Poor word choices when describing:


Advice

1 to 50 of 74 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | next > last >>

2 people marked this as a favorite.

Last night I told the PC wizard "You feel the foul taint of Kyuss".
He of course replied that he wasn't about to feel Kyuss' taint, especially if it's foul. It brought the session to a halt and the players to tears.

I'd like to hear other descriptions I shouldn't use in an attempt to avoid breaking the mood.

Lantern Lodge

There is no practical way to prevent players from perceiving double entendres. Plus, to many players, things like this are the best part of playing tabletop games.

Shadow Lodge

1 person marked this as a favorite.

Deadmoon has it spot on. This is the reason I play these games.


I'll echo Deadmoon and Quath here, though I'll add the caveat that I do understand not every table operates the same way; for many tables these sorts of unexpected double entendres are a major portion of where the humor of the session comes from. Not only that, but actively trying to avoid any perceived double entendres could very easily sap the fun out of GMing. If at all within your table's personality I'd suggest you laugh, then move on.

Liberty's Edge

Depending on my mood, if a GM is actively trying to avoid using certain words, I will either A) find ways to insert said words into a conversation, or B) Find ways to make new 'safe' words 'unsafe'.

Naturally this requires a group used to mocking and joking with each other. Otherwise, much social awkwardness ensues.


Lopke wrote:

Depending on my mood, if a GM is actively trying to avoid using certain words, I will either A) find ways to insert said words into a conversation, or B) Find ways to make new 'safe' words 'unsafe'.

Naturally this requires a group used to mocking and joking with each other. Otherwise, much social awkwardness ensues.

I have to avoid saying "Night falls, and.." because one of my players will inevitably counter with "I get out of the way."


GM "You come to a fork in the road."
Me "I pick it up."


1 person marked this as a favorite.

I accidentally the whole wizard


1 person marked this as a favorite.

"You heard the town cryer"
"I give him a hanky."


2 people marked this as a favorite.

We had a GM who described a horse's attack as a "rear and plunge", which, of course, we all heard as "rear end plunge". That became a running joke.

Sovereign Court

rather PG-13:
Playing Pathfinder a year or so ago, and the combat against some huge beast is going onto the umpteenth round - it was one of those insane-amount-of-hit-points, but easy to hit and doesn't hit hard type monsters. My big bad barbarian winds up, and meta-gaming I ask the GM if I should prepare a full attack, and the GM says, "I think one more hit and he'll go down."

Without ever engaging my brain-to-mouth filter I say, "I think I had a girlfriend like that."

Please note, I do not and will not ever condone any type of violence of that nature, but at the time it left the table in tears.

Sovereign Court RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8

1 person marked this as a favorite.

another PG-13 spoiler

Spoiler:
I traumatized my niece and nephew at 1st level with a ghoul. Their friend got ghoul fever and almost died.

Second level rolls around and the nephew's character took the bite rage power. He's fighting zombies and afraid to use his bite attack for fear of catching Zombie rot or something. One of the other players is trying to encourage him. He said, "You can spit it out, you don't have to swallow!"

Fortunately we all made our will saves against me having to deal with having my 12 year old niece asking her mom, "What was funny about that?"

Grand Lodge

Example:

GM: You turn the corner, and begin to slide into a narrow canyon, with rough sides. It's moist, and smells of dead fish.

Player: Am I wearing protection?

We still joke about that, even after 4 years.

Scarab Sages

Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

My group's version of "Night falls and..." is the players making crashing sounds.

I've also had a goblin PC urinate on another goblin PC who was on fire.


The door is ajar...

The room is bare...


We had a DM back in 2nd edition that wasn't very good with pronouncing words that aren't in the common vernacular. In one session he was on a roll and we'd corrected him on several. Then we got to the room that was lit by several burning braziers along the walls. He pronounced it "brassieres." That was the end of the session. We couldn't stop laughing long enough to breathe and he was too ticked off to continue.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

'Taint gonna happen.


The sad, or happy I guess depending on your table, thing is that this game can descend into entendre entirely too quickly. Something as simple as, "He unsheathes his longsword," can send the wrong group, or the right group depending on your table, down the unrecoverable road to perversion. Heaven forbid somebody brandishes a shortsword; their masculinity will be called into question for eternity.


Simple as it may be, but we had a great deal of fun at a game where our Paladin with a Big Cat animal companion expressed her love for her pussy.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
MendedWall12 wrote:
The sad, or happy I guess depending on your table, thing is that this game can descend into entendre entirely too quickly. Something as simple as, "He unsheathes his longsword," can send the wrong group, or the right group depending on your table, down the unrecoverable road to perversion. Heaven forbid somebody brandishes a shortsword; their masculinity will be called into question for eternity.

