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You know what I'm talking about. The stereotypical "rocks fall everyone dies" to the "Gazeebo devours you" type stuff. Things that your group falls back on as a funny joke or reference.
Mine has a few:
Any time something calamitous occurs the consequences always occur to an old lady who just so happened to be there. Including: Rollinig boulder crushing her, a myriad of wayward arrows and siege weaponry obliterating her, and my favorite is her being mauled by multiple leopards released by the PC's from a gladiatorial fight.
My group has had a few, although in-jokes seem to arise more often from our WoD games than our D&D+ ones. Our in-jokes came mostly in the form of euphemisms.
"Ding, pizza rolls are done" was an expression for a foolish/silly idea or statement.
"Give elder blood to the hamster" was code for an unwise decision.
"Indubitably" was a sarcastic form of agreement.
Hand gestures were a common theme as well, often with later references for laughs.
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"But how will he breathe?"
When party members die in the field, our groups frequently have to seek out NPC help for a raise/resurrection. We tend to end up with little or no divine casters. One of the early game sessions that my wife participated in, one of the PC's died and his character was a fairly large individual. Would have been cumbersome to carry, to say the least. The party had not bothered with horses or wagons.
So someone suggests they squeeze the body into a bag of holding. Everyone stops, thinks, shrugs, and agrees. Except my wife, who gets this look of concern I've seen before...
Me: "What's the problem hon?"
Wife: "Well, ok, a bag of holding...it's like Dr Who's TARDIS, right, only it doesn't have things like light or life support. It's just a bag that's bigger on the inside?"
M: "That's the gist of it, yes. It's called an extra-dimensional space."
W: "Ok. So, um, we can put his body into this bag and the bag won't be any heavier and he'll be protected from crows and other scavengers."
M: "Yes..."
W: "But how will he breathe?"
M: "......"
Rest of group, nearly simultaneously: "He's already dead!"
My wife was suitably embarrassed. Somehow she completely missed the part that the character had, in fact, died. In her head he was merely unconscious or otherwise incapacitated. However, it now lives on, no matter what game is being played at the time.
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My group has "Pulling a Garth." , which comes from one of my previous characters, Garth Rogar, human ranger.
Garth was a very unsuccessful ladies' man. In 17 levels he only seduced 1 woman, and every time an attractive female forced us to make a save, Garth failed, which the group agreed was because he was too busy flirting.
So now whenever we have to make a save when fighting an attractive female it's "Don't pull a Garth,' or "Spirit of Garth Rogar, don't haunt me."
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"I throw my spear, WHY DID I DO THAT?!" Our goblins and kobolds have a tendency to throw their melee weapons when panicking.
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The running joke in a WoD game I was in for a while was a character named Snowy. Snowy was a drug dealer who'd been peddling this fantastic new drug some guy had given him... that just happened to be causing people to undergo spontaneous combustion. This was before I joined the game, but the GM was my housemate, so I was listening in.
Long story short, the players took a liking to Snowy during the course of their investigation, and started hanging out with him socially. Until one fateful day, he managed to get unbelievably high, took some of the spontaneous combustion drug, and that was the end of Snowy the friendly dealer... Every now and then, a player that was in that group will randomly say "Man, remember Snowy? Such a great guy. How high did he get?", and any others from the new group will respond with "SO HIGH!"... Then they stop for a moment, all look really sad, and yell "SNOOOOOOOOOWY!"
Other than that we don't have too many running jokes. Only ones I can think of are from my East Texas University game. I guess that has some.
- One of the main NPCs is literally never seen without food in hand, and whenever they call him he's either eating or cooking.
- One of the players can be really awkward when it comes to explaining things, and managed to make himself sound like a complete racist when he was trying to talk about racial issues in the legal system... with a black detective.
- Another player was trying to describe the effects of a supernatural painting that was causing intense but short lived feelings of love/lust in people who viewed it to campus security... and blurted out that it was emitting some kind of "love field". The other players now regularly remind him to watch out for love fields.
- Yet another player has the filthy rich edge, and is on good terms with every single authority figure in the town, because he's figured out the best way to deal with them is to just hand out bottles of scotch. So every time something weird happens and he needs to come up with a way to smooth things over, he stops at the bottleshop first, leading to the recurring question "Is this a one or two bottle situation?"
