#RPGs

[phoenixyfriend]

The World’s Most Inconvenient Convenience Store Hangs 393 Feet Off the Side of a Cliff

favourite rpg trope is the merchants in incredibly hostile environments. we are at the evil curse mountain and youre just selling me items normal style

[biowareproblems]

Playing the Veilguard as an elf and getting that lore dump

[anim-ttrpgs]

Exerpt from Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy.

[mostly-funnytwittertweets]

[lawfulgoodness]

Shoutout to the Elder Millennial at the table next to me at the gaming bar, whose barbarian just charged into battle shouting "LEEEEROYYYY JENKINS!!!!"

and then had to stop and sheepishly explain a World of Warcraft meme to his genZ GM.

[msunitedstatesjames]

The ME3 Citadel DLC really has everything:

-An evil clone

-Commander Shepard and Javik battling for top billing with Blasto the hanar in a war propaganda film

-An anime style zoom in on the eyes of Traynor and her greatest rival over a match of space chess

-A scene where you have to manually press whatever buttons your system requires 183 times to beat James in a pull up competition

-A scene where the gang is trapped in a vault with limited air, while Shepard complains about the fact that no one told them how cheesy they sound when they talk

-Shepard forcing a hardened mercenary/bounty hunter to say 'please' when he asks for more change to beat the claw game in an arcade

-Shepard almost being assassinated in a sushi resturant, then being ceaselessly derided for falling through a fish tank in their escape attempt and getting everyone's favorite restuarant closed

-Potentially a sexy tango dance scene with a merc-killing vigilante turian

-The chance to rebelliously stick your hands under a decorative waterfall so many times that a staff member is like, 'fine, do what you want, but just so you know this waterfall is a hanar urinal'

-Shepard learning to play piano

-Shepard Accusing Kaiden of poisoning them Canada style

-A toothbrush that prevents a hijacking attempt

-Watching some good old fashioned telepathic sports and cracking open a cold one with the boys while the galaxy is in a shambles

-Wrex complaing that he's been having so much sex he's too exhausted to fight the Reapers

-Playing fetch with a skillet and a Varren

-Just two space divas drinking wine and talking about shoes

-"It's joking time."

Unironically, this is truly Bioware's finest work.

[mikethinkstwice]

I'm bored of elemental giants. Use environmental giants instead.

Environmental Giants all start out the same, but their bodies take up the features of the place they live in. They become a reflection of their domain.

Giant takes up residence in the cliffs of dover? Not a stone giant. No, that's specifically The Giant of Dover. Its body is made of chalk. It can create dust clouds of chalk with its breath, its shoulders are padded with tufts of short grasses and blackberry bushes.

Giant takes up residence in the ruins of a highway during an apocalypse? That's the I-95 Giant. It has rebar spines along its back, skin of pavement and concrete, and wears wrecked cars as armor.

And to make this idea more dynamic, the giant's form changes as the ecosystem changes. A river gets diverted away from a Giant's domain? Then the Giant dries up along with its land. Now the Giant has an incentive to protect its dominion, and a weakness that its enemies can exploit.

[rasamune]

I’ve just been reading Mörk Borg and the system where at the end of each session you can increase a stat if you manage to roll higher than its current value struck me as very SaGa-esque. And the fact that you can level down if you roll bad struck me as very Unlimited-SaGa-esque

do you have any ttrpg recs for something like the final fantasy legend / saga games?

Anon, I am also a SaGa/Final Fantasy Legend Sicko, the first JRPG I ever played was SaGa 2 on the Gameboy in Japanese (I didn't get very far because I was a stupid kid who couldn't read Japanese) and I have spent so much time looking for a game that could fulfill the promise of those games. To little avail.

But like, if you're okay with not slavishly emulating the mechanics of the SaGa games and trying to get something approaching the series' science fantasy vibes: Fabula Ultima is a tabletop RPG that explicitly models itself after JRPGs, and while it owes more to the mainline Final Fantasy games it is very open to reflavoring and if you're willing to switch things around you could get something approaching the SaGa games.

I could also see going at it the really old-school way: take The Black Hack (an indie game that is a fun take on old-school D&D) and its post-apocalyptic cousin The Rad Hack and smash them together. Add a bit of Knave for a classless system where characters are mainly defined by their equipment like in the SaGa games.

I'll be sure to let you know if I ever find something that works better for this.

