still where these fantastical things, wondrous things around are happening.

And it puts things in a mood where I think it helps the audience and makes it so it's not so oppressive. Because if you only stick to one tone, you can wear that out.

And I think whimsy helps avoid wearing out emotional capacities, sort of building up what's the word I'm looking for, like a resistance almost to it. Desensitize.

Yeah, I remember having music teachers who would tell me, like, there's only so much buildup you can get in music for a crescendo or a climax before you have to let it drop. And you're getting to my next talking point, which is what does whimsy accomplish?

And so we've done a decent job of defining it, I see Dustin might want to add, whoever you are, might want to add a little bit more to that, but also let's start to go into what does whimsy accomplish in addition to that tempo change? And when is it good to bring in whimsy?

Well yeah, and it's transitions between those two questions, because whimsy helps in a large way reveal the absurdity of reality.

It helps bring by, like you said, that gnome might be an axe murderer, or it could just be an adventurer, but she gets attacked by a bunch of skeletons or something along those lines, and suddenly gets thrusted to this serious tone, but she still has the crazy colorful hair.

And that's part of what it does, is reminding you, it adds almost a layer of verisimilitude into the storytelling, because life isn't always, you know, reality doesn't get black and white when you're suddenly induced with a stressful moment.

It could happen when you're at a carnival and surrounded by colorful clowns and elephants with big rainbow robes on their backs, and suddenly you're having, you get a call of something serious happening, and there's that element there that it could lighten it, or it could even highlight it.

Yeah, like, one of the things that you bring up in that verisimilitude thing is, like, we can kind of plan on how we expect the players to react to this stuff, but what are the other people in the world saying about this?

So it's like, we see that gnome that we've just brought up, and the players are like, this is zany and obnoxious, and as they're commenting all the NPCs around, they're like, dude, not cool, like, what are you doing, this is entirely normal!

Right.

But you look at, like, soldiers in war, and you look at, like, you know, candid photos of them goofing around or drawing things on their weapons that they shouldn't have on there if it was only serious modes.

You know, life is whimsical. You look at ruins, and you'll see lots of silly graffiti all over the place from thousands of years ago. You know, it's not like everyone was wearing Togas Disgusting Philosophy 24/7.

I see you Josh, and I just want to bring up for our chat, go ahead and send in some questions if you have any, post that in the Twitch chat, we'll see if there's enough of them to be answering afterward, otherwise we'll follow up in the Discord discussion afterward.

Josh, what's up?

JOSH FOSTER: Well, we're also going off on that, that it's revealing underlying absurdities, and it can also sort of change your view of the stakes, or even change the stakes entirely, of a story. You think you might be fighting for survival, or to save a bunch of people, but maybe you're just trying to get through things.

Maybe that's what you're laughing at. Maybe it turns out that the big threat you thought was some Tanuki prankster, which I think we might have a heart of one, that instead of fighting to the death, you just challenge to a dance-off.

Because things can be a little ridiculous, and even though maybe there was danger before, there's a ridiculousness that you can put in that changes the way that's perceived, and the way you treat it going forward. So you could shift the stakes of your story.

Yeah, it's definitely a great way to use Wednesday. It's also something that we can use when we're creating our content for you guys to read and to play through. We don't know what sort of preferences your table might have, as far as being serious all the time, or being Wednesday-typical.

There's always the Monty Python jokes that pop up, or the person in your group who names their character poppin' fresh because he conjures up a little dough golem to help him out, or those sorts of things.

Oh, you hurt me in Organized Play. But yes, we often will try to inject bits of whimsy and such into our adventure paths, even when they're like Hell's Rebels. It's about Hell. It's about some really awful things going on in this oppressed society.

But in the artwork, we often will show scenes of our iconics getting into adventures and stuff like that, and it's not always a fight. And I love getting those chances to show our iconics in a different light.

When Kyra and Merisiel are going out for dinner at Cobweb Manor in that one, we get to see an illustration of them. They're not dressed in their normal adventuring outfits. And instead of going out to fight, they're going out for a night at this creepy manor where they're supposed to have a weird dinner and everything like that.

It gives us a chance to show those two characters' personality in a way that we can't do actually in the adventure because they're stand-ins for your player characters. So that's something I love doing, just putting our iconics into weird situations where you can infer what's going on without us actually spelling things out.