- The group as a whole is also really, REALLY bad at NOT summoning demons. They botched a ritual roll for a simple speak with dead spell incredibly badly, and I had to draw some cards to figure out effect. First pull, Joker. Summon random demon. Draw cards for demon traits. Get an imp sized demon, that's not so bad... draw for abilities, get another Joker, check the rules... Okay, demon has a bunch of subservient demons. Roll dice. Get maximum number of demons. Cue players running screaming from the gymnasium while a horde of imps burst into the night throwing fireballs and cackling... To top it off, the next session they found a book and just read it, resulting in another, rather more handsome, demon being summoned and offering them two wishes in exchange for his freedom. He now hangs around sleeping his way through the entire student body and faculty of the university while waiting for the player to decide if he wants to use the wishes or not, and occasionally just appears at the site of whatever they're investigating with someone new hanging off his arm to see what they're up to.
Most of ours have nothing to do with gaming and everything to do with our day to day lives... as such, most cannot be repeated here.
One exception:
"So we let them fix things and THEN kill them?"- An actual quote by a friend of mine. Said right in front of the hostages in question (we were Bad People). Who of course, immediately tried to escape and were mowed down by our sentry, meaning we had to fix our own problems. Now we use this line whenever we've just said something blisteringly stupid in-character which is going to make our lives a lot harder.
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"Crinos can't make this worse." - From a WoD game where they played werewolves. Before my time. I don't know the story; every time I ask, they give each other embarrassed looks and then assure me that, yes, Crinos made it way worse.
"Skyrim guard time." - East Texas University game. My character owned a pistol and snuck it on campus. One point, during the campaign, she had it with her while they were sneaking around the campus at night, trying to dodge security. At one point, they need to cover their tracks for what they've done... so my character tries to fire a warning shot so they can play it off as just an armed burglar and NOT the students. Thanks to a botched roll and the following rolls... She instead shot him in the knee. Another character, when summarizing later, said I "made him into a Skyrim guard." Ever since then, this has been a codephrase for a badly botched roll that hurt an NPC.
Let's see...
"Max Hit Points" - This started after the party rested at one point and the DM told us that we were at max hit points. For whatever reason this led to a conversation about how 'Max Hit Points' was the best inn ever and now whenever we roll into a new town (or we're really hurt/tapped on resources) we joke about looking for a Max Hit Points to stay at.
"I'm Gonna Ride It" - Code for 'ridiculous idea'. The story in question involved a bard; first deciding to run off and attempt to ride one of the large beetles we were fighting. Did I mention that they had a paralytic bite and the bard was carrying lots of the equivalent to alchemist's fire? About the time he goes to throw the lot of it, the arm he was holding them with gets paralyzed and the whole mess drops right at his feet. The rest of the party hears a loud 'KABOOM' about the time we finish off the beetles we'd been fighting and we quickly discover the bard lying in the center of a crater, dead beetles and burnt grass all around, weakly waving the one arm that hadn't been paralyzed.
"Do I Have Stupid Written on my Forehead?" - A catchphrase from the bard from the previous story. After the 'I'm gonna ride it' incident, the bard did wake up with something on his forehead. Except it wasn't 'stupid' it was 'dunce', written by the party cleric during the night.
There's one or two others but they're a little on the crude side for the forums I think :P
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"Would Mr. Jefferson jog your memory?"
...any time the PCs try to bribe someone.
A while ago, we were playing a GURPS modern-day game set in New York. The PCs were trying to trace the movements of an informant who'd gone missing. Anyway, they were pretty sure he was holed in a particular neighborhood in the Bronx and were canvasing the neighborhood. They were questioning a drug dealer who usually worked a particular corner when this exchange took place:
Player: I show him the photo and ask, "Have you seen this guy around here?"
GM: He glances at the photo and shakes his head. "No, I ain't seen nobody like that."
Player: I hold the photo in front of his face and say, "C'mon, take a good look. You sure you haven't seen him?"
GM: Rolls dice He pushes the photo away and says, "I said no. Now get the f**k outtta here!"
Player: I pull out my wallet and take out a bill. "Would Mr. Jefferson jog your memory?"
