A Funny Thing Happened
A Funny Thing Happened is a game designed to fill in the blanks in journeys. To detail the intereactions and minor foibles that whilst not central to an epic plot can still occur on any journey.
It is also intended to be playable whilst on a journey. Players take it in turns to describe the story with a dice based bidding mechanism to control conflict resolution.
You can play A Funny Thing Happened as a stand alone game or as a filler for your ongoing campaign to explain what acutally happened in the 2 week long trip that your GM glossed over in a sentence.
Introduction
This game is the culmination to two ideas having a head on
collision in my brain. Thankfully no one was injured but the
resulting fusion of ideas is what you hold in you hands. To
understand the concept it’s easier to explain each of the core
ideas in turn.The first idea : Travelling in a Game
At certain points in any narrative the protagonists will be at point A and the next major piece of the plot will take part at point B.At which point you may hear the immortal lines ‘The journey was uneventful’. These words have always felt wrong to me, no journey is ever truly uneventful, something will happen. The traveller will if nothing else have some time to think, maybe read a book.
A better phrase is ‘Nothing important to the plot happens’ but this then reveals the man behind the curtain and unsuspends the disbelief. Of course you could reach for the handy dandy ‘Random Encounter Tables’ but this again is just a fancy way of saying ‘Nothing important to the plot happens’.
Or you could play it out, tell the story of the journey. But whilst this story is real it is, as I may have entioned, not important to the plot. So the telling of it is less vital. It doesn’t require everyone of a regular play group to be there. Or character sheets, or books and it could even be done without the GM. Everyone knows that nothing major will happen, no one will dice, no one will get any new super power (Feat whatever). But maybe some of the characters will get to actually talk and some role-playing might happen.The second idea : Gaming while travelling
The second idea occurred because at the same time as having the first idea I was thinking about the 7 hours train journey I had ahead. This got me thinking, as I was thinking about travelling and gaming, that it would be nice to have a storytelling game that would be easy to play while travelling. Or in other situations where all the regular paraphernalia of gaming might not be easily used. For instance in a drinking establishment.With this thought in mind I had a constraint for my journey telling game. It should require as little as possible, finally coming down to the concept of each player needing only a pocket full of dice. Any dice, from the lowly four sider to the twenty sided dice of power. It’s all good.
- a-funny-thing-happened.pdf
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Tags: Simon Proctor