>> Yeah, and I like the point about incorporating whimsy into our adventures, because one of the pieces of advice I received really early on is that it's best to really avoid putting comedy or writing comedy into our adventures, because comedy is so variable that you could be trying to set up an entire scenario, and if the joke doesn't work, then what have you really done with your play experience?

But whimsy is a lot easier to translate, and you can let people kind of play with the secondary tones of that in their own way and make it fit their table, so whimsy is a lot safer to include in RPGs, in my opinion, especially published adventures.

So we talked about-- oh, yeah, go ahead, Josh.

JOSH FOSTER: Oh, and on that note of what it can do for your adventure is sort of downshift a tone. I've been doing a lot of work into creating this all-ages tag, and it's pretty useful to use whimsy to sort of dial things back so that a younger player isn't so put off or stressed out.

Like if you introduce a friendly sloth poppet NPC, yes, that, even if they're trapped in this shrunk-down-into-a-dollhouse, which could be stressful for a kid, they're literally trapped in a prison at that point, this friendly NPC can add just a touch of whimsy, because it's a cute little sloth doll. But it's not a joke. It doesn't have to be funny.

>> Yeah, and there's another thing that I'm seeing in the inclusion of that sort of whimsy, because you're mentioning the all-ages thing, or, like, hey, for children.

And what it makes me think of is how introducing whimsy can kind of take your players out of a mechanical mindset and remind them subtly that this is a game about fun. And if they want to have some sort of zany solution to the encounter, they have more permission if there's a whimsical overtone.

So yeah, oh, I can solve this by making balloon animals for our arch nemesis, because it is this sloth poppet, for example. I'm not necessarily expected to roll initiative.

So we've talked some about where we might use whimsy. Let's at least explore a bit about why we might not use whimsy, whether that's adventure-wide or in kind of a more targeted sort of scene.

DUSTIN KNIGHT: I can start off.

We talked about how it shifts tone and shifts stakes. If you want those stakes to be very, very present and very, very constant, throwing in whimsy is going to sort of do a shift that you don't want to happen, pacing as well. So if you've ramped things up and you want that pressure to stay on, you don't want to pull off the gas, and too much whimsy, or even sometimes whimsy at all will, like Dustin was saying, distract from the present and sort of reveal the underlying absurdity.

And sometimes, yeah, it could just be too distracting. When I wrote The Crashing Wave as a freelancer, I took these sahuagin NPCs and started thinking out why, what's their motivations behind these, and toward the end I had this kind of like love triangle between these sahuagin, and I gave it to the developer in a separate file, like, you probably don't want to use this, and they're like, yeah, we don't, it's silly, this is a military conflict, they're not going to care that these three sahuagin have this like power struggle/romance thing going on. It's not the plot.

But you could have had the like, here's the anticipated final combat encounter, and then an H2 header that's just like, alternative, now, kiss.

And it's like an influence scene where it's like, can we match-make all of our shark people? Fire Emblem, three sahuagin.

>> I mean, you used a little bit of like the jargon H2 header and stuff like that.

That actually brings up a point that is one of my pet peeves, is when a writer uses whimsy inside of, you know, just the structure of what they're writing for us.

Like normally we'll have a header for an encounter, this is like the mud wrestling room. And it's a room where, you know, you're dropped into a pit and you have to fight a mud monster and all of that.

Calling it the mud wrestling room is unnecessary whimsy because that whimsy is there just to, you know, entertain the writer, entertain the developer, entertain the GM. And I feel like it's distracting. It doesn't really help set up the encounter.

If you want the encounter to be funny, that there's like, there's mud going on and you have to fight a bunch of creatures, like Rich Pett does a lot with like pigs and mud pits that shows up weirdly often in his adventures.

I would, I almost always rename that from something like a mud wrestling room into like a goblin arena, or something a little more succinct that just lets the GM know that this is what's going on here. But we're not going to be putting this Easter egg or this joke into a place that one, distracts you from like, you know, understanding what's going on, but two, it's never going to end up in place.

You don't stop the encounter and say, "The name of this encounter is mud wrestling, that's too distracting."

And I think one of the other things I'm thinking about for a whimsy, and I'll poke it, Dustin and Shay night, whatever, in just a moment for some follow-up, but using it in Starfinder, one of the things that I loved when working on Starfinder Society is that just by taking some fantasy elements, familiar Pathfinder elements, and then having to make at least one change to make it sci-fi or science fantasy, can be whimsical in its own right just because of the nature of the juxtaposition.

