Funny Preconceived Notions

[Scribble]

Do any of you have any preconceived notions about some aspect of D&D that you later found out were completely false?

For instance: Around the time when my friends and I started playing AD&D we had some of those collectible trading card things TSR put out... One of the cards was a Forgotten Realms card, and it was of a dinosaur... We decided we didn't want anything to do with the Forgotten Realms because obviously it was some sort of weird "Land Before Time" dinosaur setting...

 

[pawsplay]

After sampling the first chapter of a FR-based novel, I came to the conclusion FR was some sort of trendy, Celtic-themed thing since the book was full of firbolg and such.

When I was ten, I didn't know what a bastard sword was, but I could see why it wasn't in the Basic Set... such language!

 

[Huw]

Not really a D&D blunder. For about a year I assumed that a hobbit was a sort of dragon. After all, why else would the book have a dragon on the front?

 

[Masquerade]

Heh, I like this thread.

I came into D&D back in junior high, primarily through video games like Final Fantasy. When I ran my first session (oh, yeah, I didn't know anyone else who played, so I DMed for my friends), I understood most of the fundamental rules of the game quite well, but I still had some drifting notions from my video game background. For example, the PCs in that first session were able to pay a few gold at an inn and, the next morning, sure enough, all their HP had been restored! The concepts that sleeping can occur anywhere and that wounds don't go away overnight both came later.

I had a player who assumed that mongrelfolk were dog-people. This was in a campaign that featured a mongrel npc fairly prominently, and the belief went unchecked for a couple sessions until his mistake became obvious to the rest of us. I guess that he was only familiar with the term "mongrel" in the context of canine breeds.

Similarly, there was a thread either here or on Monte Cook's boards a couple years back in which someone knew a player who had mistaken the term ninjatō (or ninja-to) as a reference to a ninja's toe rather than a sword.

When I tried to explain the basic D&D rules to my (board game-loving) mother, she repeatedly got caught up on the fact that a fixed number, and not the d6, was used to determine how many squares could be moved in a turn.

 

[Li Shenron]

I make these sort of mistakes all the time... last one has been calling them BAR-IGURA for years

 

[Voadam]

Jubilex. Joo ib lex? Really?

 

[ceratitis]

Not really a D&D blunder. For about a year I assumed that a hobbit was a sort of dragon. After all, why else would the book have a dragon on the front?

he he this one cracked me up

 

[Dr. Harry]

Do any of you have any preconceived notions about some aspect of D&D that you later found out were completely false?

Surely I wasn't the only one whose clerics were running around wielding lucerne hammers before finding out that the darn things were a pole arm with pointy, blood-shedding spikes...

 

[WayneLigon]

I'd never heard the word 'cleric' in terms of religion before D&D. When I heard kids in school talking about it, I assumed for some reason that you had fighters, wizards and ... some sort of powerless scribe or 'office worker'-type. Who in their right mind would play one of those?

 

[Ambrus]

some sort of powerless scribe or 'office worker'-type.

That mistake is even easier to make if you start with the french version of D&D in which the cleric is translated as "Clerc", which is the same word used to describe a bureaucratic clerk.

I recall in an early campaign the DM's girlfriend had chosen cleric as her class and then marked down "atheist" for her character's religion.