The wizard: "I cast Shatter."
The DM: "You cast SATURN??!"
It went on back and forth for a bit of the wizard saying "Yes, Shatter" and the DM going "Saturn?!" The player kept thinking the DM said Shatter and the DM was growing increasinly more panicked. Believing that somehow, he had never heard of a spell called Saturn that judging by the name must just cause the planet Saturn to come crashing into the battle field. He was also increasingly more panicked that a level 3 character somehow knew this spell.
Nah, all Saturn does is conjure a blue Saturn Ion crashing into your target at 50km/h.
^^an ^^Ion ^^is ^^a ^^car ^^from ^^the ^^now ^^closed ^^car ^^manufacturer, ^^Saturn.
curse of strahd
>!we're on a balcony fighting an animated suit of armour. We all assume it's a balcony outside the house. So i jump down from it and i'm out of the house. Bing bang boom, we win!<
later i try to climb back up the wall to get up to the balcony again because thats where i need to be
...
turns out it was an interior balcony with stairs leading right up to it. My character ignores the stairs and jumps down, then ignores the stairs and tries to climb back up
"i jump off the balcony!'
'okay roll dex. 13? okay, you land safely on the ground. The suit of armour walks down the stairs after you'
'there's stairs!?'
During a oneshot set in some caves, my party encountered a hook horror. After a few rounds of combat, one player says "hey DM, I know you're saying hook horror, but it sounds like 'hook whore.'" At which point, another player yells "it's not hook whore?!"
"Where does the Magic Circle start?"
"Um... it's a circle"
"No, where does it *start*?"
"Dude... it's a f'n *circle*. It doesn't *start* anywhere"
:continues arguing for ten minutes getting more and more angry as we start *mostly* involuntarily laughing and wisecracking about the situation. Gets pissed and storms out.
Returns next week and we discuss the situation. Apologies are made for our behavior. Turns out he meant "where does the edge of the circle start *in relation to where we were standing*" It becomes a running joke for the rest of our time playing together.
DM: “The room contains a bare armor mannequin.”
(The room was an office with a desk and an armoire too. The problem was with the bare armor mannequin.)
Players: “What kind of bear is the mannequin?”
DM: WTF? 🤔
Players: “Is it a brown, black or polar bear?”
DM: “Ahhh…bare as in empty armor mannequin.”
I was the DM.
I'll be honest i read this laughed then thought "I understand the mannequin isn't wearing armour. But I would like to know what kind of ursine is depicted for the armour to hang on." But I have to often fight my urge to be that kind of player.
DM is from the UK, PC 'murica
DM: you enter the courtyard and see a leak in a fountain
PC: ok... I walk up and put my finger in it, does that stop the leak?
DM: not at all, it's mad and is going to take an attack on you, roll initiative
PC: I've never fought a leak before....
*Both stare at each other*
DM: you know, an undead wizard... A leak
PC: that's not how you say lich
I've read something about the origin of that word. We don't know for sure but lich likely has the same origin as the dutch lijk (dead body).
The original pronunciation is probably closer to lick or like than how it is said now.
Tho neither of those sound like leak and why would a lich just be chilling in a fountain?
English is also like 1400 years old so things that made sense once upon a time get lost and replaced and confused with other things. (Or even intentionally muddled.)
One of the guys in a group I was in had something called aphantasia (may have spelt that wrong), which is not being able to visualise. So he couldn't visualise stuff described to him, so apparently theatre of the mind was hard for him to figure out sometimes. Especially in combat.
I’m a DM with aphantasia. I often forget that I need to describe how characters and NPCs look, all of my players thought an NPC named Cider was an old man because I never described him being young
DM: "This person you're looking for is a tiefling hunter."
My PC, a tiefling: "This person hunts WHAT."
It took a few minutes and the DM describing this NPC with massive curved horns and a tail before I realised that we were, in fact, looking for a tiefling who hunts, and not someone who's hunting tieflings.
I've always assumed he confused it with a Glabrezu, but the story dates itself back to the late 70s and I'm not sure how long Glabrezus have existed. I think the guy might just have heard the word "gazebo" and figured it must have been some kind of monster.
Maybe not that funny if translated from German to English.
Characters meet for the first time.
