"The Haunted House Comedy as a Game?" Topic

Posted this to my blog today. Recreated here in its entirety to save folks having to shift over just to discuss:

I love haunted house comedies.
After posting "Enchilada Man" yesterday, I got to thinking about how this sort of fun could be replicated in a game.

Abbot and Costello ponder a mystery

The "standard" approach would be to have the players investigate a supposedly haunted house. The spooks could be real, imagined, or really racketeers or Nazi spies just trying to keep their activities a secret.
Now any of the standard horror/pulp games would handle this sort of game easy peasy. However where is the comedy element? Using this approach the players would have to supply the guffaws and quite frankly not everyone is up for that sort of thing.

So what are some other options?

No doubt hilarity ensues

What if the players have to shepherd a naive NPC through the madness? This guy or girl (or chimp or Great Dane) would wander blithely about, accidentally pushing secret panels, sitting on chairs that are actually chute traps, and encountering spooks when no one as with them.

In this game the goal of the players would be to not only solve the mystery but to find and repeatedly rescue their NPC associate.

This game would allow the game system to handle the pratfalls and zaniness of the Vaudevillian rather than placing that burden squarely on the shoulders of the players.

This one is, I think, workable as a co-op or solo game. Certainly with the right GM it would be no problem at all to pull off as a traditional RPG sort of deal.

Kay Kyser debates the finer points of spooks with Peter Lorre

There is a third approach that might work too.

What if the players are the spooks/racketeers and the game system handles the intruders?

This version might work best of all as the players maneuver their forces to cause the intruders to flee in panic yet the sublimely oblivious and endlessly lucky funnymen/women/animals shtick their way out of nearly any situation.

I can see where this would generate a proper frustration level for the players and breed the associated hilarity as trap after trap is foiled.

While this approach perhaps best lends itself to a game system controlled opponent, the obvious hurtle is that in this genre the bad guys are supposed to lose.

What to do? Victory points could be awarded for holding out against the forces of good as long as possible but is this really satisfying? Every game would be a "last stand" scenario.

Perhaps victory could be awarded for causing the intruders to flee the house in terror. Traps could be reset, the defense rearranged and then another party of do gooders dealt with.

A fun variation here might be to allow the players to be supernatural entities. Each party of do gooders would come from a slightly different era bringing different skills and gadgets to the game.

For example the first set of do gooders could from the silent movie era. Next up would a Laural and Hardy or Little Rascals group. Following this could be a Three Stooges interlude.
Next up would be Abbot and Costello, or Bowery Boys, followed by the more "sophisticated" approach of Hope and Crosby or Martin and Lewis.
Moving into more recent times the Scooby Gang would make an appearance followed by the high tech Ghostbusters.

If your spook crew could outlast all of these teams you would have achieved a mighty victory indeed!

On reflection all of this is probably more work than any pay off would warrant but like any R&D some ideas explored here might eventually find use in some other capacity down the road.

Hope I've stirred a thought or two or at least brought back a happy movie memory.

More like a one off game with the players having all the funny roles and NPC straight men.

Don't forget that most powerful weapon "The Seltzer bottle".

It requires good-natured cooperation among the players and a ref willing to moderate discussions, but we have played that type of scenario as a head-to-head game with one side the investigators and the other side the mystery (supernatural, supernormal, mundane in disguise, etc.).

It helps to have a fixed goal for the players, such as retrieve our baseball from the spooky house, or survive the night in the mansion. We made up a deck of these and had a random draw at the start of the game, after the investigators chose the team and equipped up. The threat player didn't know what the goal was. The ref helps here (f'r'ex in deciding when they found the ball).

On the other side, the threat player would set up traps, pitfalls, and encounters on a secret sheet that the ref got at the start of the game. The three types we used were room events, intestigator action triggered events, or time triggered events. We allowed one encounter per "room" (loosely interpreted for castles with large rooms).

The most fun part was the combat bonuses. Basically, the ref would assign an "inappropriateness" bonus to the combat. The more inappropriate the choice, the better the bonus. So, if you were fighting an animated suit of armour with a sword and shield, you would use regular combat rules with no bonus and likely get offed. If you were fighting an animated suit of armour with a pillow and a blanket, you would get a high bonus and likely win. But don't ignore the shield, you might need a big movement bonus when running away down a set of stairs!

The game came down to innovation in thinking on the part of the investigators. "Oh, we're in a library, let's look for a cookbook!" and before game planning on the part of the threat – Do I want to advantage variety in picking up objects or do I want a progressive threat along one theme (were the effectiveness of variety peters out over time).