[sprintingowl]

Deadball

Deadball Second Edition is a platinum bestseller on DrivethruRPG. This means it's in the top 2% of all products on the site. Its back cover has an endorsement from Sports Illustrated Kids.

It's also not an rpg I'd heard about until I discovered all of these facts one after another.

I was raised in a profoundly anti-sports household. My father would say stuff like "sports is for people who can't think" and "there's no point in exercising, everything in your body goes away eventually." So I didn't learn really any of the rules of the more popular American sports until I was in my mid twenties, and I've been to two ballgames in my life. I appreciate the enthusiasm that people have for sports, but it's in the same way that I appreciate anyone talking about their specific fandom.

One of the things that struck me reading Deadball was its sense of reverence for the sport. Its language isn't flowery. It's plain and technical and smart. But its love for baseball radiates off of the pages. Not like a blind adoration. But like when a dog sits with you on the porch.

For folks familiar with indie rpgs, there's a tone throughout the book that feels OSR. Deadball doesn't claim to be a precise simulation or a baseball wargame or anything like that---instead it lays out a bunch of rules and then encourages you to treat them like a recipe, adjusting to your taste. And it does this *while* being a detailed simulation that skirts the line of wargaming, which is an extremely OSR thing to do.

For folks not familiar with baseball, Deadball starts off assuming you know nothing and it explains the core rules of the sport before trying to pin dice and mechanics onto anything. It also explains baseball notation (which I was not able to decipher) and it uses this notation to track a play-by-play report of each game. Following this is an example of play and---in a move I think more rpgs should steal from---it has you play out a few rounds of this example of play. Again, this is all before it's really had a section explaining its rules.

In terms of characters and stats, Deadball is a detailed game. You can play modern or early 1900s baseball, and players can be of any gender on the same team, so there's a sort of alt history flavor to the whole experience, but there's also an intricate dice roll for every at bat and a full list of complex baseball feats that any character can have alongside their normal baseball stats. Plus there's a full table for oddities (things not normally covered by the rules of baseball, such as a raccoon straying onto the field and attacking a pitcher,) and a whole fatigue system for pitchers that contributes a strong sense of momentum to the game.

Deadball is also as much about franchises as it is about individual games, and you can also scout players, trade players, track injuries, track aging, appoint managers of different temperaments, rest pitchers in between games, etc.

For fans of specific athletes, Deadball includes rules for creating players, for playing in different eras, for adapting historical greats into one massively achronological superteam, and for playing through two different campaigns---one in a 2020s that wasn't and one in the 1910s.

There's also thankfully a simplified single roll you can use to abstract an entire game, allowing you to speed through seasons and potentially take a franchise far into the future. Finances and concession sales and things like that aren't tracked, but Deadball has already had a few expansions and a second edition, so this might be its next frontier.

Overall, my takeaway from Deadball is that it's a heck of a game. It's a remarkably detailed single or multiplayer simulation that I think might work really well for play-by-post (you could get a few friends to form a league and have a whole discord about it,) and it could certainly be used to generate some Blaseball if you start tweaking the rules as you play and never stop.

It's also an interesting read from a purely rpg design perspective. Deadball recognizes that its rules have the potential to be a little overbearing and so it puts in lots of little checks against that. It also keeps its more complex systems from sprawling out of control by trying to pack as much information as possible into a single dice roll.

For someone like me who has zero background in baseball, I don't think I'd properly play Deadball unless I had a bunch of friends who were into it and I could ride along with that enthusiasm. However as a designer I like the book a lot, and I'm putting it on my shelf of rpgs that have been formative for me, alongside Into The Odd, Monsterhearts, Mausritter, and Transit.

[90sfantasyanimestuff]

From a 1995 mail-in magazinze RPG. Source.

[notsogreatdion]

✶ INTERACTIVE FICTION RECS 3.0 ✶

✶ Mind Blind - @mindblindbard (wip)

✶ God-cursed - @wings-of-ink (wip)

✶ Aquarii - @aquarii-if (wip)

✶ Slaughter squad - @harlequinoccult (wip)

✶ Summer of Love - @summeroflove-if (wip)

✶ The Second Sight: Death Reckoning - @spoiledblogif (wip)

✶ Speaker - @speakergame (wip)

✶ Defiled Hearts: The Barbarian - @defiledheartsblog (wip)

✶ Shepherds of Haven - @shepherds-of-haven (wip)

✶ Apartment 502 - @apt502-if (wip)

