The first time we played Storytale with a group, we used the "neutral" setting. It worked. But the stories felt like news reports — neatly constructed, sometimes even touching, but without surprises. Nobody laughed out loud.
Then we tried Comedy. And the whole game changed.
What the mode does
In Comedy mode, every prompt the AI receives includes an instruction: "Write in a deadpan style, with one small absurd detail or an unfortunate observation. No moral lessons, no 'and they lived happily ever after' at the end."
An AI bridging sentence doesn't become a calm transition like "He walked on", but something like "The alarm bell growled as if it had taken offence." And the ending isn't a moral — it's a specific observation: "It tasted, surprisingly, of pineapple."
Why we made it the default
Comedy is hard to write as a group. You never know whether your neighbour's sentence is meant seriously or ironically. But the AI makes it easier — by consistently building in the same deadpan tone, the group gets a shared landing strip. Everyone can then decide whether to write genuinely or pseudo-seriously, and the story stays coherent.
Besides: a game with a funny reveal at the end is simply more fun to share. People send screenshots around. People quote each other's lines at the next get-together. Comedy invites repetition.
Where it goes wrong
Comedy is a slippery slope. Two pitfalls we've had to learn to navigate:
- Fake-natural jolliness. Early AI bridges wrote things like "Haha, what a funny situation!" — explained humour is the death of humour. We've explicitly banned that in the prompts.
- Cliché absurdism. "A flying elephant with a hat" was done to death in 2010. We now specifically push for small unfortunate observations ("The alarm bell growled as if it had taken offence") rather than big weird images.
Before and after
A concrete example of what Comedy mode does. Player contribution: "Bram opened the box." Next player: "It was the wrong pizza."
The AI needs to put a bridging sentence in there. Compare:
- Neutral mode: "Bram looked carefully at the contents." Functional, but dull.
- Comedy mode: "At the bottom lay a note: 'to the rightful owner — return appreciated'." Same story, suddenly chapter-worthy.
When Comedy doesn't work
Sometimes you want to write a serious story. A group that's been working all evening on a melancholic sci-fi tale gets irritated if the AI suddenly injects a joke. That's why Comedy is the default, not the only option. In Classic mode the AI is fully off. In Quick mode the tone is still comic but the whole session is shorter.
For most first-time players? Start with Comedy. Turn the page and see what emerges.