So there's an art piece that we can look at, Sparklemane , a unicorn that many people might know from the first season of Starfinder Society, is like, "Okay, it's a unicorn."

And we're like, "How can we make some little sci-fi twist?" And we're like, "Let's put a grenade launcher on its horn."

So after this and I giggle ourselves to death for the next half hour of our meeting, yeah, we made it happen.

And you know, Sparklemane is a rather serious NPC, but just the nature of the visual or that little elevator pitch, it's one of those things where it's like, "This thing could murder us at any moment, but also I can't help but kind of adore it, and yeah, it does hit the goal of sci-fi fantasy."

So is there something else in Starfinder that would be a great way of exploring it? Well, the catfolk, the sandcat pothra(?) art that we showed off in the last, about two hours ago on Twitch, again, yeah, it's this wee little small cat, as everybody said what came out.

But then if you actually look at it, you're like, "No, it's looking really serious and has a sword and has a gun and has a little comm unit and is maybe in the desert exploring some ruins or something," and at that point you're like, "Oh, okay, no, there's a palace."

"Oh, what a cute kitty."

"They'll never find your body."

Right, right.

Exactly.

So, we've talked about some ways to add in whimsy, ways to, times that it may not be good to add whimsy.

>> How do we know, especially as developers and as gems, how much whimsy is enough? How much is too much?

One little aside, I have been told by my developer I can only have so many puns per book, that's all.

>> That's definitely one.

There are absolutely tallies you can keep track of, you can only use, we also have things like you can't use apostrophes and names too often or stuff like that.

But to a certain extent, how much whimsy is too much is sort of something that everybody is going to have to decide on their own, but for something like this where we're all working together, it really kind of, that's part of the job of the creative director, to a certain extent, is how much do you try to guide everybody that's working on this shared world as to what is or isn't appropriate to include in the adventure or the storyline or anything like that.

Even beyond that, we do a lot of shared braised orbs and meetings where we talk about things and run things past each other, and it's often really helpful to have somebody like that who takes on a genre or a story element or something like that you trust, and to run by them and say, "Hey, would this ruin this story if I included a grenade launching thing on a unicorn?"

It's like, "Yeah, that's fine, just don't put a bayonet on that rocket launcher because that's too far, or maybe it's not."

So it's really kind of a tricky thing to pull off, and I think looking into stuff like when we started out here talking about inspirations, looking at stuff like Miyazaki or Final Fantasy or Fallout or Pokemon, those franchises, those stories are incredibly effective and successful and popular and beloved, and by studying how far they go and noticing what they don't do is really important. You can define something as much by what you include as what you specifically choose not to include.

You also have to keep in mind what is your goal with the Whimsies. You want it to be a whimsical campaign, or are you stepping back before you challenge the thing that's bent on destroying the nation just for a moment of just a short reprieve, and that's going to be a very different amount of whimsy in both situations. So knowing why am I putting this here, what do I want to achieve, and just using that much.

I'm really intrigued by the return reference to the pacing and what you're trying to accomplish, because I made the reference of the Sephiroth meteor and then the Golden Slessor(?).

That's a Final Fantasy reference where it's, "Oh, hey, we have reached the sandbox stage where you can go in and go to the endgame at any point. Why aren't you going there?"

But sometimes you don't have control over the pacing of-- the PCs don't have as much control over the pacing of that part of the adventure, and it might be that there is something holding up their progress that they have to overcome that is whimsical, and at that point it becomes a reasonable, a realistic inclusion that doesn't feel as much like a distraction as it does one of the stages in the journey.

So as we were chatting as a group before this, Josh had mentioned how he might bring up one of our way-back-when games, where they were going after a Wahoo high-power classic.

(For those who don't know, John Compton was our high school GM for my gaming group a lot of the time.)

And those were some very important lessons in how to run games, what did work, what didn't work, and also one of many steps along my way of becoming a less-pandictive GM. But one of the things he helped was, at some points they got defeated by this wizard. They woke up, and they were captives, and they kind of looked around, everything seemed to be a little off around them, until they looked down at themselves and realized they had all been polymorphed into rats, and had been put into a specially-designed, like, death trap maze.

This also helped that the reason they had been knocked out was because one of the PCs had in fact betrayed them, thinking that he was going to gain ultimate power as the right-hand man of this prison.

He was also a rat. And was very pissed.