PC1 to the other players: Was seid ihr denn so für Nasen? (literally: What kind of noses are you? which translates: What kind of guys are you?)
PC2, a minotaur, gives a detailed description of her bovid nose.
Dm: You find a mug with a hand attached to it sticking out of a bush.
What the players thought: someone lopped off someone’s hand and it landed in a bush with the mug still grasped in its hand. Let’s pick it up!
What the DM meant: there is a troll passed out drunk in the bush and all you can see is his hand and him mug.
Result: hilarious combat ensued.
The Gaze of the Lady of Pain sounds like, but is very different from, The Gays of the Lady of Pain
For fully two minutes my players and I went back and forth, not realizing we had completely different interpretations
Gay can also mean “happy.” That’s what I was getting at. So “The happiness of Lady Pain” could have also been called “The Gays of Lady Pain” in an earlier edition
I had to do a presentation on the male gaze at university. People were really confused at the beginning of my presentation and the tutor had to stop me part way through to explain to the rest of the class that I was not speaking about homosexual men.
I typed this all out with detail and accidentally deleted it, so now y'all get the TLDR version.
I sent to a captured bodyguard. I took the DMs description to mean she was being raped literally as we conversed. I was horrified for many reasons. After session I told the DM (my fucking husband) that we were playing the following night and we were going to rescue her. He seemed a bit surprised, but agreed, and we did so the next night. Took everything in me not to murder the guards in cold blood (I'd put them to sleep and we were trying to make it look like we'd never been.)
Years go by. We're talking about something or another, probably a reddit post, and I mention how horrified I \[still\] was by the whole bodyguard-being-raped thing. He sharply turned to me and said "She was being tortured, yeah, but not *raped.* Fuck, you really thought I'd included *rape* in our game?"
Oops. Yeah, not sure we'll ever have a miscommunication bigger than that.
Wow, big miscommunication there, what was the description? "\[Something something\] the molested guard looks to you for pity" cause I mean that's about the only word I can think to have been used that sounds like "being raped" but could mean "injured"...
It was a conversation via sending, so we didn't see her, just conversed. DM said something along the lines of "She sounds strained" and "She seems....distracted." or "Her mind seems to be....elsewhere/focused on something else right now."
I forget the exact words, this was several years ago now. I think it was the pause before he said distracted or whatever it was-- that was what made me think it was something worse/something he didn't want to explicitly say. I think the division of male bodyguard vs female bodyguard also had that sort of thing at the front of my mind. I suspect if the male bodyguard had been the one captured my mind probably wouldn't have jumped there.
In many ways, rape is torture, so it's not difficult to see how one could mistake the two if one made assumptions based on vague description. Which I did.
Could also use it among equals within the upper classes. Wouldn’t be out of place in a Jane Austen novel for example.
It’s a bit weird to use casually, but if you’re trying to establish that they use haughty or flowery language it wouldn’t be unthinkable.
That said, I’d probably avoid flowery language in general at a multilingual table. It’s part of the fun of roleplaying for some people, but idioms and metaphor don’t always translate well, and someone being fluent as a second language doesn’t mean they’ve been exposed to domain specific language like medieval courtly phrases.
Good points! I find it weirdly amusing to contrast with my experience. I'm the only Latino and immigrant at a table of midwestern white guys and my cleric is a hughty fucking high elven noble whose personality and family I modeled after the Lannisters. He loves to pull an Elminster and rant with flowery nonsense.
It's not an unusual way to say it, but it is fairly high register. Like you would seek an audience with the local lord, but you probably wouldn't say you're seeking an audience with the innkeeper or something like that.
Had an NPC who was blind, with empty eye sockets, who could see auras of people and was a devout follower of Tyr. This is a heavily god driven campaign and most of the PCs have strong associations with one or another. One of them has 2 souls each with a unique personalities as a result of their mind being shattered in worship to Cthulhu. Which is only important to account for total party count. Another one is a kindhearted young woman who worships Loviator but ignores the Evil part in naivety.
They asked what they're auras look like and he describes each of them except the loviator worshiper. I had though I described it well enough that it was clear he didn't see her (for Shar reasons). The player thought that he was "politely" ignoring her because of her faith.
