What's the longest running "inside joke" at your table?

[reveal]

Most folks have "inside jokes" at their table. Sometimes, these jokes are brought over when a new member relays something that happened with their last group.

So what is the longest running "inside joke" at your table? How long as it been running? Go ahead and post the backstory if you feel inclined to do so.

 

[Caspian Moon Prince]

Let's see...can't talk about the jokes with kobolds or gnomes...wouldn't be appropriate for the board, so I'll talk about the owlbear.

The first time I played 2ed(first time I played an rpg all together) and during the third adventure the group I was playing had an encounter with an owlbear. Now we was all pretty low in level and this should have been a REALLy dangerous encounter.

So what happens? I critical and three other players critical...kill the poor owlbear in one turn. Not to mention the fact the owlbear wasn't actually threatening us, but going across the road in front of us. Now anytime a monster or villian is killed much quicker than thought we call it "the owlbear syndrome" or "we're killing the owlbear"

I also must say other owlbears that have been fought against in campaigns I've played in have died pretty quickly...Must be hate crimes against the owlbear.

 

[JesterPoet]

That would be the "Afro Knight" prestige class.

 

[Altamont Ravenard]

Hm.

The two I can remember are "Kill the Gnome!" and "Burning Dwarves". I'd say they're about 5-7 years old each. "Kill the Gnome!" is in reference to a recurring (gnomish) villain in an ongoing campaign. God we hate that gnome, and by extension, every other gnome in every other campaign. I'm trying to rehabilitate myself by playing a gnome paladin in a new campaign.

The history of "Burning Dwarves" isn't RPG related. I can't really remember why, but one night we were talking about the fact that dwarves could be inflammable, and what could entail of that. They'd be a cheap source a fuel, fireworks were actually dwarves being shot out of canons, etc.

Edit: I tried to rehabilitate the dwarves also by playing a dwarf fighter in a campaign. I got scared last session when we encountered Magmins

AR

 

[Mouseferatu]

Hmm... These probably won't be funny to anyone else, since they're all of the "You really have to be there" variety, but what the hell.

One joke that sort of developed on its own is the "...to Snakes" joke. For those too old to remember, every edition of D&D before 3.0 had a clerical spell called sticks to snakes. You threw a bunch of sticks on the ground, and they turned to snakes and attacked your opponent. (Remember that clerics didn't have much in the way of good offensive spells in those days.)

Somehow, any time we got into giving a whole list of details or features, we wound up adding "to snakes" on the end of it. For example, a ridiculously overloaded weapon in 3.5 might be a defending returning keen scimitar of wounding... to snakes."

Then there's the "gratuitous Q." In my homebrew world of Selion, a few of the place names use Q in place of K. For instance, the fishing village in which most of my Selion campaigns begin is called Waylocq. I did this just to make things seem a little different, but I've never lived it down. Everyone in my group, for years, automatically assumes that anything that can use a Q does use a Q. And if I'm telling them how to spell a name, they'll throw Qs in there at random intervals, even if the word has no similar sound at all. We've even decided that Gratuitous Q is the name of a Selion rap-star, and they want to get shirts printed up that read "If it's not Selion, it's qrap."

 

[Hiscores]

One time our paladin kept getting awful rolls while attacking. He got around four or five attacks in a row that were all under 10. We then figured the paladin had a mental handicap, and went around yelling "My Thword! I'm gonna hit you with my thword!" (No offense to anyone with a mental handicap or speech impediment). From then on whenever some sucks badly at some mundane task (like our rouge that took four rounds to tie a friggin' rope around his waist) he would be ridiculed in the same manner ("My rope!").

Because this is a public forum I will refrain from discussing our fighter's certain "affinity" for goblin corpses.

 

[FullTinCan]

There was a character once, named Wend. He was a AD&D 2E Psionicist parading as a bard. He was an utter disaster. His powers rarely manifested successfully, and the player was forced to retire him after one session. That was in 1993. For the past 11 years, an "Ill Wend hath blown" or they have "Wended" their way through the city streets.

 

[Paragon]

The Druid Gate Incident.

at the climax of an epic campagin and adventure our group was leading an army in the siege of a city. the walls were impregnable, army unstoppable, etc, etc, after gaming for 24+ hours we were trying to figure a way in when one of the guys said
"hey, we'll have the druid circle allies cast warp wood on the front gate!!"
they died in a hail of arrow fire. all of them.....to the man.
from that point on all debunked party ideas had the phrase, "we'll not have another druid gate" in it somewhere.

 

[Marius Delphus]

Hm, how to give enough background info for "you had to have been there" war stories....

In a 1E game we played, one of the players forgot to write down his thieving scores before beginning play; this after repeated admonitions by the "detail-oriented" DM to "make sure you've got *everything* written down." This was a one-shot, kind of no-holds-barred when it came to character creation, so the character was in fact a duelist/thief, intended for an Errol Flynn-ish stereotype. (Duelist NPC class from Dragon Mag, or something.) The character has forever after been referred to as the "duelist/schmuck." (The DM relented and permitted the character thieving scores, just not adjusted for his 19 or 20 DEX.)

At a con game (still 1E), one of the DM's buddies was hanging around waiting for an open slot. There was one, and the fellow sat down and pulled out a character sheet. Without batting an eye, the DM asked, "you're playing your mooth?" Yeah, you read that right. M-U/Th, for Magic-User/Thief. Mooth. We haven't seen either of these fine gentlemen since the late 80s, but you might say that one stuck with us. "Wizrog" just doesn't have the same charm, does it?

A skit that aired on the Dr. Demento show led to a mage and his fighter bodyguard named, unapologetically, "Mr. Wizard and his little friend Timmy." The Spelljammer was never the same again.

I *think* this one happened to a friend of mine rather than it being an urban legend. In a Dragonlance game, one of the players had read the books and knew when the wicker (i.e., fake) dragon appeared. Confidently proclaimed the fact to the other players, too. So when the amazed (i.e., frustrated) DM pulled out the MM and decided it was a not-wicker (i.e., really big and really real) dragon, the players were not amused (i.e., nearly had all their characters killed). "Oh, I've read this" is still enough to make that particular DM cringe a bit.

In a 2E game, the characters ran across a great wyrm shadow dragon. They could have left it alone, but they were so into the battle plan that they managed to scare the dragon away (right through a blade barrier, no less). The pursuer (a flying mage with a magic staff in each hand; think F-16) wound up losing the dragon, but not to worry: upon rejoining the party, he asked the psionicist where the dragon was. A piddling number of PSPs and a few minutes of running later, the party bashed open the door to the dragon's hiding place and finished the job. I started rolling dice. "What now?" asked the psionicist's player. "Hang on," I said. "He's rolling up the dragon's treasure! We weren't supposed to kill it!" exulted the mage's player. It was an impressive haul, for a Ravenloft module, and they really *weren't* supposed to kill the dragon. "Are we supposed to kill this one?" has lasted oh these many years.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

There are two in my Sunday group. The first is "It'll be a quick in-an-out." After the thief said this, he led the party into a trap that ended up taking them on a many-months long diversion.

The second came from a GURPS campaign, in which the Private Eye turned out to have very few skills of use. "Have you got research? No. Tracking? No. Stealth? No. What have you got? I have Brawling."

The joke became "everything defaults to Brawling."