✶ Grey Swan I - Birds of a Rose - @reinekes-fox (wip)

✶ In the Cards - @inthecards (wip)

✶ Bad Witch + au demo - @badwitch-if (wip)

✶ Saturnine - @satur9-if (wip)

✶ Prismatic - @prismaticif (wip)

⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣ ✶

VN'S

✶ LyteLove (wip)

✶ Touchstarved (wip)

✶ Cupid Chatroom (wip)

✶ Adopt a Boyfriend

✶ seekL

✶ my friend is a ghost (super short but super cute)

⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣⌣ ✶

if recs 1.0 & if recs 2.0 & new projects recs

[cavegirlpoems]

Violet Core Approaches

So. My close friend and collaborator Sarah Carapace has been working on Violet Core - a ttrpg about dykey mecha pilots in space - for the past few years, and that work is approaching its fruition. It's about to get kickstarted pretty soon, and I got a preview copy of the game ahead of that. So, preview/review I shall.

Disclaimers: I'm close friends with Sarah, was involved in some of the early playtests, and might end up doing a stretch goal for the game. So, I am of course wildly biased in Sarah's favour. Still, even if I wasn't, I figure this'd be my jam.

TL,DR: This game is really really good, back the kickstarter. For more details, read on.

The Basics:

Violet Core is set in the Nemesis System, an alternate scifi version of the solar system. The game follows the lives of spacers cut off from their home planet, Cerulea, as they face an oncoming disaster as escalating waves of comet-storms hit the system and everything starts to come apart.

Our characters are mech pilots for one of three factions of spacers - The Reach, The Homebound, and The Cosmic Embrace - each with their own perspective on what to do about the looming disaster. It's generally agreed that they need to escape, but where to and how is a source of conflict.

All three factions and their approaches have their merits. Although the Reach are positioned as more heirarchical and organised than the other two, all three are clearly scrappy tenacious punk-ish survivors who've been rejected and exiled to space by the dickhead bourgoisie of their home planet, Cerulea.

Luckily, you get to pilot X-10s, giant personalised mechs powered by a mysterious psycho-active (psychic?) crysteline core. This lets you get up to all the various activities you just pictured when I said that.

Tonally, it's Sarah Carapace through-and-through. Everything is purple and blocky, with CRT monitors and snaking cables and spray-paint. Riot Grrl mashed up with retro scifi mashed up with cosmic weirdness.

On The Humble D4

The game uses the oddity of dice - the humble D4 - as its main dice, with D8s scattered in here and there. It's a choice I really like, giving the game a feel that's a little angular and off-centre. It's a simple choice, but it does a lot to set it apart. I can't sum this up better than Sarah does, so I'll just quote her:

d4s are the most cursed of all dice.

They are awkward to roll.

They are pointy and can/will stab you.

Femininity is pointy, painful and powerful and so are these odd little polyhedrons.

Also, There is no standardised style for d4s. When you roll them, the result is the number displayed upright, either on the top or bottom. It varies from die to die.

Which I think gives you a good sense of the tone of the whole game, y'know?

The game cares about dice as physical objects deeply. Players can use the emotional connections between their characters to donate bonus dice to another character's rolls: the game suggests that when you do, you should pass her your physical dice, and use the motion of how you do it (including potentially how your hand touches hers as you hand them over) as a way of expressing the connections between characters, which is a fucking genius bit of design.

Anyway. Who do you play as?

Some sort of dykey space-gal x-10 pilot. To define who you are, you pick three things: the faction you belong to, your pilot type, and the X-10 you pilot. I'll go over each in quick succession.

Your faction determines your political alliance and likely goals, and the culture you grew up in, and each faction has access to a different set of X-10s. You pick between:

The Reach: the most organised and strict faction, and the oldest. Strict, heirarchical, and high-tech. You play here if you want to have a good The Man to chafe against, or to be that The Man for somebody else. The Reach are working on engineering humanity to be able to survive the coming disaster and thrive in space, and building a vast engine - the Overlock - to enable this.

The Homebound: the most rough-and-ready faction. A large population of working-class gals, and with too few resources to go around. They're working on repairing a giant machine, The Sling, to transport their people to another star system and flee the coming disaster. Unfortunately, The Sling and The Overlock are both adaptations of the same machine...

The Cosmic Embrace: the weirdo faction. The smallest, most mystic, and overall hippy-est. Short on space, people, and resources, but not on idealism and enthusiasm. They're poking the weird shit of the setting, and getting results. A little culty. In the playtest I was in, I played Cosmic Embrace, obviously.

