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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Iosue" data-source="post: 6176293" data-attributes="member: 6680772">To clarify, by no means did I intend to suggest that these language changes are purely due to edition.  Edition plays a part, the emergent game play of that edition plays a part, outside influences, age, all this plays a part.And that's cool, but tangential to my point.  Regardless of what we ourselves do, the online gaming community and indeed the games themselves are operating with different paradigms, and attendant differing lexicon.This is very edition specific if you're going from BECMI to WotC-D&D.  Perhaps less so if going from 2e to 3e.  BECMI uses "side initiative", which means there's no initiative order as conceived in WotC D&D.  Order of actions is determined by where that action falls on the combat sequence and initiative only determines which side gets to complete their sequence first.  Hence, the term "initiative".  Even if you're using individual initiative, all that means is that each pair of combatants roll individually.  And initiative is re-rolled every round, because it determines who gets to initiate action on that round.In WotC-D&D you roll once, determine the order of action, and then keep that order for the entire encounter (barring delayed and interrupting actions).  So it's the same word, the idea is more or less the same (roll dice to see who goes first), but what a WotC-D&D-only person imagined when they heard the word and what I imagined when I heard the word (before I started playing 4e) is quite different.  They have "initiative order".  They have "high initiative" and "low initiative".  In BECMI you either have initiative, or you don't.Yes, as do I.  But, again, the point is communication with the community-at-large.  My point is that I have to code-switch when talking on a forum such as this.Nice list.But telling the BECMI player that he will get a +1 enhancement bonus to his BAB from his Undead Bane Longsword would at least cause pause.  It's simply not the way a BECMI player would talk about D&D.A 2e player knows that his longsword is a slashing weapon, and thus will have certain bonuses or penalties on different foes.  A 3e player knows that his longsword will do slashing damage, which some foes are susceptible to and others not.  It's a subtle distinction, but there are a lot of these subtle differences that undermine the sense that we're all playing the same game.</blockquote>

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