GM: Makes quizzical face ...Um, you're trying to bribe him with a two-dollar bill?!
Other players *laughter*
Player: Wait! "Jackson!" I meant, "Jackson!"
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Something I've said quite a few times when I roll a wash in our group's Vampire the Masquerade chronicle. (Clarification: My actual favorite is Jayne.)
...I've said this too for botching. Keep in mind, my Vampire character is an eleven foot tall half-ton Gargoyle with Strength 4, Protean 2 equivalent, and Potence 5, so when he screws up, people *die.*
From a really weird video one of our friends showed us before a game. We use this from time to time when someone rolls poorly. ("Okay, initiatives. Sir Geoffrey Longsword got 17, MageBot 3000 got a 12, Sir Runsa Lott got a 15, Urist McDorf got a 13 somehow, and the bad guys bought the peach rings. You go first.")
From a poorly-thought-out game of Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, where the DM said right before a combat with undead that "Undead don't just pop up out of nowhere." We use this when we fight undead.
From our Legacy of Fire game that the same DM clearly didn't read the encounter. (He was playing for us to lose.) Guess what we say when we fight final bosses now.
One other DM runs great games, but some of the Pathfinder Society modules he ran for us had some badly-edited flavor text he read as it was printed (as above.) Except for "kobloid;" he legit thought that's how you say "kobold."
We needed the name of a bar, Cityscape had a table to roll off of to get a tavern name. This was the result. Guess what has franchises all over our campaign setting? (Not this place, thank Armok.)
An NPC in our Vampire game. Think Teddy Roosevelt if he were the only Tremere on the planet who didn't have a single dot of Thaumaturgy.
Oh right, I forgot to mention it but potatoes have ascended to meme status after a riddle's answer was potatoes.
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Any time a character kills a bird creature (harpy, roc, dire corbi) with a fire spell, its corpse automatically turns into a delicious stuffed turkey that they can eat to regain health.
"the Curse of Zuan" is referenced every single time someone rolls a nat20 followed by a critfail. this is because Zuan's player manages to be both spectacular and terrible, often with the same action. The very first example of this was the ranger, Zuan, catching the alchemist's firebomb thrown to him and applying it mid-battle (with an acrobatics nat20), followed by him rolling a critfail when he turned to fire it at the boss. The arrow left the bow, but the bomb dropped at his feet. Since then he has managed to fall off a cliff but land with grace, be dropped to 0 by a reefclaw but dodge the death frenzy ability (while prone!), and shoot himself with his own arrows many, many times - all while also beheading dragons with single swipes, backflipping up walls, and being the all-around DPS, tank, and skillmonkey. It's high or low, no inebetween, no matter what character this guy plays.
Whenever we fight goblins, they always hit each other on critfails. Any time a goblin dies, they have a 50/50 chance of either farting or catching fire as they hit the ground, regardless of what else is happening in the battle. One time this prompted the paladin//unicorn player to cry out "Why are they so flammable!" in in-character horror, and her voice was so perfect at the time that it's just become a permanent feature.
'Mmm, cornflakes.' --from a Toon game we were in. It was just an ordinary daily opening. It's now passed on to ... well, every game we've played since then. Even Pathfinder. At least one of us will respond to a breakfast scene with this.
So in addition to sunrods in mouths (not an euphemism) and the two healsticks fiasco I am now apparently the banana king.
"Twang! Whoosh! Thud!" has become the sound effect for any trap we trip or spell-created pit someone falls into. The origin of this rather specific sound effect is Souls for the Smuggler's Shiv, Part 1 of Serpent's Skull. My Half-orc Ranger managed to miss (seeing) every vine/rope snare laid across a trail on that whole damn island! Thus:
Twang! vine/rope is tripped.
Whoosh! PC is pulled rapidly through the air.
Thud! PC smacks into a tree and hangs upside down.
In one of our groups we had a very specific name that if someone would say it would signal the entire group to immediately start attacking. I can't remember what that name was for the life of me. It's been too long since we played. I believe there was a fish part in the last name though.