Notably, you can have PCs all be in the same faction, or be split between them. If split, there's lines of conflict, but also room for alliances and subterfuge. PCs can, and might well, switch faction in play.

As well as your faction, you pick your pilot type. There's three broad types of pilots you can be:

Genebuilt, artificially created super-pilots with custom genetics to make them good in space. Divided into two rough types; the Violet Kind (for if you were a successful project, and inhereted mysterious abilities) or the Rat Bitch (for if you... weren't, and mostly just inhereted emotional issues). There's some interesting space to play with the idea of nature vs nurture here, or with the pressure of expectation.

Baseliners, aka normal humans who haven't been genetically engineered or tinkered with. Again, divided into two types; the Shining Star (for if you're keeping up with the best through sheer talent and training) and the Baseline Breaker (for if you're a normal person getting by with determination and adaptability.

And then, lastly, the Returned. People who died - or nearly died - and were brought back. The character creation section only mentions one sort of Rebuilt - the Returned, who have been remade by the power of humans science - but hints that other sorts might exist. And indeed they do, tied to the mysteries of the setting.

I ended up playing a Rat Bitch, who'd seen her best buddy get horribly fucked up in a training exercise and gone awol. It was great fun.

Lastly, your X-10. Each faction has three models of X-10, divided by function: Warriors to be brutal front-line fighters, Rogues to be mobile scout-types, and Witches that do weird shit and fight at range. Out of these, each faction has its own version of each of these archetypes. Some X-10 models are pretty common and mass-produced (like the Ogress, the Reach's warrior-frame), and some are rare or even unique (like the Hag, the homebound's rare and experimental Witch type that can fuck with time and space).

Each X-10 has its own Violet Core, the psychoactive crystal that's at the heart of the mech and gives the game it's name. Thoughts from the violet core filter through to the pilot, and visa versa. If you pilot a Hag for long, you'll start thinking Haggish thoughts, and your own emotions will start to seep into the core. It can get real strange real fast.

Each type of X-10 feels and plays extremely differently, in a way I personally found made your choice of frame a reflection of your pilot's personality. My pilot ended up in a Mermaid - the Cosmic Embrace's version of a Witch frame - that had the ability to shift space around it (her?), and 'swim' out of the normal world into sub-space. Which brings me to...

The Spaces & The Mysteries

As well as the material, mundane world - what Violet Core terms 'top-space' - there are two other spaces that exist.

Sub-space is a serene, empty (is it?) realm that lies below top-space. You can dive into sub-space in the right X-10s, and explore. Time and space are wierd and fluid here. If you dive deeply, you find... things. If you dive too deep, you might not come back the same, or at all. There are mysteries down there. Remember I mentioned there are other types of Returned you might become? Yeah. Remember those Violet Cores that power your X-10s? They're made from something called 'the fingers' found deep down in sub-space. Who's fingers? You see where I'm going with this.

There's also The Violet Realm. This is the psycho-sphere, the realm of dreams and emotions and mystical experiences. The violet core of your X-10 links you to the Violet Realm. You can meditate to experience it, to commune with what's within...

This is a setting with mysteries. There are things to explore, forces and powers beneath the surface. I won't elaborate. Partly because I don't want to spoil the discovery for you, and partly because I don't want to read it all and spoil myself before I can play this again. What I will say is that the bits I did read ahead on give you a lot to explore, and are explained in a way that make how they tie into the wider setting and plot. It's all coming together into something impressive.

Personally, as a player of rpgs (larp and ttrpg) I really enjoy settings which present you with mysteries and mysticism, which let you explore the underlying nature of this universe in ways that are at times rational and at times intuitive or mystical. It's an itch few other ttrpgs have scratched for me. Lacuna and Orpheus were, until now, games that achieved what I wanted; now I get to add a third game to the list in Violet Core.

In case it wasn't clear, this is high praise. This is extremely high praise.

Mechanics

I'm going to assume you're already sold. If you aren't, let me make a statement:

I'm mad I didn't think of these game mechanics.

The core engine is pools of d4s, in a way I believe is drawn from forged in the dark. However, unlike FitD, I really like how VC handles its rolls. Particularly - as I mentioned above - the way players can pull on the connections between PCs to offer each other dice, and the way this affects the game.