And so part of what allowed the players to really get over the fact that they were defeated was seeing the absolute outrage on this player's face, that he had also been ratified. But what we had was, we had this fun one-session little diversion, where they fought a mousetrap golem.

They eventually escaped, and there was the cat that was wandering around the laboratory that our terrible dragon-oriented homebrew character, Josh, jumped off of a countertop and punched through its skull.

>> Did I mention I like Final Fantasy?

>> Exactly.

>> And it's like, okay, we still have some of the game mechanics, we still have a little bit of the life-or-death threat, but there is a reason within our narrative as to why we are doing this whimsical distraction.

And in this case, it was the arch villain wants to shame you, wants to embarrass you, and thinks that you will not escape, because ha ha ha ha, the villainous monologue of course you will. And of course the PCs do.

But you can put those in as these cohesive barriers, and yet keep the overall theme of your campaign. But sometimes, sometimes you gotta blend whimsy with something else, and there's no greater example of this than a little bit of horror and whimsy.

James, you're pretty instrumental in that.

JAMES JACOBS: Yeah. When we first started out making Pathfinder, even before it was a role-playing game, back in the early days, and we were like, well, we want to just make our new campaign setting and do adventure paths for it, we knew we wanted to stick with the classic fantasy tropes, because that's what our established audience enjoyed.

But we also wanted to make it our own. We wanted to go places where D&D didn't, and make our own mark on things. And the classic idea of the adventure where you go fight the goblins, back in the mid-2000s, that was a trope that was largely regarded as boring, cliched, everybody does the one where you go to fight the goblins, so I was like, well, let's make this something new. Let's make it our own.

And for a lot of Rise of the Runelords, I wanted to include a lot of horror and a lot of really mature content and stuff like that, because we were going into our own and addressing a new audience that was maybe aging and was more interested in those sorts of stories.

So you look at movies and stuff like that, and storylines where the dog gets killed, or children are in danger, and stuff like you see happening in Stephen King stories, or the like. Those are really grim and spooky sort of things that it's hard to stomach, and a lot of people would be triggered by that sort of thing.

But when you make it a fun little jaunty tune about bonking babies on the head or stewing up dogs or something like that, and you have a bunch of little goblins running around singing it in a sort of whimsical song while they are raiding your hometown and burning it to the ground, all of a sudden, that becomes really fun and popular.

And many years later, those little monsters that were killing babies and eating dogs or killing dogs and eating babies, or both, and burning down your town, are one of the four ancestries for the entire game. People play these characters now, they're not villains anymore, even though they kind of are.

And that's a way that you can use whimsy to mix with horror in a way that makes it transcend both sides of things, and it doesn't always work, and it can go overboard, we've done maybe the, I don't know how far is too far with making goblin songs, we've had goblin songs on copy, they've showed up all over the place, so it's super successful. But yeah, it's a powerful, powerful tool if you do it right.

>> One of these days we're going to have a goblin song that is five lines per stanza, and the plotline is going to be, "All the other goblins think that's blasphemy."

>> It is, it is, yeah, you're going to have a goblin, because goblins hate writing, because if you write down, it steals words out of your skull, but you'll have one that, like, the goblin that sings only in iambic pentanther.

And actually speaking of that, we, in Curtain Call, which is an Adventure Path that's coming out soon, there's a lot of whimsy in that, and there's this, there's an entire section in the third book that was written in like free verse, and iambic pentanther, just, it's one thing to edit just language, it's another thing to edit rules content, but when you have to do it also in the format of like this really kind of structured cadence of speaking, it makes it, it's challenging and fun and off-putting and strange.

And it's another way you can introduce sort of things like, like, you know, the whole concept of like accidentally rhyming when you're talking makes it sort of feel off and weird, and that's another great way to make the horrific kind of more palatable, and then later, when you do have something that you want to be really horrific, like in the second adventure, a local gets stuck in a lumberjack piece of equipment and it's violent and gory, it hits harder.

Other folks have some ways of like blending whimsy with some other tones or themes? They do it really, really, really well, especially when you get into like fey monarchs, wild hunt kind of things, just, they have inscrutable rules, and it's almost cosmic horror level, but there's a prankish impishness to it.

>> And I'll just chime in and say that if the fey really doubled down on what we brought up earlier, where Wednesday's not necessarily a comic.

>> Yeah, I have a quest in the works where a fey is throwing a banquet, and they've extended time in their domain, so every day outside is 10 years inside, and if you happen to stumble upon an invitation, you're there for 70 years, because it's a week-long banquet, and you have to get out, and it's very whimsical, but it is not safe, and it is kind of terrifying.