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"This place got Calored." We had a wizard named Calor in a long running campaign who had a bad habit of accidentally causing complete devastation to things. He rolled a crit on a spell vs a demon, pulled a crit card that said it was banishment to a random plane, and we randomized it and he went to celestia. He also caused a demi-plane to merge into the plane of shadow causing negative energy to basically wipe everything out. Now, whenever the group walks into a place that is in ruins someone mutters that.
We also carried over a joke from one of the early edition megadungeons(Might have been tomb of horrors) where someone looked into a room and didn't see anything, then walked inside and got pounced on by a big cat that was hiding in hole directly above the door. Whenever checking out a dangerous area the group will say they "Check for panthers" by peeking around the door before they walk in.
Are you sure it was channeling negative energy and not pulling on a rope?
"They [NPC] have a name! Get 'em!"
(From the sheer number of named NPCs who have needed killing over the years.)
"Is he wearing a hat? God I hate hats..."
(From a particularly memorable NPC who used a hat of disguise to tremendous effect, derailing the party for several sessions while his plans came to fruition. As a result, haberdashery, like having a name, has become a capital offense.)
*gesture meant to indicate deflecting an arrow*
(Whenever a ranged attack misses - because no one can be sure if you have Deflect Arrows or they're just a bad shot...)
In our recent Reign of Winter game it has been decided that Giant, as a language, sounds suspiciously like Swedish. As a result, whenever we happen to be dealing with trolls, they all greet us with a hearty "Bork bork bork."
I like that! We've been pretending that Giant is just Common, but IN ALL CAPS.
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We have a few.
1. "Ow, I've got something in my eye!" means you rolled a 1.
2. "You spleenerated him." means you made a really good damage roll or critical hit, and thus stabbed your victim right through the spleen. Our fighter in an early D&D3e campaign started this one.
3. "I take one step forward to reduce the range penalty." Translation: you're just metagaming. We had a player once who metagamed a lot, and on one occasion got my character shot in the head by announcing he was taking one step forward to reduce the range penalty so he could attack the NPC - who was holding the gun to my PC's head. In his mind, one step wasn't actually moving. The gunman didn't agree. (My PC had regeneration, so being shot in the head wasn't that serious for her, but still.)
4. "Smoke comes out his blaster hole." He's dead, Jim. This comes from a Star Wars campaign where the GM would often say that when an NPC was killed in a firefight.
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"Guys, we're in a ****ing WHALE."
One of my players tipped a few too many back during the game by this point and had a hard time accepting the situation that the party found themselves in. So of course we tease him about it any time it comes up. (Like when I was at Disneyland and went on the boat ride with Monstro.)
Many. Oh so many. Some highlights:
"I take out my muffin."
"He's dead all over the floor."
"I'm rolling to seduce the _____."
"I'm adding that to my inventory."
"I name him... Squish!"
"I rolled a 26 to detect pixies."
"Hey, I am a god, remember?"
So, in my college gaming group, during a Scion game, one of my buddies figured out how to make a demigod (Scion is a game where everyone plays Demigods) whose divine power was entirely based off how good he could throw things, a character he called the Chuckman. Later, that same person ran a superhero game in Savage Worlds where one of the background characters was Chuckman, whose superpower was the ability to throw things really good (he was the Superman-equivalent of the setting, and managed to defeat Richard Nixon by throwing the Watergate Hotel at him). Later on, I ran a 13th Age game where they encountered a guard named Captain Hyrum Chuckman, was was really good at throwing things.
So, whenever one of us runs a game now, it's always assumed that somewhere in the world is a guy named Chuckman who is really good at throwing things.
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Oh where to begin
We have a player who has a nasty habit of rolling 1s and hitting party members with her ranged weapons, including hits that resulted in death. This started with a dwarven cleric with a throwing hammer, so she's no longer allowed to play any of those things. She's currently a ranger and everyone is afraid to stand between her and the enemy.
We also joke about "swinging on the dragon". Her husband was laying on the ground dying, and a single heal from her could have allowed to run out of the way of a giant rolling ball trap. Instead we're told "but I can kill the dragon!". She was our healer, missed the dragon, and the trap crushed her husband. Needless to say, any time he has the choice to help her or go on the offensive, we tell him to swing on the dragon.