It's hard to talk about rods, wands, and staves without eliciting some snickering.

Grand Lodge

Metamagic Rod of Extend usually gets snickers.


2 people marked this as a favorite.
jocundthejolly wrote:
It's hard to talk about rods, wands, and staves without eliciting some snickering.

Especially for our table, ye olde wand of viscid globs. Someone at our table has to comment on it every time it comes up in conversation.

Another wand story was when I as a DM described the effect of a wand of detect evil as "vibrating and glowing blue" whenever it was activated and actively detecting evil. One time I accidentally described it as "vibrating and blowing glue" and forever after I would get tongue-tied trying not to describe it like that. I still get messed up trying to describe it otherwise.


jocundthejolly wrote:
It's hard to talk about rods, wands, and staves without eliciting some snickering.

Right, that's exactly what I'm talking about. This game seems to lend itself so well to double entendre that you'd almost think it was part of the design process.

Lantern Lodge

2 people marked this as a favorite.

"You see a barred window"
"I open it"
"You can't open it, it's barred"
"But I'm a bard"


"A guy flying around spraying large ropes of sticky white fluid on gigantic phallic objects" was an... interesting description of Spider Man.

Seriously, you can't avoid it. There is always SOME moron who goes into laughing cramps about how someone cocks their crossbow or sheathes their sword. Best DM advice, don't adjust. Just ask someone who keeps doing this not to continue, with calming down times in another room if necessary.


3 people marked this as a favorite.
Sissyl wrote:

"A guy flying around spraying large ropes of sticky white fluid on gigantic phallic objects" was an... interesting description of Spider Man.

Seriously, you can't avoid it. There is always SOME moron who goes into laughing cramps about how someone cocks their crossbow or sheathes their sword. Best DM advice, don't adjust. Just ask someone who keeps doing this not to continue, with calming down times in another room if necessary.

Pathfinder: proving you're never too old for a timeout. =P

Dark Archive

4 people marked this as a favorite.

I have to double- and triple-check NPC names with my players - like kids on the playground, if there's an inappropriate nickname suggested, they'll jump on it. I was running a conversion of an old Dark Sun intro module last night when one slipped through.

The fact that the characters started off as nearly naked slaves probably affected their reaction when they were introduced to the dwarf elder Baranus ...

Of course, I had spent the previous hour gleefully describing a combat in which two of the three PCs were repeatedly injected with eggs by a giant wasp queen. When the dwarf kept making his saves, he joked that it must have been a legitimate attack, "because the body has a way of shutting those things down."


2 people marked this as a favorite.

My group is obsessed with this:

DM: "You enter the room. Across the way you see a door that is ajar."

My players: "Well which is it? A door or a jar?!?!?"

Groans


1 person marked this as a favorite.

Once upon a time, a character of mine was trying to sell a magic rod to some traders.

So, in my infinte wisdom, I described it as "my rod of interesting qualities."

I have never lived it down.


2 people marked this as a favorite.

There is also nothing quite like saying, with complete conviction, "This man has no taint!"


One of the great challenges when running Legend of the Five Rings ...


I actually like those kinds of things in my games, they make for really great and memorable moments.

For mature audiences:

A bit of background first:

Player A: Old campaign as an elven female mystic theurge and plays a half-orc female inquisitor in our current campaign.

Player B: Old campaign plays a LE human oracle and the current GM for our campaign.

In the older campaign, Player B found a Djinn in a bottle, but it wasn't just any kind of Djinn, it was a pleasure Djinn. He ordered the Djinn to pleasure Player A took her virginity.

During our last session we met up with a traveling circus and one of the members of the circus was this big half-ulfen strongman taking an immediate liking to Player A. They chatted it up with the strongman throwing out a bunch of innuendos along the way and finally a bet came to be with the half-ulfen stating that if he won at arm wrestling he'd get a night with the inquisitor and if she won then she could have his greatsword. The deal was struck and they arm wrestled, the strongman won.

So Player A went along with it and they went back to the strongman's wagon and did the deed. We kind of joked around about how this was the second time Player B had stolen the virginity of Player A's characters. One of the others at the table said that it wouldn't have happened if Player A had been playing a male this time around and without missing a beat I piped up with a line from Deliverance saying, "Oh yeah he would have! The strongman would have just said, 'my you have a pretty mouth' and taken advantage of Player A again!" The table erupted in laughter.

Now this wasn't a serious moment like what the OP had, but just the same it was a great and memorable time at the table for us.


3 people marked this as a favorite.

My group is made up of 40+ year olds. Stuff like that will still make us stop and act like goofy 12 year olds.