So it would be really hard to set up this adventure, as opposed to having to be a scripted story, but the idea of having some sort of escape hatch, like let's say you have a talisman that you can snap, and it will take you to that 10 years equals one day setup.

And the PC, or PCs, or like one of them is really heavily wounded, that arrow that's firing at them will kill them, they snap the talisman as a reaction, takes the whole party into the fey party, or the fey celebration, and you know that in order to not reappear until after the arrow has passed you, we need to stay there for at least three weeks and survive. Because if we leave before then, the arrow will still hit us.

>> Elsewhere Feast as a plot device, I like it.

>> Yeah, I got something similar, except the time you spend there reverses the time in the normal world, so you'll just go back before everything went bad.

One thing you can use that trope with really well is if you are running a game, and you know the group is headed for a TPK or something like that, and you can interject that sort of thing, like all of a sudden you get swept away into some other place, and that's the best way to include that sort of thing, like rather than killing them off, they're captured, then you get to run the escape from the prison storyline, and it's not forced on the party.

That's something that is a great way that Whimsy can elevate and transcend a situation, because almost getting TPK'd, that's the sort of thing that the group is like, we've been playing this campaign for three years and now we're going to die because somebody rolled a bad roll or something like that, and it's really depressing.

And then having something whimsical and unexpected like that happen, take the campaign in a new direction, can not only help save that near disaster, but it is super memorable, and if you do it right as the GM, your players will think you're brilliant, because obviously I had that plan the entire time.

I would love to be the GM running the thing where it's like a TPK, you get swept up, you reappear in front of this fey court, and the piece is like, what happened, like, oh, we've been watching you for a long time, and you were losing, and you were dying, and we can't have that, we love you too much, also, we bought you new costumes, and now you can entertain us here.

And you realize, yay, we got saved, after a day of in-world time, and you're just like, we have to escape, we cannot be their pets, and if we do escape, how can we know for sure they won't follow us again?

>> If you don't mind me interjecting, we were fighting a void dragon on top of a temple over a black hole, and we fell in.

Two of our party members fell in, and we just thought, okay, they're dead, right? No, some witchwyrds caught their souls, resurrected them, and now we have to play in their reality TV show until we've earned enough money to pay for the resurrection.

>> Exactly, exactly.

>> So we have about 15 minutes left, I'm going to get us to a couple of the questions that have been posted in chat in just a moment, but there's one other little subtopic I'd like to get into, particularly for the GMs at home.

What should we consider when it comes to building a whimsical campaign, or starting a whimsical campaign as a group, especially in terms of session zero messaging, or other accommodations?

>> I think in all campaigns, you're going to want to do a session zero type thing, let your players know what sort of game you have planned, or if you're working with your players, what do you want me to run? That's really the point of our Player's Guides, is we want to get the players ready for this theme of this campaign without spoiling all the surprises.

But just as you would want to say in it, well, this is a campaign where it's based on Dark Souls and you're going to die often and have to remake new characters and it's grimdark and all of that stuff. You want people to know what they're getting into.

By the same extension, if it's going to be like a whimsical one, where the only way that you can survive in an encounter is if you are singing the entire time, so like it's a musical campaign, not everybody's going to want to play in that thing, so you got to want to make sure that everybody's up for this sort of shenanigans that you're going to be putting them through.

>> That's absolutely true. It's like any campaign that's leading heavily on a single tone, you're going to want more buy-in than usual, but once you have that buy-in, a lot of it is knowing your audience very well, knowing not to go too far with it, but also coming up with good adversaries that will be whimsical and not depending too much on combat, especially as we talked about bringing in those other creative solutions and making it clear that outside-the-box thinking is something to be rewarded.

Something I'll add in as well is, and this goes for a lot of campaigns, but especially more whimsical ones and even horror ones too, is know your scope and know when to end it. Whimsical campaigns in particular can kind of meet that crescendo effect of like, it's a real good concept, whatever you cooked up, for maybe three sessions.

But turning it into an entire three-volume Adventure Path, you might not be able to sustain it or you'll just have to keep on upping the ante to the point it's no longer tasteful, so you can either plan a shorter campaign around this and/or just keep gauging your player's endurance for this theme.

