Group Terminology

[Zaq]

I'm sure that pretty much every group out there has their own terms and phrases that they adopt for various purposes. Whether they're direct references to something, in-jokes, or just terms that stuck, let's share some of the linguistic quirks of our respective groups.

One of the big ones is that we often (not always, but often) refer to a nat 1 as a "sneeze." In many cases, I find this makes sense—you sneezed at the exact second you were trying to accomplish something, and we all know how hard it is to get anything done at the exact second you're sneezing. Hearing something (nat 1 on a Listen check), seeing something (nat 1 on a Spot check), holding your hand steady (nat 1 on a Disable Device check), adopting a fighting stance (nat 1 on an init check), swinging a sword (nat 1 on an attack roll)—to me, all of these make sense to say "whoops, I sneezed. Crap."

I often refer to a nat 4 as a "skill check." 4s really, really like me, no matter what set of dice I'm using (I once recorded every d20 roll I made for a month, swapping dice regularly, and 4s came up seriously disproportionately often). There was one fateful night where every single time I would roll a skill check, no matter what die I was using, I would get a 4. Since then, I've taken to referring to 4s as "skill checks," and when one person does something like that long enough, the rest of the group tends to pick up on it.

What are some of yours? Both of mine were about die rolls, but yours don't have to be. I'm interested in hearing about funny or unusual names you have for things, or ways you have of referring to things. I'm not so much just after in-jokes or stories, unless it directly ends up changing your terminology in some way. What have you got for me?

[Averis Vol]

my group uses a one weird terminology. one is "friend" , reason being is we once had a half orc barbarian named kraza who used his "friends" as distractions, when we confronted him he said "you guys are my friends, S H E L D, friends." he couldn't even properly spell shield, so now whenever someone leaves another person hanging out to dry were just being friends.

bout all i can think of right now, its 5:20 in the morning =/

EDIT: remembered another one. whenever anyone rolls a Nat 1 on any sensory check they get stung by a bee in the relative place. fail a spot? stung in the eye, listen? right in the ear. this mostly came about by our ranger rolling 8 1's on all different dice in a row.

[Ryu_Bonkosi]

When ever the druid would fail a check involving senses (spot, search, in some cases survival) the DM (knowing it was her favorite animal) said she saw a fox. This continued for a while until it became a thing. So we commented about seeing foxes when someone botched a spot check.

Another one that happened was during the first session of a campaign, my character got attacked by some mob goons in a tavern. I was rolling terribly on my to-hits to the point that my irritation was rubbing off in character. I cursed at the goons in Draconic (something along the lines of you filthy low life B*******), and because they weren't the brightest bulbs in the shed one of them (failing a sense motive check or some such) yelled "HE'S CASTING A SPELL!" and ran for his life. So whenever I started speaking in Draconic people thought I was an arcane caster about to blow something up. This trend continued for a bit. Until I stopped speaking in Draconic altogether, because having random towns folk running for their lives does not sit will with the guards.

[lord pringle]

From D&D specifically, we have my sound effects for teleport that we've started to use to refer to the spell. Kytzplyxm, for running away. BAMF, for short range teleports. Finally, Vworp (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMlle0gBZ7Q) for anything else.

Outside of D&D, we have the coma turkey. You see it when ever you fail the equivalent of a spot check, also there's a poison called coma that knocks you out in a few seconds, but whenever you miss with a coma applied weapon, it's assumed to hit the turkey.

[Seerow]

In my group "Hail Traveler" and "Here Kitty Kitty Kitty" have become code words for "Kill it with fire, let's get the surprise round right now". Does that count?

[Zaq]

In my group "Hail Traveler" and "Here Kitty Kitty Kitty" have become code words for "Kill it with fire, let's get the surprise round right now". Does that count?

It sure does.

I just remembered another one. Surely we're not the only group to occasionally refer to a charge on the first round of combat as a "Leeroy," are we?

[godryk]

Some years ago, when I still lived in a dorm, we set a really nice group to play Temple of Elemental Evil. Every Thursday we would gather at the library and play till 2 or 3 am. We played for a year but barely managed to finish little more than half of the module after killing like a dozen PCs. After the summer many players left and the group split.