Edit: A thesaurus can be your best friend.

Edit part deux: My Magus character has a rooster as his familiar. It's a pretty big one, so you can imagine the absolute lunacy my group of "mature adults" has when my Magus and his large c**k go charging into battle.


Dotting. :D


My group will forever remember the brutal Tarrlok the "Bater".


In my most recently started campaign I have a witch PC and they are about to encounter a male witch NPC, the NPC has a snake as his familiar. This thread is giving me some great ideas for the introduction of that particular animal companion; though, if anyone wants to throw out some possibilities I'll sure listen.


Once, during Midnight Mauler...:

(we were trying to find a way to reason with the guy turned into a werewolf without resorting to conflict)
Druid: "We can talk to his ex-lover. Maybe he can help?"
Bard: "I dunno... The guy was a bit of a dick."
Rogue: "Maybe that's exactly what he needs!"
Everybody: "..."


DungeonmasterCal wrote:

My group is made up of 40+ year olds. Stuff like that will still make us stop and act like goofy 12 year olds.

Edit: A thesaurus can be your best friend.

Edit part deux: My Magus character has a rooster as his familiar. It's a pretty big one, so you can imagine the absolute lunacy my group of "mature adults" has when my Magus and his large c**k go charging into battle.

I'm in my mid 30's and that part deux made me nearly spit out my water when I read it.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

Word choice lessons learned by gaming (mostly DM’ing) while exhausted:

Double vs. Both: when one has Spell Penetration & Greater Spell Penetration one should never say “I have the double penetration feats”.
On Rods & Might: I was once forced to come up with an NPC “the Lord of Rodly Might” based on 2am DM’ing. I am fortunate that I’ve not had to utilize the NPC in more than 15 years now… stupid “you can’t take it back” rule died that night.
Named Spells: when witnessing conversation about the predilections of Greyhawk wizards, the only trump to the Bigby’s various hand spells was the observation that Mordenkainen’s Sword was slightly "too large" to work with Mordenkainen’s Lucubration (often deliberately mispronounced).
-TimD


1 person marked this as a favorite.
tribeof1 wrote:
...I was running a conversion of an old Dark Sun intro module last night when one slipped through.

A tee hee.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

"Morning comes"


4 people marked this as a favorite.
Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber; Starfinder Charter Superscriber

A female elf sorceress as she casts a personal spell, "I move to the corner of the room and touch myself." The rest of the males in the party stop down speechless as her charisma is in the high twenties.

There are also the times, as mentioned previously, where someone says, "I whip out my rod!"

Why is it always the innuendoes and double entendres?


Imperious3 wrote:
My group will forever remember the brutal Tarrlok the "Bater".

Was he a master?


4 people marked this as a favorite.

For the record, I would totally feel Kyuss' taint. I love that band.

We had one session where a couple of vampire spawn snuck up on the party while they were camped next to a river, but since I had a couple of players for whom English was not their first language, they misunderstood, and thought they were vampire prawns. It was very confusing at first, because they couldn't understand how the prawns got out of the river. Eventually, I just rolled with it, and added the vampire template to some sharks. The prawns were so desperately hungry that they'd beached themselves just to pull someone into the river. It turned out to be a much more interesting encounter.


Recently I was part of one event where our parties female half-elf ranger was grappled by a shambling mound. Naturally comments on tentacle monsters come up.

It didn't really help things when one of our wizards decided to cast Grease on the half-elf and quote "move behind her".


A spell called Burning Gaze + everyone on a sugar low + it being kinda late...

Grand Lodge

Penetrating Strike(Injection Spear).


Third Mind wrote:

Recently I was part of one event where our parties female half-elf ranger was grappled by a shambling mound. Naturally comments on tentacle monsters come up.

It didn't really help things when one of our wizards decided to cast Grease on the half-elf and quote "move behind her".

This is inevitably the comparison drawn when Black Tentacles comes up.

This picture on the SRD page does little to help matters.


1 person marked this as a favorite.

The online comic The Order of the Stick" has the spell "Evard's Spiked Tentacles Of Forceful Intrusion"

It has become my players all time favorite spell...Heavy Sigh!


3 people marked this as a favorite.

DM: The farmer gives you a sour look and says, "You want to spend the night here, you'll do some o' the work."

Player: Alright, tell us what you need done.

DM: The farmer goes to the barn. When he returns, he has a pair of hoes... [/headdesk] Nevermind. Just fast-forward to tomorrow.

Player: No way! We've got a job to do!

1 to 50 of 74 << first < prev | 1 | 2 | next > last >>
Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Pathfinder First Edition / Advice / Poor word choices when describing: All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.