The core is pretty simple but has nuance. There are PbtA-style moves - things like Negotiate, or Hurt, or Shield - that trigger when you do a particular thing. You roll, and get a codified result based on the result. When you roll, you get a number of dice depending on how you're going about it. In person, you use your talents; things like Making Out and Using Your Head. In your X-10, you use the X-10's talents, things like Synchronising and Drawing Near. An example: You're piloting a Mermaid, and you see your friend (piloting an Ogress) is about to be struck by spiraling comet shards. To save her, you dive across to pull her out of top-space and into sub-space with you, dipping out of the material world to avoid the hazard. Since pulling somebody into Sub-space with your X-10 is Draw Near, you roll as many d4s as your Draw Near pool, and count how many hits you get. Since you're trying to protect somebody, you take that result and look at the Shield move to see what happens.

It's a simple core that's then built on with more detail, giving it a lot of room for nuance and expression.

Further, there's a neat little system for tracking the emotional connections between PCs and how they escalate over time. As they escalate, you pick statements to describe how you feel, pinning down the nature of the relationship, that will get deeper and more intense the further in you get. And the further in you get, the more potent it is when you hand another player your dice to assist her PC.

In play its such a neat, deep, evocative system that it made me really mad I didn't think of it myself. It's basically perfect.

Sorties, in which our cosmic purple space robots punch each other

Up front. Although your in giant space-mechs with giant space-weapons, combat isn't meant to be lethal and horrid. It's intense, and gritty, and emotional raw, but in the way that a bloody-knuckled fist-fight is, not in the way that a shootout is.

Fights aren't war. They're personal.

There's a lot of dancing metaphors in how the fights are described. You might be sparring or actually seriously going after each other, but either way, a fight is an interplay between two characters at their most intense. That thing where a fight scene serves the same purpose as a musical number? Yeah, that.

So. Each fight between X-10s is a Sortie. A sortie is divided into a series of steps, and at each step you pick an option for how you're fighting;

Lead, to be agressive

Sway, to be fluid and fucky

Follow, to be evasive

Sway hits follow, Follow hits lead, Lead hits sway. Its a rock-paper-scissors cycle. (If you get two Leads, both hit, and if you get two follows or sways, both miss.)

When you hit, you can trigger one of the moves as a result. It can get ugly and painful. It could concievably get vulnerable and emotional.

Critically, you have a limited pool of lead/sway/follow actions (depending on your X-10), that get used up as you use them in steps. IE: if you're piloting a Witch, you can use Sway twice and Lead & Follow once. So, you can count what you're opponent's used up, and predict their moves based on what they've got left. In really long sorties, once you've only got one option left to you, it resets.

A sortie is a sort of dance as you maneuver for the advantageous position, use that to fuck with your oponent, and get your fists bruised.

Damage to your X-10 can bleed through to you. Contact between two X-10s can bleed through to their pilots. Things can get strange, particularly when there's Witch X-10s involved.

I'm gonna quote the book again here:

Not all pilots fight to win. Some pilots fight to hurt.

The Gay Bits

As you might have realised by now, it's a really fucking sapphic game. Not as a focus, but in the way where all our PCs are assumed to be some sort of dykey queer type because that's just the kinda tone we're going for.

To misquote Sarah's fellow aussie: "This is my book motherfucker, they'll walk be lesbians if I tell them to".

Pulling It All Together

Tonally, it's a fucking slam dunk. The world bleeds with a very specific atmosphere, a sort of dykey grungey weirdness that draws on old late-80s to early-90s mecha anime, and Heaven Will Be Mine, and weird scifi.

The writing has a really strong voice. Sarah doesn't write like a typical clinical dispassionate ttrpg text, she writes like Sarah. There's little witicisms, emotional bits, slang. It reads like somebody passionately explaining how to play in person.

There's a lot of snippets of in-character text - chat logs, reports, records, recordings - that give you a sense of the sort of people in this world.

The art is all fucking gorgeous. Mostly Sarah art, with some guest spots.

It is extremely purple, so purple its even in the name.

In conclusion:

Listen I am wildly biased because I've been friends with Sarah for yonks, but even if I wasn't I'd be incredibly enthusiastic about this game because:

a) it seems to have been carefully fine-tuned to hit my tastes.

b) it's really fucking good. Really fucking good.

It's an idiosyncratic personal work that also has a huge cosmic scope to it. It fucks around with the medium of dice-based ttrpgs in interesting ways. It's gorgeously written. It's got a setting that makes me want to dive in and explore it.