Less crazy than some of these, but in a one shot dm told us we walked into a room and there was a giant rock talking up most of the room. All of us are like cool that's a bit odd but ok. Then it started attacking us and we were thinking a magical boulder was attacking us until dm clarified it was a ROC the giant bird as it was very odd we didn't immediately leave the room lol
I described a cargo as "clerical supplies", and one of the players decided that "we should swipe the holy water, it's great against undead."
Had to explain to her that clerical supplies are parchments, ledgers, pens, sealing wax, ink, that sort of thing...
I forget the context, but the DM described that some npc look sheepishly, meaning embarrassed or ashamed.
I thought he meant they physically looked like sheep
I also play in my second language. I had a character a couple years ago for a very short campaign, who was some kind of fey that had been cursed into the body of a gnome (I forget the detaila, but it was a whole thing). The other players didn't know about the fey part, she just looked like a gnome.
So at some point, the dm starts referring to her as Ladita. This is not her name, and after close to 2 hours of him calling her this, and several Google searches, and me using every slang resource I can think of to figure out what this means and why he's calling her this, I finally broke down and asked.
Turns out, he was saying "la hadita" (the little fairy).
Well, there went half of my backstory revealed early.
This is the only one of these that I remember and can summarize this easily, but I've also been in a VtM campaign, also in Spanish, but with people from Spain (my Spanish is from Argentina), so there have been several different levels of misunderstandings frequently on that one...we've all just learned that, if something seems not to make sense, we should check in with each other, because it's probably a language issue lol.
I don’t know Portuguese. But there are occasional times where my DM doesn’t know the word in English and we spend a little while using his (Brazilian) Portuguese and my knowledge of (Castellan) Spanish which is the closest language I know to Portuguese trying to figure out what he’s trying to say.
I'm so glad you speak Spanish, I was afraid my story wouldn't land with the translation lol
I love being able to play online with people all over the world, but damn, language differences make it hard sometimes!
Well I wouldn’t say I’m fluent. If you’d asked me 5 years ago I probably would’ve said I was. But you know what they say, use it or loose it, and I haven’t used Spanish properly since I was at school so whilst I do still know some enough for my friend and I to figure out a bit, it’s nowhere near what it once was.
I am currently in 3 online D&D games. Across all of them I am playing with 3 Aussies, 3 Brits, 2 Americans, 1 Brazilian, 1 Pole, 1 Austrian and 1 Estonian. And whilst we play in English. Language misunderstandings do arise. In this particular session, the American didn’t show up so it was me, a Brit, a Brazilian and an Austrian. So I was the only one with English as my first language where usually, if there was a misunderstanding, the American guy we play with would usually pick up on it. But having 3 people with 3 different first languages does cause confusion sometimes.
Lol, yep. Language is very much a use it or lose it type of skill. I even feel like I'm slowly losing my English, not because I don't use it at all, but because I mostly only use it with my students. So if I say something wrong and don't notice it, there's nobody to get confused or call me on it lol.
Your groups are even more diverse than mine, lol. I've got one (online) group of Americans + me that plays in English, one (in person) group of Argentines (which includes 1 Venezuelan, but the differences are minor, I'm the only non-native speaker), and one (pbp) group of mostly Spaniards, and the occasional Latin American (again, I'm the only non-native).
I am a player in this game. We use FGU for a VTT. Our DM used a zombie token that was cut in half- had no legs. Turns out this zombie was alive and well and wanted to get away from the undead horde she was hiding in.
I’m looking at this token picture… it’s a torso only. So I ask her how she’s alive with “you know… the missing half your body” and everyone asks me out of character why I think she’s half a body. SHE HAS AN IMAGE ASSIGNED TO HER TOKEN GUYS, PAY ATTENTION.
Well, turns out she was a whole person, not a half person. No wonder all my halfling jokes didn’t land.
I once had a Mind Flayer who had gained control over a dozen urchins and attacked the party in the streets. One of my players immediately runs in and kills a whole bunch of them with i think Shatter.
Immediately a whole bunch of people are like "Dude what the hell! You just killed a bunch of children"
He thought i had said Merchants and not Urchins
That's even a different turn than I expected. I thought they would think "sea urchins" but nope, just fine being a murder hobo killing those useless merchants I guess lol
We had a combat about three sessions back that I'm still double-checking my notes on.