It might be that you close up each session and you're like, "We still having fun? We good for another session?" It could be that you notice that it's kind of running its course and now it's time to adjust this five-session story that you have into one that you could wrap up after three. Make whimsy fun and bubbly by not overtaxing it.

And make sure when people are filling out those X cards during session zero that you include, also, there could be themes that they could be okay with until they get silly. Like there are themes where you could be like, "Yeah, I'm fine with this, but don't make light of it and don't humor. Don't make it funny or silly or don't add Whimsy to it. Like I'm fine having it be a serious theme but not a funny theme."

And that's a perfectly acceptable thing for your players to bring up during a session zero.

>> That's a really good point because so often when we bring up things like the X card and that type of thing, it's like, this is all like people don't want body horror in their game or something that's really, you know, grim or intense, but it's anything that is extreme, be it body horror or just singing all the time. Not everybody's going to be into that.

>> Yeah, and it's doubly important for us as developers to consider how for published adventures where we can't gauge individual audiences, it can narrow what we are able to publish and still be whimsical to try and keep a safe territory.

So the sloth poppet is of course one where it's like, I'm sure there's somebody out there who's terrified of sloths. There are certainly plenty of people out there who are terrified of dolls, but the idea of a cute sloth doll, meh, largely safe.

But yeah, that's a real solid point there. There's also an element too that I think is really important for us as publishers of content like this. There's a point where if you go too far, your customers or your players or whoever you're presenting this for might think you're making fun of them and using the context that you're doing as a joke. And once you start treating what you're working on as a joke, you're no longer creating content. You're mocking the people that you're trying to engage. And that's a really dangerous thing to fall, a trap to fall into and to be aware of.

I think one good tool or way to approach putting a lot of whimsy in a campaign is with like a very particular antagonist who can show up and cause mischief and be foiled. Your Q in Star Trek, or your Mixel Splittalick, or whatever the Superman villains called. I know I pronounced that wrong.

Just a whimsical adversary that can do their thing and back off once they're thwarted. So they know they've got this antagonist they're dealing with, but it doesn't have to be ever-present. And just the thing I thought, James, you were going to say of too much whimsy was, I thought you were going to talk about like, if you do so much whimsy, especially from a publishing perspective, but even from your gameplay, those whimsies start to define your brand, your identity, things like that.

So we have good fun in Organized Pplay stuff, but if we have 15 scenarios in this season and eight of them are whimsical, is this really like a general purpose RPG campaign or is it a whimsical campaign? And so those are always balancing the facts that we have to strike as we are planning out seasons, APs, and so on.

>> All right, any last points before I get into our two questions?

>> One little thing, a little bit of whimsy will make sure that you create worlds that are worth fighting for. It's kind of a meme sort of thing where it's like, look, we don't actually care about saving this weird fictional country, but if anybody ever hurts a hair on Mr. Meowkin's fluffy head, we will destroy the entire multiverse forever, Mr. Meowkin's.

We made him familiar just so he would live as long as our elf wizards.

>> So first of our questions, and probably going to have at least a little bit of Dustin in on this one.

Question: how would you work in terms of Starfinder versus Pathfinder whimsy? Same sort of approach, are there differences?

>> There's a certain level of anachronism, I feel like you can't hit quite as well in Pathfinder, whereas in Starfinder you could use a lot more modern things without it overshadowing the points that you're trying to make.

I mean, I'm all for one for card games in Agent(?) Absalom, but at the same time, it's a little easier to write an entire-- well, I guess we have-- it's a little easier to be whimsical with modern technology being involved because people have-- it's inferred that you're living in a world where most people don't have to toil as much.

So there's a lot more free time, so there's a lot more entertainment, so there's a lot more whimsical things just happening all around you at all times, because whimsy is now being used in mass marketing, in mass media, there's such a thing as pop culture in the infosphere.

You know, there's a reason it says, I believe, in the Starfinder 1E gnome entry, that gnomes are very unlikely to bleach in the Pact Worlds  because there's so much stuff. And just my experience with what you'd reference there in Starfinder Society development is, yeah, there are some modern tropes, modern behaviors, the card games that you mentioned, but social media things.

For example--

>> Or shenanigans, like big companies enjoying weird, goofy stuff.

>> Yeah, where if you were to do that in Pathfinder, you would kind of shake the verisimilitude a little bit, and you'd risk losing your audience, whereas for Starfinder or similar things, you're in fact just building upon the nature of science, fantasy, and sci-fi, and the modern tropes that they expect to play with.