You should go back the kickstarter when it goes live, and tell your friends about it, and I am not kidding. If this game isn't a wild success there is something wrong with indie ttrpgs. The kickstarter is here, I believe it's due to go live in a couple of days.

If any bloggers are interested in getting a preview copy of their own, hit me up and I can hit up Sarah and we can sort things out.

[biowareproblems]

N7 Day is going to hit a bit differently this year, most of us won't even be out of DA:TV's character creator by then

[anim-ttrpgs]

Yo. Been really getting interested in Eureka recently, cause it looks cool as hell from what I've read, and also I ran a police procedural campaign a few years back that I'd like to bring back, but my choice of system back then for the type of game was bad (Savage Worlds). Likely gonna give Eureka a shot with it anyway, but does the game separate out the urban fantasy elements from the more realistic/mundane elements by how much? Like, do traits have seperate sections for non/fantasy and fantasy traits, or is it all just together? Is there anything else in the game that complicates running a campaign with no fantasy elements?

You can download Eureka from this link for free (we’d really appreciate it if you paid but payment is optional) and check it out for yourself, just in case you didn’t know!

But to answer your question, the urban fantasy stuff and the mundane stuff actually are quite separate in the book. You’ll find a few references to the existence of vampires and stuff in the mundane rules, but all of the rules for supernatural characters are found in the very back of the book, not mixed in with the other character creation stuff.

As for other complications, this isn’t exactly a complication with running a fully mundane no-fantasy game, but there might be a few small complications with running a police procedural game. Don’t get me wrong, I actually still think that Eureka is probably your best option for a police investigation campaign, but there will need to be a little tinkering. But that’s what I’m here for.

By default, Eureka assumes that the PCs are not cops, so it assumes that they don’t have access to all of the resources cops have when investigating crimes. Eureka assumes that the PCs don’t have the institutional power to make an arrest, to take someone in for official interrogation, to call for backup if they get into a bad situation, or to send forensic evidence back to the lab for analysis.

Now, the only one of these that I can think of actually causing any friction with the game itself is the part about sending forensic evidence back to the lab.

Making an arrest and interrogating someone would be easily handled by the rules as they are with no changes. For calling for backup, you could take a look at the “Heat” section in Chapter 7. That section is normally used for what happens if the cops get called *on* the PCs, but since it has mechanics to tell you how long it takes the cops to show up, you could just use those same rules to determine how long it takes for backup to arrive.

Sending forensic evidence back to the lab, well, we don’t have anything for that. If I had to make something up on the fly, realistically it would probably be like, the PCs bag the evidence and send it to the lab and then in 1D6 days they get the information back.

Of course if I were writing this into the rules for real, I’d probably spend hours or days on it coming up with some kind of system that determines the reliability of that evidence and how likely it is to be a false positive or false negative (because IRL forensic evidence is not nearly as reliable as cop shows make it look or as reliable as police would like you to believe), but i have Silk&Dagger to write right now.

And here's another link

[dare-to-dm]

To me, Party Balance has less to do with the classes people choose and more to do with the personalities they assign their characters. Here are the various mixes you can end up with:

Being the only nasty little silly gremlin in a party of more serious characters: Fun, you get to be the comedic relief and don't have to think about things too hard. Ideally you delight your companions as much as you annoy them.

Having two silly little gremlin characters in an otherwise serious party: Still pretty fun. It's like cats - having two of them means twice the bother, but they will also spend a lot of time bothering each other and their antics are cute, so it works out well.

Being in a party fully composed entirely of silly nasty little gremlin characters: Not very fun after the initial introduction as you all try to care less than each other and the narrative gets less attention than a safety pamphlet on a crowded airplane.

Being the only serious character in a party full of nasty little silly gremlins: Satisfying if you want to be the protagonist, in that you will probably end up as the de facto center of the story by dint of being the only one to seriously engage with the narrative. But also exhausting, as you will be a babysitter.

Having two serious characters in a party of silly little nasty gremlin characters: Ideal, as you can support each other in pursuing your goals and can more easily wrangle your chaotic companions into a useful force for change. You get to be the parents of this found family.

Being in a party full of serious characters: Mixed. One the hand, everyone will try to bring their A game. But on the other hand, not everyone can be the protagonist all the time, so you might start tripping over each others' intentions. It lacks the spice and balance a couple of little silly guys can bring to the table.