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Funny Business

D&D won't ask you to wield a blade, this stand-up comedy RPG won't make you tell a jokes.

Daniel Metz

— 4 min read
Funny Business
A tabletop RPG about fledgling comedians on tour
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Road Warriors: A Stand-Up Comedy Odyssey is a TTRPG for 3-5 players and one Master of Ceremonies (MC), where you take on the role of touring stand-up comedians trying to put on shows and put up with each other all around the world. Inspired by John Harper's Forged in the Dark system, treat your shows like heists and work with fellow comedians to make sure they g0 well. Created by DGB Games, an early access version of Road Warriors can be played right now at the DGB Games itch.io store and the full version of the game is crowdfunding at Gamefound as part of the RPG Party.

Life on the Road: Each session of Road Warriors will see your characters arrive in a new town, at a new venue that is full of problems. You'll then spend your time running around trying to solve those problems before the show starts. Then you'll get on stage, make 'em laugh or get laughed offstage, and hit the road to do it all again next session, richer in drink tickets (but not money). Jokes Not Required Your characters will tell jokes just like wizards cast spells and robots fire lasers, by rolling dice. You'll make your friends laugh at the table just by being yourself and getting invested in the characters and scenarios.

Road Warriors: A Stand-Up Comedy Odyssey is a game about funny people. Well, funny enough. In Road Warriors, your characters are just funny enough to hit the road, but they certainly aren’t successful. They haven’t released an HBO special or been given a prestige spot on anything more than YouTube. This premise often leaves people with two questions: (1) how funny is my  character supposed to be? (2) how funny do you need to be to play this game? The answer to both is, “not very funny at all.” 

Three character playbooks for Road Warriors: The Weirdo, a lanky man with an androgynous haircut and big glasses staring straight at the viewer; The Bully, a muscular woman with a high blonde ponytail wagging her finger at the audience; and The Scumbag, a middle aged man with a mustache and lots of chest hair making bedroom eyes at the audience
These guys aren't as funny as they think they are

Looking at it another way, the characters in Road Warriors aren’t much more talented in their craft than 1st or 2nd level D&D adventurers: they are certainly better than the average person at the thing they are supposed to be good at, but not good enough to guarantee their success over even mild challenges. In Road Warriors, your goblin warbands and pressure plate traps are incompetent managers, empty rooms, and over-enthusiastic fans. In the same way that D&D won’t ask you to wield a blade with grace and economy, Road Warriors will never ask a player to tell a joke they don’t want to make. 

Three character playbooks for Road Warriors: The Influencer, a young woman in stylish clothes smirks into the camera; The Philosopher, a woman in a pantsuit shrugs and sneers smugly at the audience; The Loser, a disheveled man in sweatpants and Hawaiian shirt holds up his hands sheepishly.
They don't deserve the jokes you'd write them

In D&D, you pick your intention and method then let the rules take over. You pick your skill or weapon, describe how your character uses it, and then check the dice to see if they succeed. Pick a goblin, use your shortbow, then roll dice to see if the arrow hits and how hard. No real bow required. 

In Road Warriors, your weapons are your jokes: you pick your intention, the subject of the joke, and the style of delivery. Win over the table full of bachelorettes with your risqué material: roll some d6s for your Schmooze skill, if you get a 4 or greater on any of them, they like the bit and you’re one step closer to crushing this gig. In both cases, the dice tell you whether your joke or your arrow lands.

That does not mean playing this game won’t make you funnier. It’s made me funnier. While we made sure that every opportunity to actually tell a joke is ruled by the die roll, Road Warriors wants you to think about your joke’s setup, style, audience, and intention. We’re guaranteed to make you laugh by accident, and that will make you want to make the table laugh on purpose. Since we don’t require you to make a joke, we also give you permission to try and fail. Plenty of our players have started roleplaying a joke, realized they lost it, and safely bailed out into describing the mechanics instead. Then they give it a beat and get to try again on the next roll. 

We don’t want you stressed over how to tell a joke. We want you stressed because your characters are barely competent narcissists trying to make their dreams come true in small towns that do not and likely will not ever care about them. And that, for us playing the game, is pretty funny. 

The cover of the game Road Warriors: A Stand-Up Comedy Odyssey. A group of people hang out of a speeding van. The driver shaves in the wing mirror, behind him a woman films herself with a selfie stick as her hat flies away. A man dangles out of the open back doors of the van, clinging for dear life. A man surfs on top the van. A man in the passenger seat reaches around to try to remove a raccoon from the windshield, the animal stands flat against the windshield staring straight ahead, clearly held in place by equal parts fear and speed. The game is written by David Piccolomini, Dan Metz, and Miel Markus.
Come back the game on Gamefound

Road Warriors: A Standup Comedy Odyssey is a Forged in the Dark TTRPG crowdfunding on Gamefound from 10/06 to 11/10.

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