I also now hear "But I'm a ****ing demon" (Dogma, for those who don't know it) anytime I don't think something all the way through. In a 4E campaign, I showed up late one night. Nobody would tell me where we were, so in a close call during combat I transformed into a demon as a warlock to gain regeneration and escape. My DM looks at me and asks
"Ummm... how does that work, do you actually turn into a demon?"
"Yea it's pretty cool".
"Alright. The paladin you've been travelling with this whole campaign hasn't actually seen you do that, and he's pissed that you did such a horrible thing in a temple to his god."
The paladin quickly took me down, followed by an ally who was turned away so only saw the paper in attack a demon, turns around and crits me to death. It was hilarious, and beautiful, and probably the only I ever thought "An ally, who OOC knew he was attacking me, just brutally slaughtered me off the direction of a shortly known ally NPC... that was awesome!"
There's too many others to list here, but they are almost all not just "Oh remember that funny time", but "Oh remember that funny time you were incredibly stupid and it ended really badly?"
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THE BIG RED BUTTON
The party is looking for this ancient temple trying to find it before the bad guys do, so that BBEG cannot be released from its magical trap.
We find it, find the chamber with this mechanimagical device that traps the BBEG, we destroy the controls, no way they can be operated ever again, we burn it, kick it, smash it, we throw everything at it.
Turns out the bad guys had beaten us to the punch, the BBEG is on the loose, and we have no way to put it back in its magical prison.
We still laugh about it, and have to retell the story if there are new players.
CRAF!
A hold-over from my first Pathfinder game session (which was also my first TRPG session ever) the rest of us were complete newbies as well, with the exception of the GM (who had played, but never run a game). We had decided to play Serpent's Skull.
Minor spoilers: The first encounter is with a bunch of giant crabs. But the GM had miscalculated their HP and AC somehow so our 6 man party was fighting a group of 6 crabs and missing every. single. shot. It took us nearly 3 hours to get through our first ever combat, and the one thing that stuck in our memories was that on the Roll20 map, every single crab was labeled as CRAF (a reference to this video, by the by, though probably more to the then-new Game Grumps episode that had mentioned it). To this day all members of the group that still play RPGs refer to all giant crabs (and any crabs that are combatants) as CRAFS. If in text, it must be in all caps. If in speech, yes it must be shouted (even if the rest of the sentence is perfectly calm).
EX: On the beach, you notice a shaking. From the ground rises a bunch of giant CRAFS. The CRAFS look hostile and click their pincers loudly.
The running joke in a WoD game I was in for a while was a character named Snowy. Snowy was a drug dealer who'd been peddling this fantastic new drug some guy had given him... that just happened to be causing people to undergo spontaneous combustion. This was before I joined the game, but the GM was my housemate, so I was listening in.
Long story short, the players took a liking to Snowy during the course of their investigation, and started hanging out with him socially. Until one fateful day, he managed to get unbelievably high, took some of the spontaneous combustion drug, and that was the end of Snowy the friendly dealer... Every now and then, a player that was in that group will randomly say "Man, remember Snowy? Such a great guy. How high did he get?", and any others from the new group will respond with "SO HIGH!"... Then they stop for a moment, all look really sad, and yell "SNOOOOOOOOOWY!"
I'm guessing he took the second part of Snowflame's name a little too seriously?
Whenever a player can't make it to the game, we always say his character has jury duty.
Our Serpent's Skull group has a ton of inside jokes, each one the product of terrible, terrible banter.
First, one of the characters, a cleric of the sun god, wanted to monetize water. On an island. She sees nothing wrong with this plan.
The second one requires a bit of context. We'd just found a man poisoned by a snakebite, but we realized it had happened prior to our shipwreck. Somehow, this translated to the cleric determining that time-traveling snakes were to blame. Time-traveling snakes are now believed to be the villains of this adventure.
"Jorts"—for those not in the know, jeans crossed with shorts—are normal dwarven jeans appropriated by humans from dwarven culture. Dwarves are now attempting to reclaim the traditional dwarven clothing once again. I should note that our party is essentially all-dwarf.
Ekubus—a water mephit, for those who don't know—is referred to as "the snotgoblin". It has been speculated that his two ears are just two more noses. Look, if you'd seen the image, you would understand why.
