RPG Buzzwords that have effectively lost their meaning due to poor over-use

[Golden Bee]

"Agency" or "Railroad" = 90 page EN thread.

 

[Autumnal]

Jaron is specialized or technical language used by a particular group. Aside from roleplaying situations, how often do you tell someone to roll 12d8 and add the sum?

I seldom need to discuss the quantity of anything in mmol/L or mg/dl except when talking to my endocrinologist, who’d be happy at a reading of 110 mg/dl or 6 mmol/L, but that’s just measurements of my blood sugar level. They’re units on two different scales for the same value. I don’t think of those measurements as jargon, either, whereas I could be easily persuaded to regard “A1C” as jargon. But I don’t know.

 

[soviet]

Level

 

[Koloth]

Oh, +100. As we gamers age, this is a constant moving target. For me, who started in 1981, modern is WotC on. Which is weird, because it's been almost 30 years now. Just like how it's hard to believe Lord of the Rings movie is 25 years old now...

Oh, you mean the new LotR movies, as compared to the older animated one.

I have learned many new words reading through this thread. Look forward to using them often.

 

[soviet]

For example, "narrative" means one thing in GNS theory, another in more modern game design, and of course has its own colloquial meaning. It is helpful when using the term to lay out what meaning you are aiming at, then.

'Narrative' isn't in GNS at all. GNS defines and uses 'Narrativism'. When people use 'Narrative', I don't know what they mean. Is it a malapropism for Narrativism? Is it something else? Usually it seems to mean 'those other games that I don't like'.

I remember you started a thread not long ago about 'Narrative Games', and when I asked you what you meant, you refused to elaborate.

 

[MGibster]

Have we reached the point the word jargon itself is no longer meaningful?

Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.

 

[SteveC]

I'd say that anytime the jargon gets in the way of the important things you're talking about, it becomes a problem. And I'd say that the vast majority of threads where there's a huge (and angry) debate, it's due to mis-applied definitions. In those cases people are just talking past each other.

 

[Wolfpack48]

Bespoke.

 

[James Gasik]

I'd say that anytime the jargon gets in the way of the important things you're talking about, it becomes a problem. And I'd say that the vast majority of threads where there's a huge (and angry) debate, it's due to mis-applied definitions. In those cases people are just talking past each other.

Or people who have to be "right" or "wrong" concerning how they use words.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Grognard- I mean spellcheck does not even pick it up and when I Googled it it dates back to the Napoleon era.

That is a legacy of TTRPGs share history with wargames.

Napoleon called his Old Guard Grognards (grumblers), because they complained when they were not committed into battle.

This carried over into wargames as veterans who were never satisfied, and since back in the 70s, which is where I entered the hobby, wargame clubs and groups were fertile breeding grounds for RPG recruits, and the term carried over.