Being a touring comedian is one of those things that gets heavily romanticized. Who hasn’t dreamed of coming up with an act and taking it from town to town, soaking in the laughs and enjoying the adventures? However, as any touring performer will tell you, life as a touring comedian is often far from fun, as you have to deal with hostile crowds and spend 90% of your day cooped up in a car with a load of other comedians, most of whom have just as many quirks and neuroses as you. However, if you want to experience the life of a touring comedian without the pain (or at least a fictionalized version of the pain), then you should check out Road Warriors, a TTRPG about a group of comedians and their chaotic tour antics.
Build A Comedy Titan
Road Warriors is a TTRPG for 3-5 players and one GM. In this TTRPG, you take control of a comedian and their touring buddies and attempt to hit the big time before either the audiences tire of you or the being in a car for hours on end makes you all attempt to kill each other.
As is tradition, the game starts with character creation, which Road Warriors dubs “The Tight Five,” because characters consist of five elements. The player starts by devising their general character concept (or rolling on a table if they’re stuck for ideas) and defining the core idea of who their character is.
After this, the player chooses a playbook. Each of the included playbooks (Bully, Influencer, Scumbag, Weirdo, Philosopher, and Loser) focuses on a different comedian archetype and gives the player two special abilities, one for use on stage and one for use on the road.
The next steps have the players choose their material from one of five options (Act Out, Crowd Work, Observational, Offensive, Storytelling), which further refines exactly what your comedian does on stage. Finally, each comedian assigns points to the game’s six skills (Reason, Surprise, Schmooze, Commiserate, Punish, Embellish).
Moment-to-moment gameplay is pretty easy. When the player wants to tell a joke or do an action with a chance of failure, they have to make a roll, with the exact nature of the roll depending on the situation.
For example, a joke roll requires players to decide who they’re trying to make laugh and why, what skill they’re going to use, and if they’re going to use a safe, risky, or audacious setup. The player then rolls dice equal to the value in the chosen skill and takes the highest roll as the result.
Then they compare this result with the threshold for their chosen setup. If the roll exceeds the value required by the setup, the character lands a zinger and gets what they want as a result, or if they mess up.
The main flow of the game is built around clocks. These are used to track the characters’ progression towards their goals, be they mundane goals like setting up chairs for the gig or how close they are to succeeding or bombing the show while they’re performing.
Comedy With Enough Tragedy
Road Warriors is a really fun TTRPG that does a great job of capturing the feel of being a touring comedian and turning it into a memorable TTRPG. It is clear from the first page that the designers know loads about stand-up comedy and understand what makes the life of a touring comedian intoxicating and frustrating, which gives the game a palpable atmosphere.
While the idea of turning a performance medium into defined mechanics may seem like an impossible task, Road Warriors pulls it off well. While the mechanics are simple to pick up, they have enough depth and character-specific quirks to keep the game from getting repetitive, and players are encouraged to consider how their character would approach each situation.
Plus, having the game focus on the backstage touring stuff as much as the on-stage stuff really enhances the game, as it allows for deeper characters and stronger narrative arcs as players get to explore the difference between their character’s public and private personas and think about how different events inform and alter these two personas. This means that Road Warriors often feels like Monsterhearts, just you’re playing as comedians in a cheap hatchback rather than monsters in a school, because scenes can get pretty emotional and socially complex.
One thing I deeply appreciate about Road Warriors is that the game makes it clear players don’t have to create or tell actual jokes during the game. Instead, the player picks a general approach, and the dice decides if they’re able to come up with and perform a good joke.
Like any form of performance, comedy is a skill, one that takes many years to learn and even more years to refine. So a game that judged players by their real-world comedy abilities would exclude numerous players. Plus, it would also quickly become either painful to play (as players would have to deal with a torrent of bad jokes from less comedy-minded players who were forced to attempt comedy) or far too easy and boring (as everyone would work out the best way to make the other people at the table laugh and repeat the same jokes infinitely). So by going with the dice results, Road Warriors make sure the game is accessible, and the story remains fresh.
I also like that Road Warriors offers two specific modes: One Night Only (a one-shot mode with simplified rules) and Tour Mode (designed for campaigns and adds mechanics like level-ups and long-term abilities) [Though note that Tour mode is not complete as of the time I write this]. It is often hard to convince a table to agree to a campaign in a game they’ve never tried before (especially if it’s an indie title), so having a dedicated one-shot mode with more focused mechanics and a more immediate list of abilities that quickly show the game off at its best is a fantastic way to allow people to dip their toes into the game and decide if it is for them before embarking on a longer campaign.
If you’ve ever imagined what it would be like to be a comedian on the road, Road Warriors is the TTRPG for you, as it really captures the ups and downs of being a touring performer. However, it is still worth playing even if you’ve never dreamed of being a comedian because it is a TTRPG that does a really good job of capturing the complex social dynamics (from the good to the utterly toxic) that can form within a touring troupe, meaning that a Road Warriors session can often become surprisingly deep.