My primary Starfinder Society character is an operative  who is a speedrunner in her off time, and sees every mission through the lens of a speedrunner, but that doesn't really work in Pathfinder, you can't have that sort of element of a character who views everything as a video game challenge, or you can, but it doesn't-- it would be very off-putting. Hercules speedrunning the trial.

>> One more question that we have, and I think this is kind of the little bit of cracking the shell of the stodgy, foggy in our midst, a question: "What could you do differently for veteran players for the effect of like, 'who's seen it all' attitude?"

>> So what I take from this question is like, "Whimsy, when you have Mr. Grumpykins the player at your table," or something like that.

I think that's a case where you really have to know your players and the people you're with, because in a case like that, the reason Mr. Grumpykins might be grumpy is because you're not taking the game seriously enough, and adding Whimsy will make him grumpier.

It's a case where you really need to know what your players are expecting and being able to adjust upward or downward, these thematic elements of the game, whether it's horror or whimsy or romance or mystery, whatever theme your group is at, being able to adjust those spigots is a really handy way to keep people from getting too frustrated or annoyed or grumpykins.

>> And I think dosage is part of it as well, where it's like, if you have a very serious group or one who wants mostly serious games, it might be around session eight and kind of message them beforehand and be like, "You know, session nine, I'm planning on doing something a little bit offbeat, a little bit lighter, then we'll get back to your regularly scheduled content."

And then maybe Mr. Grumpykins is willing to go along to the right and you can see how stodgy fighter plays out when suddenly everything's a little bit lighter and more humorous, and do they stay very serious or do you crack a smile?

>> Getting that buy-in is key. You don't want to drag someone unwilling because they're already, if they're resistant to the idea, springing it on them is not going to suddenly make them less resistant.

So good communication, and if they're not there for it, they're not there for it. Maybe that's for a different group.

>> And sometimes the cliche becomes the deconstruction when the deconstruction is pushed too hard with certain player groups.

I have my cubate(?) plushie and my pipefox plushie back there to remind myself a little of this, because very frequently I'll have the hyper-cute familiar be the evil mastermind. To the extent that I've noticed with my personal groups, it's more shocking when I don't.

And when the hyper-cute familiar is just, it's a rabbit, it's a rabbit familiar, it was friendly, it wants to help, it's just helpful, it's a good guy. And sometimes you've got to twist that back to just, you know, your standard, sometimes the shiny knight in shining armor really does just want to save the kingdom and isn't trying to plot anything sinister.

>> And one other thing is that, one of my axioms in Organized Play development was, you know, players are going to be players where it's like, they're going to come up with real solutions, they're going to tackle things in ways you didn't expect.

Sometimes it might be that you have a more jaded group and you present something whimsical that you expect to become like, they're happy mascots, they love and enjoy. And Mr. Meowkins comes up and he's the hat(?) friendliest little magical cat in the world.

And the players decide through some exposure that, you know what, no, we're going to spend the entire session trolling Mr. Meowkins. We're going to at some point pick up Mr. Meowkins and throw him down the hallway to detect traps.

And it could be that as long as it is within the realm of what your group considers tasteful or safe gameplay, that it might be that taking whimsy and kicking it between the legs figuratively speaking is in fact the way they're going to have the most fun. And if that's the case and everybody's cool with it, go for it.

JOHN COMPTON: Everyone's having fun, everyone's having fun.

Pretty well to toss in one last thought before we close things out.

All right, so a couple of quick announcements. First off, we are going to be kind of hovering around the follow-up channel chat in Discord on the Paizo Event Server.

Also right after this, I believe, is when we have the Pathfinder narrative team's pre-recorded game. They asked me to run something special. I asked what they wanted.

They said maybe we should run something high level. How high level? Maybe we should be 20th level.

Ugh, okay. But you can go and see how whimsical and wild they get. And frankly, no matter how serious I sometimes come across, how loosey goosey I am as a GM.

So yeah, we hope to see you there. And enjoy the rest of your PaizoCon.

And also one last point is mentioned talking with your players, figuring out what works for them.

I think it's tomorrow that we have a therapeutic RPGs panel on the schedule. Look for that.

That's also where we're going to talk a little bit about how to be a psychologist within workshopping your group problems. And overcoming what could break apart your group in order to make a stronger RPG experience.

All right, it's been great having everybody.

Thank you, James, Josh, Shay, and we'll see everybody else at the rest of PaizoCon.

Bye.

Bye.