^{Originally published on Sicdekickcast.com November 17, 2015}

Easily my favorite part of tabletop RPGs is the fact that they have so much latitude and room for player agency. No matter how robust a computer game is, there are always a finite number of choices. Because tabletop RPGs rely on human adjudication, the possibilities are limitless…like that time the PCs in one of my games inspired a pair of half-fiends to become vaudeville stars.

The Setup

My long-running Pathfinder campaign has the PCs currently at 14^th level and 4^th mythic tier. When you delve into the mythic rules, things get really crazy – players can spend resources to take additional actions during a turn, teleportation is everywhere, and dealing 200 hit point of damage with a single attack becomes routine.

To accommodate this group, I’m running a very modified version of the Wrath of the Righteous adventure path. Now about halfway through that adventure path, the PCs are delving into a labyrinth where the crystallized blood of dead demons lords gets refined into an elixir that can create monsters with god-like powers.

Like I said, things get crazy when high levels and mythic tiers get involved.

That said, not everything is about combat. Sometimes, you just have to dance.

The Ballroom Blitz

Breaching the fortress required the PCs to run up against a magically sealed portcullis with a gang of half-fiend minotaurs on the other side. Unfortunately for the minotaurs, a portcullis doesn’t stop spell effects, so a single mythic cone of cold reduced their numbers to two. One of those then got hit with a command spell to perform one simple command: dance.

Technically, Pathfinder’s command spell doesn’t make creatures dance – it can force one of five specific actions. Personally, I prefer the pre-D&D 3.5 version of the spell, which allows any one-word command. However, when you boil it down, what does a “dance” command do? It makes the creature lose an action. Effectively, it’s the same as the spell’s “halt” effect.

That’s one of the differences between computer games and tabletop RPGs. In a computer game, the command spell would trigger one of a limited number of animations. In a tabletop game, it turns out that halting the half-fiend meant that it stood in one place and performed pirouettes for six seconds.

Things went downhill for the monsters from there. They both tried to attack with glaives through the portcullis, and they both got disarmed. Then they got hit with more command spells, forcing them to continue their dance.

Around this time, I rolled Perform (dance) checks for them, just to see how well these guys were doing. They wound up rolling a 15 and a 20, meaning that one was functionally sound while the other was downright terrific. Apparently, these minions of Baphomet had been hiding rhythm in their souls.

When All the Numbers Go Higher

As you level up in Pathfinder, you have the chance to get ridiculously good in anything you choose to specialize in. Most commonly, this is expressed through combat, where you go from being able to barely knock a goblin down with your sword to piercing dragon hide. But it applies to other stuff on your character sheet as well, including diplomacy.

With the half-fiends disarmed and forced to continue dancing thanks to the repeated use of the command spell, the person who started all of this decided to take the opportunity to compliment the dancers on their skills and try to convince them to change careers. Initially, the fiends responded by casting unholy blight, but the group’s sorcerer was determined to keep things peaceful and kept countering their attack spells.

Every attack wound up getting negated by a well-coordinated group, which made the fiends more and more furious. But even as they raged, one of the PCs kept talking, and eventually their words started getting through.

After some time at this, one of the half-fiends finally broke down and admitted, “I never thought anybody would appreciate my dancing.”

This led to incredulity from the other, which led to another use of a command spell with the order, “Agree.”

Again, that’s technically not a valid use of command in Pathfinder, but what is it really? It basically boils down to another use of the “halt” command, resulting in the half-fiend pausing long enough for some of that sweet, sweet diplomacy to get through.

Thus the half-fiends agreed and decided to fly off to civilization to show off their mad dancing capabilities. The players decided that their names are Vaude and Ville, respectively, and now my campaign setting has a pair of half-fiend minotaurs cutting a rug in the streets.

The Infectiousness of Funny

I have more than 100 pages of flavor text for my campaign setting. In the flavor text, the setting seems a lot more serious than it turns out in game. Even the name of the setting – Blackwood – implies a certain grimness.

My players, on the other hand, love their silly. They’ve turned mariliths into gerbils, seduced doppelgangers, and created potions of magic missiles as booby traps. One of the PCs is a talking horse who kept his intelligence a secret for weeks just because.

When it comes to gaming, I find that the GM works really well as a straight man. If I take the setting and the adventure seriously, it becomes a lot more hilarious when the players decide that dancing minotaurs is a thing they want to do. I could make a whole screwball setting, but these precision funny bombs work really well. Most epic fantasies don’t have the grimness of Mordor interrupted by infernal servants from the Abyss shuffling off to Buffalo in the middle of it, but I’d wager many RPG settings have something like that or weirder.

Because tabletop RPGs have unlimited choices, they also have unlimited opportunities for surprise and hilarity. Most GMs put a ton of work into the adventures they run. Why put so much effort into something that’s over and done with in the span of a few hours? Because the unexpected is always waiting to happen, and the opportunity for a creator to be surprised and amazed by his creation is always a great thing.

The encounter with the half-fiends was supposed to take a few rounds and provide little more than a speed bump for the PCs. In a computer game, that would be all it would have come to. But because it happened in a tabletop RPG, Vaude and Ville are now cutting a rug in some unsuspecting tavern while the commoners hide under tables and hope they don’t piss off the half-fiends by not applauding loudly enough when the performance is over.

_{Images: Paizo, Inc.}