We use Roll20, and several of us, particularly the cleric's player, love to draw on the map. Enclosed are some samples (the "I Am A Human" drawing is from another game in the same group, where the cleric's player was playing a goblin seeking to infiltrate a human cult by talking about how much they loved colonialism).
Due to a mixup in map art, jungle goats are foxes, and foxes are jungle goats.
Whenever eagles are summoned, Birdemic gets a reference.
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Kender. Everywhere. They don't belong.
Maligned politicians from the US, the UK, and Australia.
Hamilton references, everywhere.
This song and/or this song playing whenever a character dies.
The "Otterman Empire," and the shapeshifter PC killing urchins (sea urchins) while in the shape of a mutated otter monster. Also, invasive giant pugs, originally summoned by PCs, upsetting the ecosystem balance in a nearby jungle.
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Hmm, any alchemist i make is required to have burn ointment available (for free) upon request due to too many of their allies' gaining the Flame Tested Survivor feat.
The best, most scientifically tested, way to find out if there is a kraken in your party's general vicinity is to yell "Release the kraken!" where your GM can hear you.
Any time you are trying to figure out the depth of a hole the best way is to jump in. Even if you have painstakingly measured it out by throwing rocks down the hole and waiting for the sound of the rock hitting the bottom, then having characters with different perception bonuses listen and narrowing down the range using the perception DC rules. For one thing, the GM is the final arbiter of the distance and he doesn't have to tell you the truth, for another it always wakes up the gelatinous cubes at the bottom no matter how far it was.
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Oh, right, the kender thing. So, see, our group has a running joke (or a joke Gark and I tell that everyone else hates) that while kender as a race do not exist, there is an enormous family of halflings called the Kender Klan who behave exactly like kender. Gark and I currently have two kender characters in one campaign: Jim Kender and Dick Kender. We are "cousins". The weirdest part, however, is the existence of non-halfling members of the family, like Dick Kender's orangutan animal companion—Jim Kender's "brother". Jim, an occultist, also has a lantern archon he calls upon (and remember, the occultist's chosen outsider always resents this summoning) whom he calls "Ray Kender".
Whenever cannibals come up, we have to ask whether they're technically cannibals if they're eating other races (since we usually play nonhuman parties).
The following italicized text is from another game—a Spell RPG game that up until recently was entirely noncanon.
The Gorilla King is Brother Ape, from George of the Jungle. The city of Usaro is referred to as Ape Mountain. The Worldbreaker has been stolen by the same party that created the pug menace, and is now flying through the air towards Eleder, borne by thousands of tiny wings. The Gorilla King has an adopted brother named Jort of the Jungle.
The thing is, remember the pugs Gark just mentioned? They were created by the Spell RPG group. So exactly how canon that game is has been thrown into uncertainty ever since Gark had the giant pugs appear in our other, serious game. They nearly wiped us out. Not even joking. It was one of the most brutal encounters we've ever run.
With the current campaign? Whenever anyone points out that the paladin should've fallen a long time ago.
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"Hey, I've got an idea. Why don't we split up so we can cover more ground.... with our blood!"
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"Talrune's stroll"
My own 5e group has a character in a more diehard campiegn in which character are dying left and right. Except for our Dragonborn Sorcerer with the worst stat rolls of the whole party three times over. The party as a whole averages three sheets per person and his is a first character.
That Sorcerer by the name Talrune had somehow convinced a (relatively) friendly Sucubus to be his wife and not kill him for sun-snu. When their child was layed (The GM decided that the child would be in an egg) the egg went through a rather ridiculous mishandling that resulted in it being launched out of town.
Talrune is a very proud Character and decided he would retrieve his child from the death forest (as we had dubbed the woods in which every encounter to this point had been close to TPK) solo. The rest of the table fails to notice Talrune is leaving and cannot help.
Talrune proceeds to solo a pair of ogres, a herd of seven Bulettes, and a Mature blind green dragon that mistook him for its mate. All without dropping to less than half health
Such blatant badassery is now regarded by the party as "Talrune's Stroll" and is referenced whenever someone tries to split the party or think's an encounter is unfair.
"Do you think you can copy Talrune's Stroll" and "It's not as bad as His Stroll"
Whenever another player gets bad rolls I always look over and say "Better than Talrune and look what he did."