One of the players had a dwarven fighter that lasted a little longer. When he had to interact with different NPCs and enemies, he would always use what he believed it was a dwarven accent. It sounded more a like a thick Russian accent, though. I don't remember very well the situation but we had someone grappled and we wanted some information. He put his axe against the foe's throat and said (aproximate translation): "We could... reach an agrrrreement". We found the whole situation kind of funny and from then on every time some dwarf opens his mouth in our games, we end up impersonating Eastern Europe mobsters and talking about diolomacy will swinging the axe.

EDIT: I'm remembering that playing in a library can become a dangerous game. When I tried the monk I grabbed a copy of the Tao Te Ching (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tao_Te_Ching#Interpretation_and_themes) and used it to melt my friends' brains every time I had the chance.

[SirFredgar]

I just wanted to point out a Nat 1 on a skill check isn't an auto-fail.

On Topic: During one epic long session (about 4 hours into a 6 hour session), our ranger was doing terrible. I mean TERRIBLE. He never rolled higher then a 9 the entire session.

Wellllll.... during one pretty climactic battle we were all praying for him to get a nat 20 on this really tough BBEG. The Ranger says: Aww... man... I rolled a 0.

Everyone skipped a beat while the sheer absurdness of the situation struck us, as we could plainly see a "0" on his die face. Needless to say, I took a look at it and it was actually a weird d10 that had 20 sides (2 each of 0-9). After that anytime anyone overlooked something that should have been obvious, we call it "Rangering"

[Shadowknight12]

A high-intrigue campaign had a hilarious misunderstanding born of group terminology, revolving around the word "kiss." We originally tried to use it to mean "kill" (as in, "he desires to kiss you, my lady" and "they will not let us leave unkissed" was a way to secretly pass information between characters about which NPC was trying to kill us and so on), and eventually we had one of those "bickering couples" who ended up together in the end. The local naive, good-natured NPC priest (who had no idea what 'kissing' meant for our team) at one point uttered (completely serious) "Oh, just kiss each other already!" at the bickering couple. There was a moment of stunned silence before everyone just burst into laughter, much to the priest's confusion.

Other highlights include "We must marry, post-haste/urgently/ASAP!" as a hilarious throwaway gag born from a need to get out of dodge without actually letting the NPCs know we were planning to flee so fast the dust cloud wouldn't settle for days (the original PCs who said it were both aristocrats whose parents were planning on marrying against their will). From then on, whenever the group had to flee, the excuse was that two party members suddenly realised they HAD to marry. Somewhere else. Right now. In modern-day games (like nWoD) this was usually accompanied with the word "Vegas" somewhere.

We also had "witching" as a synonym for "screwing over" (born from an NPC witch that managed, quite cleverly, to utterly WRECK each and every party member without ever having to roll initiative) and "That's not a wraith" whenever someone suspected an NPC to be something it wasn't (born from a crafty DM who tried to make a homebrewed monster pass off as one of the MANY incorporeal undead out there, and I was SURE it was a wraith, kept insisting it was so, and when the creature in question grew to Huge size and deployed several save-or-dies of varying effects, the only comment that rose from the stunned silence was one of the other player's "That's not a wraith.")

Then we had a player (who played a gnome bard, obviously) who insisted on using the word "murder" to replace other verbs in the most inappropriate way possible. There came a point when she had to use ANY word other than murder to speak of murder. It was... funny, actually. :smalltongue:

[Swooper]

Whenever someone rolls a natural 2 on an attack roll, he "kills a crow". I can't remember how it started, but it sure was a handy in-joke when the evil necromancer tried to escape with his last hit point by turning into a crow and flying away. :smallbiggrin:

Note that this applies especially when in an environment where there are absolutely no crows around, like underground or out at sea.

I'm sure we have others, but I can't remember them off the top of my head...

[Vegan Zombie]

I often refer to a nat 4 as a "skill check."

Lol do you happen to be playing Elan the bard?

*sneaking into the bandit camp* HEY GUYS I ROLLED A 4! A 4 ON MY HIDE CHECK!