Unusual gaming terms and phrases

[ThirdWizard]

We often refer to Evil as "John" after one of the players whose wife even insists that he's pure evil (and we're inclined to agree even though he doesn't like being called evil). So we cast Detect John or have an NPC with the alignment Neutral "John" and whatnot.

"Pull an Alan" on the other hand, named after another player, means to die in a stupid way that the DM never saw coming, mostly because he repeatedly dies when put up against easy situations. Alternatively it can mean to simply do something that wasn't necessarily lethal but made things much much more difficult for the party. For example, making an encounter more difficult by inadvertently alerting nearby foes.

 

[Viktyr Gehrig]

I'm a player in a play-by-email wargame set at the turn of the 20th century. It's the sequel to another such wargame set at the turn of the 19th, and we have some slang we picked up from our experiences in that game.

"Francing yourself" or "Francing your economy" refers to the first French player in that game, who took out loans equivalent to three or four times his Production in a single year and dropped it entirely into industrial subsidies, inflating his currency to the point that it was more useful as toilet paper than the amount of toilet paper you could buy with it.

What's amusing is the fact that two turns later, Russia did the exact same thing, except that he spent the entire sum on a single educational institution-- a college that the GM figured could only have cost that amount of money if it were made entirely of gold. This, of course, was too heavy for the local soil and sank.

"Declaring War on Economics" is a similar, but slower process, involving wracking up massive war debts or simply amassing debts to build a giant army, far in excess of what your economy could support. Economics never lost a war in the game's fifty year history.

 

[hong]

Honging. Sometimes we get a player who just hongs like nobody's business, and we say that he's honging.

I should now mention that the leader of the Thieves Guild IMC is named Takyris (Internet messageboards being an excellent source of names, you know). It would be a terrible tragedy if he were to get honged.

 

[pogre]

"Time to Harvest me some peasants" - means I'm tired of being nice to the locals let's use threats and intimidation to get information.

Bruce - short for Bruce Springsteen - who is the BOSS - which is short for a football scheme we used in college - Backer Outside Strong Safety - which in football means there is a seam for the tightend - in D&D it means try to flank this guy for me.

Naturally, when I was explaining to a new player that when someone asked him to Bruce a monster it meant to set up a flank - he laughed - he was thinking of another Bruce association.

 

[Reprisal]

"Doing the village."

I think someone in your group liked Platoon a little too much, or at least saw it before the term was adopted.

 

[Bran Blackbyrd]

I've lifted these from a post I made to an older thread.

"We have no means to harm you."
Our group of four ran into a rather large band of orcs. My fighter/cleric decided to try to communicate with them rather than immediately start fighting, unfortunately he couldn't speak orc. So I would tell the party's wizard what to say, and he would talk to the orcs. My cleric hoped to bluff them and said, "Tell them that we don't want any trouble, but if they attack us we will be forced to destroy them."
What was the wizard's player's translation? "We have no means to harm you." Apparently this made sense to the player, but the orcs attacked immediately anyway.
Whenever someone says or does something stupid despite the fact they should know better (especially during negotiations) we all say, "We have no means to harm you."

"I cast searing light."
Our priest of Pelor was involved in a tragic accident that crippled his left hand to the point of uselessness, but increased his ability to cast light based spells. As a result, he was constantly casting searing light, and nothing but searing light. Now whenever someone repeats the same action, or uses the same tactics constantly, one of us invariably shouts, "I cast searing light."
This and "I'm praying for my spells" also became euphemisms for pleasuring one's self, and are accompanied with the appropriate hand motions when said.

"Priest of Pelor, know your place!"
The cleric got uppity with the local nobility. The result was the DM cutting off the player in mid-sentence and admonishing him in a stern voice, "Priest of Pelor, know your place!"
I don't know why, but it was hilarious, especially the gobsmacked expression on the player's face. When someone questions the DM, or oversteps certain boundaries, someone usually shouts this at them.
"Hey, did you take an extra slice of pizza? Priest of Pelor, know your place!"

"Mohrg Barrel"
We had a player whose bard had a nasty habit of always trying to loot things first, and at innapropriate times. He once looted a villain's corpse in front of a woman and her small child. They stood there screaming as the stranger who just murdered their would-be killer rifled through the man's pockets. A grief counsler he is not.
So we're in a mine and come across a room full of regular old kobolds (we were 10th level on average) and kill them all. There's nothing in the room aside from a barrel. Of course, the greedy bard makes a dash for the barrel, but the fighter is sick of his snatch tactics and tries to get to the barrel first. The bard beats him to it and he opens the barrel, only to be grappled by the mohrg crouched within. We were all attacking the mohrg trying to save him, but the next player up was our wizard (we have no means to harm you) and he vaporized the bard and the mohrg with a lightning bolt.
We don't refer to it as a barrel with a mohrg in it, or anything like that, it is specifically a mohrg-barrel. Now we sometimes threaten to "crack open or drop a mohrg-barrel on someone.", or something similar.

