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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ambrus" data-source="post: 2002351" data-attributes="member: 17691">"Mule Shopping" -- To spend an inordinate amount of time role-playing campaign downtime.Origin: From an all-dwarf PC campaign I played in years ago in which the party spent three entire sessions in a small town role-playing the buying of supplies. The shopping trip culminated in a determined effort by the PCs to find and buy the stoutest, strongest and best trained pack mules that money could buy. Our dwarves didn't really know anything about animals, so we proceeded with a series of odd questions to ask the owners and some peculiar but creative ways to test our potential mules. The DM started to play along and soon a fierce rivalry had developed between the mule owners in town who were determined to prove that their mules were the best. Once we had chosen and bought our new super-mules, it occurred to our pragmatic party members that our mules were in danger of soon falling prey to a random encounter once we left town. Our solution to this potential problem lead the party into another intense round of mule shopping as we began the search for my next entry:"The Decoy Mule" -- Anything used to distract enemiesOrigin: Just as we had insisted on only buying the best mules possible, so were our dwarves now determined to find and buy the worst possible mule. By that point however, all the proud mule owners in town were unwilling to admit that they had ANY bad mules. But our stubborn dwarves persevered for another session and a half and eventually found our "decoy mule"; a buck toothed, crossed eyed, decrepit old nag of a mule to which we tied a bright orange blanket and prodded forward ahead of the party and our super-mules as we left finally left town. Our plan proved to be sensible when the decoy mule fulfilled it's duty and nobly sacrificed its life when a wandering monster attacked it first. Unfortunately our super-mules were likewise lost shortly thereafter when the entire party fell into a deep sinkhole."The adventurer look" -- The uncanny ability possessed by all PCs to silently communicate any amount of complex information to fellow PCs with but a meaningful look.Origin: This one goes way back for our group. Years ago we had a player who was a notorious metagamer. He'd always be saying things to other players which oftentimes his character wouldn't be able to realistically communicate because he was absent/unconscious/dead. When it was first used the PCs were confronted with an NPC ally of theirs that was acting a little odd. This PC fearing that the NPC was charmed / an impostor / a dopelganger and potentially quite dangerous, turned to the other players in the middle of the encounter and began relaying his suspicions as well as his battle plan to subdue the NPC quickly. When I, as DM, cut him off to remind him that the NPC was standing right in front of him and to ask him how he was going to relay his plans without the NPC being aware of them the player simply explained "Oh! I give them all the adventurer look." Nowadays, we really mime giving each other "the look", which is to stare wide eyed at someone while lowering the head but raising the eyebrows. It usually means something akin to "something is wrong or something bad is about to happen, get ready to back me up when I act". We all also agree that PCs only gain the ability to successfully use the adventurer look upon reaching 7th level. If anyone of lower level tries to give or interpret the adventurer look we usually just make up a random bits of nonsense as the inaccurate interpretation of the message trying to be conveyed such as: "What? Timmy is trapped in the well? The chicken rides the bus at midnight?""Perfectly Normal Creature/Object" -- A term used to denote a creature/object that is anything but.Origin: Years ago, we played with a really bad DM who described a scene as such: "You're all walking along the quiet dirt road passing by some fields with a few perfectly normal creatures." The "perfectly normal creatures" turned out to be a pair of great wyrm red dragons who attacked us by surprise once we'd indicated that our PCs were going to continue along and ignore the "perfectly normal creatures". That's when we learned that what this DM thought of as perfectly normal, such as dragons and tarrasques, didn't quite match up with our expectations of what was perfectly normal. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f615.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":confused:" title="Confused    :confused:"  data-smilie="5"data-shortname=":confused:" />"Is it COMPLETELY black?" -- A question invariably asked when a DM describes anything as being of the color black.Origin: The DM mentioned above had a series of extremely powerful magic items in his campaign which were described as "the completely black sword" or the "completely black armor" used by his favorite unimaginative darth-vaderesque NPC. Since we don't play with this DM anymore we use this question as a good natured joke.</blockquote>

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