M C LeSingeDew : It's a great idea and genre!

The board game The Haunting at Hill House (or something close to that) may have some good ideas for scenarios that could be incorporated into a paranormal investigator style campaign. Maybe not quite the hilarity of Abbott and Costello but you'd get to work through all of the various genres of campy horror.

I helped 'devise' and run a game in this sort of genre many years ago based loosely on 'The Cat and the Canary' film with Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard.

It went very well – but we did have a 17th Century Mansion and grounds to run riot in – with attached pet cemetery for added atmosphere. It was run as a 1-1 rpg with clues laid out around the house (especially the library)that led the 'cast' on a competitive/cooperative treasure hunt with obligatory visit to the summer house by the cemetery at night.
The standard of my clue writing helped people laugh of course – not necessarily in the right places. You don't need a mansion but physicality and darkness work wonders, as does some familiarity with the hokeyness of the genre. Probably a bit more time to plan the evening than the 20 minutes we had would help but not too much – lots of room for inspired player invention. I seem to remember alcohol may have helped with the suspension of disbelief as well.

We had the luxury of an umpire team running ahead to alter clues slightly as the player team missed/misinterpreted things – and one of the 'players' was an umpire trying to help/hinder as required. I suspect this type of approach is quite umpire/gamesmaster heavy in terms of numbers but requires a light touch if players are not to feel too forced down a line of play/script.

If you include The Three Stooges, don't forget the obligatory pie fight! ;-)

Excellent comments. Thanks!

Great to read what others have done with the genre.

MC

Since you've seen "You'll Find Out" I thought that i'd add some of my favorites in the same comedy genre. (-:

Spooks Run Wild – East Side Kids & Lugosi
Ghosts on the Loose – East Side Kids & Lugosi ("Who dat?")
Boys of the City – East Side Kids
Scared Stiff – Martin and Lewis
Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters – Bowery Boys
King of the Zombies – Mantan Moreland (he's great!)
The Living Ghost – Joan Woodbury (She's sooo cute!)
Zombies on Broadway – Lugosi
The Ghost Breakers – Hope and Goddard (and Anthony Quinn)

The Shadow! A man after me own heart.

I have never seen King of the Zombies but I quite agree that Mantan Moreland is one of the greats. Hhe doesn't often get the credit he deserves.

There are also a few Redd Skelton pictures that could fit. One is "Whistling in the Dark" and another, possibly featuring the same Redd as the same character that had some kooky plot about an ACW ghost. Can't recall the name or if the ghost was real. It was enjoyable though.

EDIT: Palm slap. The latter film was almost certainly "Whistling in Dixie"! I'm a bit slower than usual today : )

MC

You're right. It was "Whistling in Dixie". Skelton did three in the series. The third was "Whistling in Brooklyn". All were good, but IMHO "In the Dark" was the best.

You *have* to see "King of the Zombies". He's just in it for comedy interest, but Moreland absolutely steals the show! Don't confuse it with his "Revenge of the Zombies". That one isn't even close to as good. In "King" he believes (incorrectly) that he has become a zombie and his banter with a maid is priceless!

The East Side Kids have some great lines too. In one, Gorcey tells the rest of the kids that they are going to a graveyard, and Hall says "A graveyard!? oooo…that's where the dead people live". In "Ghosts on the Loose" Sunshine Sammy Morrison and Lugosi do that famous bit where Sammy here's a noise and asks:

"Who dat?"
Lugosi, off-screen, repeats "Who dat?"
and Sammy says: "Who dat who say who dat when I say who dat?"

Did I actually text "Here's a noise" instead of "Hears a noise"? Damn, there goes my "pulp" cred. (-:

I would have created such an entertaining game, if it weren't for those meddling kids….

Oh, and let's not forget
The Boogie Man Will Get You, with Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and a bunch of slapstick comedians whose plans and plots intertwine and collide.

>>Oh, and let's not forget The Boogie Man Will Get You, with Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre and a bunch of slapstick comedians whose plans and plots intertwine and collide.<<

I saw it on TV when I was a kid in the 1950's. It was part of the "Shock Theater" movie package sold to TV along with all of the Universal monster movies. I was disappointed at the time because it was a comedy. I saw it again this year on TMC and found it moderately entertaining and very reminiscent of "Arsenic and Old Lace" which is a genuine comedy classic.