"Butt-Squeak"
Wizard: Trandorf, get away from the Ettin so I can fireball it.
DM: You don't know his name yet.
Wizard: Hey, butt-squeak or whatever your name is, get away from the ettin!
You had to be there. Ever since this incident transpired, there's a good chance that any NPC, whose name is not yet known, will be referred to as Butt-Squeak.

That wizard was the source of many funny events; witness my sig.

 

[Wormwood]

I think someone in your group liked Platoon a little too much, or at least saw it before the term was adopted.

Which brings us to "Zippo Raid": wherein the PC's thoroughly loot/despoil an area, then burn all of the evidence on the way out (after a disasterous run of Keep of the Borderlands, wherein the evil cleric would routinely Animate the corpses of our dead enemies).

Other notables from my Cold War-era, military brat gaming days (New Jersey, circa 1983):

"FNG": Unfortunate term applied to new players.

"Fire in the Hole!": I'm casting Fireball on my initiative. Consider yourselves warned.

"Search and Clear": Shorthand to inform the DM that we intend to simply move frm room to room, killing everything we encounter and thoroughly searching for traps/secret doors. Essentially, we're tired of mapping.

"Frag": To take an opponent from full hit points to dead with a single attack roll (or spell).

"Doubtfuls": Any NPC encountered whose motives we were suspicious of (damsels in distress, etc). Their status was either grudgingly upgraded to 'Friendlies' or violently downgraded to 'Unfriendlies'.

 

[SnowDog]

Heh heh

Some great ones in here. I'm afraid my own contributions aren't nearly as good. A couple:

I get there first or, alternatively, I get there 5 minutes before everyone else. In our game, we would often end up splitting up and agreeing to meet at a specific locale at a certain time . Without fail, the GM would try to sum up what happened "off camera" and then say, "Ok, you're all at the place, it's 5:00" and someone would pipe in that they wanted to get there first. The game would bog down as each player would describe when they arrived and who was there first, what was said, etc. The whole point of the "fast forward" was lost.

After a while, it just got comical.

Now, whenever a player interrupts a scene-setting with a trivial change, or tries to rewind time for something which really isn't important, someone quips "I get there first."

Another one which I'm sure is not unique to my group is using the word natural to describe die rolls where it's not important. A player rolls a 17 and is happy about it, and so says, "Ooh, natural 17!"

One which hasn't seen much play lately is the classic "the camera zooms out". This was inspired when a character broke some magic doohickey that exploded in a giant blast. When describing it, either I or one of my players (I forget which) joked that in order to get the full effect of what was going on, you'd have to zoom the camera out to see the giant radius of the explosion. From that point on, whenever we want to hint that something awful is about to happen, the shorthand is that the camera zooms out. Example: "I lift the sword from the corpse. What happens?" "The camera zooms out.... just kidding. Nothing happens."

 

[Ferret]

We kind of have one saying, if someonefails miserably, we say "...and falls into the bush." or "Make sure you don't fall into the bush!" Becasdue the paladin in our group once rolled a one of attack and ride check and hurtled inot a bush.

 

[Arnwyn]

The Guidebooks got renamed as follows:

Sword and Fist: Sword-chucks (a 8-bit theatre homage)
Defenders of the Faith: Pray for Me or Oh God Make it Stop
Tome and Blood: Abu-dabi or Abbracadabbra
Song and Silence: Turn that Noise Down!
Masters of the Wild: Get off my Lawn or Warriors of the Wind (the latter was what one stupid person asked for in a gaming store)

Hey! We've renamed the Guidebooks as well:

- Sword and Fist: "Crackpipe and Bong" (I got this from a long-ago post by an EN Worlder, who said that "that must be what they were on when they wrote that book". I couldn't agree more, and my group instantly adopted it.) Thus it also spawned:

- Defenders of the Faith: "Defenders of the Bong"
- Tome and Blood: "Tome and Bong"
- Song and Silence: "Song and Bong"
- Masters of the Wild: (you guessed it) "Masters of the Bong".

Yes. We really do call those books by those names (can you tell how highly regarded those books are in my group?).

Others:
"And the cows are still pulling the barge." This statement is used when somebody isn't paying attention. It was taken from a dullard player who often didn't pay attention and had made the original comment ("Are the cows still pulling the barge?") *long* after that particular situation had passed - like, *days* later when they had been travelling overland. (And they were draft horses pulling the barge up some light river rapids, not cows.)Thus, whenever someone asks "What happened?", somebody will shout out "And the cows are still pulling the barge!".

*sigh*