TOON

James Maliszewski has a retrospective post on TOON, the RPG that lets you play in a Warner Brothers cartoon (or Walter Lantz cartoon, or Fleischman Studios cartoon, or anything equally wild.) I ran TOON once, using the beginning cartoon olympics scenario. It went pretty well, at least up until the time the shrooms kicked in.

James mentions that the TOON rules are kind of schizophrenic. There's a lot of little rules, although those are more like suggestions and reminders of cartoon style. But there's also the "balanced" point costs for the individual schticks, which just seems ridiculous. Fortunately, the rules include a fix for this: any schtick can be bought for a single session for a flat cost (3 points, I think,) or one time only for 1 point. I may be misremembering the numbers, though, perhaps it was 5 points and 3 points. You can defer the point buy until the player decides "I need a schtick". It fits better with the fast pace of TOON.

Another fix, not in the rules, which improves the pace is to drop the Fall Down rules. By the book, a player is supposed to STOP PLAYING for 3 minutes if their character is "killed", then they get to jump back in as if nothing happened. It's much better to just treat a Fall Down as another kind of Boggle (lose next action, describe some comic "death" that wears off almost immediately.)