Gaming catchphrases, expressions, and idioms--what are yours?

[Bobaloo]

"It must have been that (darn) Dark Elf."
Used when firing into melee and hitting your ally.

"WHAM!"
(Said in a flat tone but loud voice by the DM.) When the PCs fail to break open a locked/stuck door.

"Floors, Ceilings, Walls?" (or "FCW" for short.)
Used as the inital visual check of the room. Followed usually by:

"Dungeon."
(As apropriate of course.) This grew out of me (as DM) usually responding to FCW as "Normal." "Normal compared to what," one of my players started to ask. So I went to, "Dungeon."

"Saving Throws are on 101."
As they were in the 2nd Ed. PHB. None of my players was good about keeping them current, nor was I about having them for the monsters, so I memorized that page number.

We use a handful already mentioned as well: Night Falls, take damage; Famous Last Words; others...

 

[heirodule]

First heard by me in a Living Greyhawk event:

"Relate story" - to prevent repeating everything one character has just learned from the DM (while the character is by him/herself (or communicating in a language no one else understands), but the players are all right there listening), we'll just say "Relate story" instead of repeating everything. Speeds up the game when you're tight on time (more a problem at cons than home games).

Another LG one:

"we greyhawk the bodies"

which means cutting them open to see if they have swallowed any valuable treasure.

 

[Holy Bovine]

Just to keep this on the front page that little bit longer I thought of another catchphrase our old Warhammer group used.

When some one was horribly mangled by the critical hits charts it was described in the book as being killed 'almost instantaneously'. Our catch phrase was - 'well at least he suffered a little.'

Another that has surfaced in the past year

'This is the corpse we came to this tomb to defile!'

 

[Sharraunna]

Synnibar

From Synnibar:

Whenever a question is ask about something in the game that doesn't make sense, i.e. "How can the grizzly fly?" the answer is "Synnibar."

Whenever something surreal happens, like a feather doing 10,000+ damage, it's said to "ring with authenticity."

The second comment comes from the author's bio in the back, which says he's dodged arrows and fought in life-and-death situations, so his RPG "rings with authenticity."

 

[Naar]

Whenever a door is opened with a high Open Lock check, or a trap disarmed particularly well, it is said to be 'Sven'. I have absolutely no idea how this started.

 

[Gellion]

My Dm was trying to be nice and give our Ranger an animal companion. So he has the Ranger encounter an owl while he is on his watch. The Dm says the owl moves close to him. The Ranger says "I pull out my bow ans shoot it
". The Dm then looked at the player like he was stupid and laughed and said "You kabobed the bird", the player was like "What, i something like owl demons in the MM".

He was referring to Owlbears, but owlbears dont look like normal owls. We actually manged to have the owl healed, but then it got taked away by an female orc named uniboob, who was the owls owner.

Every time i talk to the player i always try to slip in "You kabobed the bird"

 

[Salamander Napolean]

Any time the DM describes something particularly gruesome or horrifying that the characters see but aren't involved in, one of the PCs will to look to his comrades and say, "It's bad luck just seeing something like that."

In a campaign that involved lots of airships, anytime a NPC or villain went over board and someone asked what happened to him they'd say, "He's downstairs," or "He's downstairs kissing Sandy."

And then there is the everpresent war-cry/ threat, "Prepare to get sword-f**ked!" usually said in a pirate voice.

 

[Rugger]

"What's yer Flat-Footed-Touch Armor Class?"

I had been beating on my PC's pretty hard, and the BBEG managed to sneak up on one of the PC's...and tried to do the Death Domain Ability on him. (I think...it was something along those lines.)

Me: Okie dokie...what's your flat-footed AC?
PC1: Crap! Um...16?
Me: Oh, wait...its a touch attack...hmmm....
Now Frazzled PC1: WHAT? Is is flat-footed or touch? It can't be both...thats not on my sheet!
PC2: My god! Your flat-footed touch AC?!?!?!
<screams of terror>

Nowadays, any time the PC's are feeling death creep up, they ask me:
"Aren't you gonna ask for our Flat-Footed-Touch AC?"

-Rugger
"I Lurk!"

 

[nute]

Playing Mage: the Ascension. The party consists of a college football star, a martial-arts drifter, an antique store owner, and the drifter's "girl Friday" (being the person still relatively new to gaming).

Needless to say, the party finds themselves in trouble, being shot at by a man with a rifle atop the local Denny's. Through judicious reality manipulation, the ceiling under him collapses at the same time his internal organs decide to become external organs.

Girl Friday: "Dibs on looting the body!"

Storyteller: "... ... there's no looting the body in Mage!"

Thus, any time a character in any game now does something normally restricted to another genre, the cry of "there's no looting the body in Mage!" comes out.

~M.

 

[mmu1]

On the way to becoming a staple in my current game, following a particularly bad fumble and/or critical hit:

"Random fluid in the eye!"

Taken from a particularly awful fumble chart our DM used experimentally one session.