We should hash out next session what works for you, and we’ll adapt :) — there’s a symbiosis there for sure, and I think everyone would have a good time regardless.

(Side note a — music drop failed miserably — I’ll just get you a CD next I see ya’ll. Side note b — I hope the move went nice & easy for you all!)

Sounds like you don’t have too much of a problem after all Gregory haha!

Though — I am still totally amused at taking the old Mel Brooks film, and using “Jim” in the concept…though that could be an outgrowth of an odd sense of humor. Overall, fun stuff so far!

For the second campaign, having learned from my earlier mistakes, I actually encouraged humour a lot more. The character creation system was tailored to the creation of wildly eccentric, funny characters. Many of the NPCs were funny, intentionally or not (on their part). And yet the story itself was more serious, more complex, and had many grim and powerful moments. This worked perfectly because I managed to take the humour from being an out-of-game element and integrated it into the game world itself.

This also allowed for some really fascinating moments of pulling the rug out from under the players’ feet. At one point, they came up with a plan to use their flying ship to drop firebombs on the enemy army; all this while most of the characters were high/drunk from something the alchemist had brewed. And they executed their plan perfectly, while laughing their asses off – until they saw thousands of people dying a brutal and horrible death in the fire. It was an incredible moment, like a punch in the stomach. Even in really desperate situations, they never used that weapon again.

I ran a Delta Green game that was pretty darn gritty and dark and what have you, but one of the players was a very conceptually comedic guy. However, when stuff was toned seriously, he was serious, unless being not serious would be more appropriate for his character at that situation.

Maybe it’s a difference between GM styles, you are a gamist/narrativist hybrid where as I go more for narrativist/simulationist, and my players and me are way more interested in a cool story with cool characters then game elements per say.

Good luck though, your method definitely works too, also my method is hard if you have someone inexperienced with tabletop because they have a harder time I’ve found knowing when to consolidate to a GM and when the GM is throwing them a bone for a story’s sake, and so on.

I think we’ll settle down quite a bit once we figure out our characters. A lot of the hilarity is just inconsistency and internal jostling… That jostling actually makes sense in-character, too. Once we’re a well-oiled prome-team, we’ll probably be a bit more gritty.