Hubcap sandwiches & other misconceptions

[BigTom]

The funniest one I ever heard was a friend who couldn't pronounce the word Ogre. It always came out orgy.

 

[Hairfoot]

You can avoid tackling the ix-chattle creature, but at some time we all cross an otyugh. That'll be otty-ugg, or ott-yoo, orty-ugg, ott-yuch...

I grew up with metric, so I originally had no idea what 10' meant. On one occasion, we'd squeezed through some sewers, climbed an anchorline, and sneaked through a porthole, then I wanted to use my 10' pole to open a door.

The DM flipped. For the sake of continuity, my fighter thereafter had a bundle of 2' sticks he could screw together to make a pole. Didn't save him from the pirate cleric, though.

 

[DarrenGMiller]

After the incident of me talking about the "puh-sway-dough" dragon (PSEUDO!), my father (who was never a big proponent of my hobby at the time) kindly sat down with me and the Monster Manual to straighten out my mispronunciations. Though even he was stumped by the Ixitxachitl. He peered really closely at the spelling and description and there on the first line it said, "FREQUENCY: Very rare" and he said, "Just don't use one of these in your game and you won't have to pronounce it."

Heh. I thought I was the only puh-sway-dough dragon DM.

I had a player back in the early 80's for whom English was his second language (he was from the Phillipines and was still learning English) who wanted to play a "Monkey" so he could make unarmed attacks.

DM

 

[Hussar]

I mugged a group of merchants back in the ODnD days. My brother who was Dming at the time asked me afterwards why the heck I attacked them for no reason.

"Well, you said they were traitors," I replied.

"TRADERS!!! As in people who trade. "

"Oh, I kinda wondered why they were so honest about it. Figured they weren't that bright."

And what do you mean it's not puh-sway-dough? It's Kuh THOO loo though isn't it?

 

[Mark Hope]

In my early readings of the old Basic D&D rules, I completely missed the distinction between game time and real time. I was convinced that you needed to have a stopwatch on hand in order to measure the passage of rounds, turns, hours etc. This led to some rather frantic combats ("Dad, hurry up and roll! The round is almost over!!") until I decided that there had to be something wrong with this dumb rule... and re-read the section correctly.

We also had our fair share of polearm misconceptions (lucern hammers, star-shaped glaives, bohemian ear spoons and the holy water sprinkler, which was clearly for use against undead, although we couldn't find any information on how long it took to fill one). The best came years later, however, during an exploration of Castle Ravenloft. At one point the party was climbing a huge spiral staircase when halberds mounted on the walls suddenly animated and began to strike at us. We fled up the stairs as fast as we could, only stopping when we were out of reach to heal wounds. One player still seemed pretty agitated, however. We asked him what the problem was and he replied: "Well, what about those birds? Won't they still be able to reach us up here?" Since then I have often wanted to properly stat out the Hal-Bird. Someday, maybe...

Mispronunciations were also fun. We also had a player who couldn't say "ogre" (it always came out sounding like "oggah") and he always pronounced "wyvern" as "wirrin" for some reason. And my sister spent quite some time referring to Tiamat as the Pneumatic Dragon - there is still an old sketch somewhere of a five-headed dragon zooming about the place on monster truck-style tyres...

 

[Numion]

One of my players pronounced Mark of Justice as Mark of Justine. We've never let him forget

 

[Rel]

Mispronunciations were also fun. We also had a player who couldn't say "ogre" (it always came out sounding like "oggah")...

I believe this is the accepted pronunciation in Boston.

We have a player who for the longest time pronounced it "orge" the same as you'd pronounce "forge" without the F.

 

[bakatare]

I remember DMing a published module for my friends when I was pretty young, and in one of the rooms the description read that the players were "buffeted by strong winds." Up to that point, the only "buffet" I had known was the Mother's Day Brunch type... so that's how I pronounced it. The rest of the group gave me crap about that one for a while. Fortunately, soon after, one of those players was refereeing a Star Frontiers game, and we encountered some "Strange, alien organism." But he kept pronouncing it orgasm, without knowing it, for about half a dozen times, until it dawned on him why were all on the ground rolling in laughter (not a funnier word in the world for a bunch of 10 year olds)....

 

[Richards]

After being introduced to the game a month or two before by our cousins (who lived far enough away we only saw them a couple times a year), one of our friends picked up the D&D boxed set and decided to DM for us. As we killed various monsters in his homemade adventure, instead of giving us experience points, he gave us hit points for each monster slain. When we were still 1st-level PCs with hundreds of hit points, we finally looked at each other and said, "Wait a minute, something's not right here...this isn't the way it worked in our cousins' game...."

Johnathan

 

[Dalprin]

I also got tripped up by the lucern hammer. I thought it was a hammer at the end of a long pole. Got the idea from one of the dwarf miniatures I owned.

I also thought a broadsword was a sword that was wider than a long sword. So my early characters had short swords, broad swords, and long swords. I would use each according to the opponent I was facing, like a golfer choosing his clubs for a shot. Hmm... This guy is kind of thick. Better go with the broad sword.

Some people in my current group insist on pronouncing ogre as "oh-gree."

Never saw Krull so missed the glaive weapon that everyone is talking about.

In my first D&D game, the DM had the undead spin like tops whenever a cleric turned undead. We would then spend the next few rounds chopping them up as they spun helplessly.