MMO terms and tabletop, anyone completely ANNOYED by this?

[nightwind1]

I'm actually bothered far more by people quoting the same half a dozen lines of Monty Python at the game table than a cross pollination of MMO terms.

Well, gee, I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition!

 

[Zhaleskra]

After Monty Python, everyone expects the Spanish Inquisition at all times.

 

[Tanstaafl_au]

I'd rather MMO terminology creep into the mix than spoken versions of text emotes and other associated text-bits. At least terms can be roughly approximated into a word category. A tank is a noun, and pull is a true verb action. A larger problem for me will be when my very young children or their friends grow up to say stuff like this:

Me: "The captain picks himself up from the dusty road and shakes his half helm at you 'the Countess will hear of this mark my words!'"
Player: lolls
Me: wait what? Did you literally just say lolls?
Player: oh em gee, surslee
Me: I don't want to live on this planet anymore
*plane shift*

Language evolves. Each generation complains about it.

The one I find amusing at the moment is the circular effect of the
Originally used to indicate being unhappy in a hard medium to show emotion (text only) it is starting to show up in speech patterns e.g. "I went to the shops and they were out of coffee sadface"

Saying lol (a dictionary word now) as a word is commonplace.

Fun story (which is probably an urban legend i.e. not true) is a Grandma who thought lol meant 'lots of love'. And so responded to the facebook post of her grand daughter's cat dying with 'heard you kitten died, lol'

 

[Zhaleskra]

Great, not the "living language" I'm a lazy butt who can't be bothered to speak or write properly cop-out. Yes, languages change, but they should not change because of sloppiness. I have witnessed people being called out for saying L-O-L in real life instead of actually laughing.

 

[Tanstaafl_au]

Great, not the "living language" I'm a lazy butt who can't be bothered to speak or write properly cop-out. Yes, languages change, but they should not change because of sloppiness. I have witnessed people being called out for saying L-O-L in real life instead of actually laughing.

What cop out did I use in my post? I don't personally use lol in my speech.

I'm sure you have witnessed people 'called out' for using slang not appropriate to the group norm. I've seen people 'called out' for far sillier reasons.

I wouldn't ascribe the use of someone saying lol to be because they couldn't properly speak 'laughter' out loud.

Whether you, I or anyone else likes it, language changing primarily due to laziness (which is how I'm interpreting your term sloppiness) or shortening words and phrases. For example, using can't instead of can not.

Other reasons words spring into use is about social cliques, of which lol was a pretty good example actually in its first verbal useage - it's really a bit too mainstream for tween/teens now to be just a clique thing nowdays.

Personally I find people saying lol far less irritating than excessive use of 'like' or profanities or many other choices of slang people use.

Language evolves. Not always in the way people would like.

 

[Zhaleskra]

What cop out did you use? I already told you. The fact that you didn't use it for yourself doesn't matter.

In the incident in question, a member of the same group I was once part of, asked a woman "did you really just say LOL? Why don't you just laugh" or something similar. And even though it could be considered condescending, I agree with him.

We also abandon old language because the constructions are clunky and stupid.

 

[Orius]

They don't bother me really, but then I suppose I'm somewhat partial to some degree of hack and slash anyway, and I like having some amount of it in my game. Tank doesn't bother me at all, it's what the fighter does, don't matter how you describe it. Draw aggro? Go ahead and say you'll do it, I'll be smiling evilly behind my DM screen because those goblins aren't going to chase after you as soon as they spot you, they'll just pull out their bows and shoot you in the ass. Toon and mob feel a bit out of place because they're related to the underlying programming in an MMO or their MUD predecessors, but I won't get too worked up about it, I just don't use terms like that at the tabble and maybe it'll wear off. DPS maybe bothers me a bit, but it's not the terminology, but the thinking behind it instead. To me, you're gaming in a mindset that reduces everything to number-crunching and I don't like calculating everything on a spreadsheet before hand.

 

[Stacie GmrGrl]

This bugs me too. It's tough to get into a setting and be in the world when players around me spout out MMO like terminology with every single action, or they compare things in the game to things they did in WoW or any number of other, equally innane and out of game conversation.

If I want that, thats what WoW is for.
If I sit around a table, I want to do actual roleplaying, and talking about 'aggro' this or 'dps' that is not part of the game for me.

 

[VariSami]

A funny incident yesterday...

We had a battle against cultists that had kidnapped the group's Halfling friends. When they stormed the cultists' temple (the map from Fields of Ruin), only the NPC Paladin of Freedom that they had brought with them (the cultists had torched his temple where the Halflings had been staying) tried to negotiate for a while. So did the cultists. Not my dear players.

Yada yada. The fight went dragging for a bit because our genious Ranger decided to cast entangle in the midst of everything and that caused both parties to grind to a halt (though the cultists had 6 Warlocks). After some time I just tried to get over it and ended up using MTG-slang. Kind of funny IMO, when I told one of the players "ok, 6 damage to the dome/head" and he was like "what?".

At a grindy fight like that it really didn't matter, though. I'd say the likes of them can easily bring out the "gamers" in roleplayers. Because trying to seriously roleplay through 3-4 hours of die rolling would be exhausting and time consuming.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Fun story (which is probably an urban legend i.e. not true) is a Grandma who thought lol meant 'lots of love'. And so responded to the facebook post of her grand daughter's cat dying with 'heard you kitten died, lol'

I don't know if that one's true, but our Prime Minister used to sign off LOL thinking it meant Lots of Love.