Keep your WOW TALK out of my D&D

[JiffyPopTart]

So...I have the misfortune to work next to two guys who play WOW. They have been playing WOW for over 2 years. They talk about WOW every day. I mean literally every day. Not just for a few minutes, but for hours.

I have had to buy an MP3 player just to keep myself from losing more sanity than I already have.

After being exposed to this I have learned to hate WOW. More specifically I have learned to hate WOW LINGO.

Today I am reading a post on ENworld where someone refered to a paladin as a pally (or pallie). This is WOW LINGO.

I have let the term "Aggro" slide because I am willing to compromise. It is, however, WOW LINGO.

So help me God, if WOW LINGO starts infiltrating my message boards I will go bat-guano crazy.

That is all.

DS

 

[Festivus]

You remind me about the other night. We had this raid going on in the sewers, and nearly had a total TPK when the MOB kept AOEing, keeping our fighter from full DPS. It's a good thing that the pally could LOH and keep the fighter up since the cleric was out of heals.

 

[Rechan]

Pally is also shorthand in general. I've been using it for at least five, six years. It's why in 3e you had Ftr/Wiz and not Fighter / Wizard written in long hand.

Just like TPK, AoE, SLA, LoS, LoE, SA... You get my point.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I have to admit, there is a lot of crossover and people tend to have different lines as to what is too much. I don't like WoW, myself. But I played EQ, EQ2, and City of Heroes for a number of years. I don't play any of them anymore.

I can tell you that before EQ(the point when I think MMORPGs truly became popular enough to have a real effect on the language used at D&D tables), I had heard tank, healer, AOE, blaster, and TPK.

I heard DPS, controller, aggro, and mezzing while playing EQ. This was long before WoW. DPS is one of the terms that doesn't really make sense outside of a real time game. In D&D, we'd just say "The fighter was our damage" before.

As for terms I've only heard since WoW came out, Pally sticks out as one I've never heard abbreviated that way until it came out. In EQ, I saw most people just use Pal. Most of the above words became 10 times more common after WoW came up, mind you.

The number of people in my group who had ever played a MMORPG of any kind jumped from 1 to 4 on average. And the amount of time that the players spend playing their games increased dramatically as well. Before there were 2 of us who played EQ and a reference would be brought up now and then and we'd laugh and go back to playing. Since WoW came out, any mention of something from WoW starts a 10-20 minute long conversation about the raid the night before hand.

 

[Glyfair]

Most of it (except "aggro', which I usually hear from NON-WOWers" I don't mind. You can tell what they mean just by listening and it isn't too jargonish.

HOWEVER....

I don't ever want to hear the MMO term "mob" again. A mob is a large group of people, adversaries, etc. When I saw Kas referred to as a "mob" I was wondering he was talking about. Kas is an individual. I am not sure where the MMO term came from, but it certainly doesn't fit well in an RPG and can be confusing.

 

[Rechan]

I am not sure where the MMO term came from, but it certainly doesn't fit well in an RPG and can be confusing.

Back in the days of MUSHes (text-based internet games, where you log on and attack things), a MOB was an abbreviation for a Mobile OBject.

The More You Know...!

 

[jdrakeh]

Pally is also shorthand in general. I've been using it for at least five, six years. It's why in 3e you had Ftr/Wiz and not Fighter / Wizard written in long hand.

Just like TPK, AoE, SLA, LoS, LoE, SA... You get my point.

Yeah, I've heard "pally" used to refer to AD&D Paladins since at least the mid-1990s.

 

[Wormwood]

Yeah, I've heard "pally" used to refer to AD&D Paladins since at least the mid-1990s.

I have heard heavily-armored fighter-types referred to as 'tanks' for about as long.

But yeah, my D&D groups are completely populated with WoW players (myself included). Terms like aggro, mob, ding, dps, pull, and off-tank abound. Perfect shorthand for RPG terms.

 

[jdrakeh]

I have heard heavily-armored fighter-types referred to as 'tanks' for about as long.

I heard that term used by Champions players years ago (the players used the term "tank" to describe characters that were almost impossible to hurt, but that could also deal out damage in ridiculous amounts).

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

Back in the days of MUSHes (text-based internet games, where you log on and attack things), a MOB was an abbreviation for a Mobile OBject.

Yeah, I've known this for a while, but I've always hated the term. I never got into MUDs. So, when I started playing EQ and all of these people were calling the monsters "MOBs", I got really confused. When it was explained to me, I said, "But those aren't the same things at all...a MOB is a programming term in MUDs, it's a way to use objects to program a monster. It shouldn't refer to the monster itself."

But, it was so wide spread that it is pretty much now the most common way to refer to monsters in games. Even though it appears nearly 90% of the people who use it don't even know what it means. It may be technically true for all MMORPGs, but it isn't a true or accurate term for monsters in D&D games. Which is why it annoys me.