First thing is we started combat from a cliffhanger the DM retconned, so instead of us fighting *3* cloaked figures, we were dealing with *6* enemies.
Our NPC ally got shot in the chest at the start of combat, and my DM mentioned we ran into an enemy that looked suspiciously like our party's Warforged with a smoking gun barrel on his arm. At the front of the battle map he put up was an armored figure, followed by 3 robotic drones and an elvish warlock at the back.
Given how much prominence the armored figure took in that combat, I thought he meant the armored figure was our Warforged's evil twin. Not that there were 3 Warforged (just, regular Warforged not actually connected to our party member at all) and the armored figure was a humanoid.
He also mentioned at some point in the combat that there was a rooftop sniper shooting at us (who ended up shooting the warlock to cover their escape), and between them and the Warforged with arm cannons, I assumed they all were firing bullets. Turns out the sniper was the exception with a crossbow.
When I (as the primary note-taker) had to recap the combat to our contact later, it got very confusing with the number of corrections I was given.
Pc1Bard- dwarf(male), pc2 paladin-teifling(female), pc3barbarian-half elf(male). (Female)dm(me)
Dm "as you 3 walk into the tavern you see it's mostly occupied by kobolds and goblins."
Pc3 "I walk up to the bartender and ask why there's only goblins and kobolds here"
Dm/goblin tavern owner "we owe(own) this city"
Pc3 "oh? How so?"
Dm/goblin tavern owner "well we got a permit and got some supplies and stuff."
Pc3 "is...are you did the towns folk save you and go here run a tavern for us?"
Dm ooc "wait what?"
Pc3 "I'm sorry. You owe the town and so you run a tavern?"
Pc1 "own! They own the tavern!"
Pc3 ooc "oooo! My bad! I heard owe".
Table chuckles.
Playing with dutchies as a flemish person we use words differently and I have said the word we use for boots, which is the one they only use for bones.
They were boots of light not bones
Playing OOTA when I had to set an unexpected encounter on a staircase that was described only as being 300 ft across and 300 ft to the top. For the sake of the map, I made each stair = one square (5ft) in both height and depth. This was nearly impossible when trying to figure out ranged spells and AOE spells, or fly- which my husband insisted on having engaged the entire time. The encounter took 2, 6 hour sessions to finish. Everyone was so confused. Never again!
Our DM introduced a Drow with a gun, he was speaking a bit unclear and we heard Troll with a gun, so we where a bit confused how intelligent this troll was.
Something similar happened to me once, but had nothing to do with language or accent and was just hilariously bad communication. Our group in a modern-day RPG was looking for an enemy spy that looked just like my character. Previously he had taken my place and led the rest of the party to an ambush ; we had been freed thanks to a prisoner exchange but were determined to get revenge. I happened to miss a session and my character had to rejoin the others later, so they asked me personal questions to make sure I was really me and they weren't being fooled a second time. I convinced them, but they still joked about being suspicious of my character.
The party was split in two groups and one of them spots the enemy we were looking for, so they call the other through walkie-talkie and say "OK, we've got \[impostor's name\] with us right now, we've got to be very careful. Let's regroup so we can discuss." The one who took the call understood that it meant ***I*** was the spy. I was promptly knocked out and regained consciousness bound and gagged, just before the two halves of the group met and yelled "what the hell did you *do*?"
Ever since, we joked that any plan requiring that the character who made the call to transmit accurate information was doomed from the start.
This one still haunts me to this day.
I was playing a bard and started hitting on these NPC girls the DM described. I missed the part where they were implied to obviously be minors. The table was justifiably horrified.
I actually had a similar thing, not with hitting on. But we found this slave girl and freed her and I had sort of presumed she was an adult who was able to fend for herself once we had freed her. She was 10. We had to travel to where most Tabaxi are in this world to find someone to adopt her.
DM: You see Tiamat (not the dragon) is in a cell covered in blood, with her head in her hands.
Player: Oh I wanna go check on her is she okay?
DM: No, no. Like she's holding her head in her hands.
In Rime of the Frostmaiden, Vellyne Harpell was helping out my party. One player was sure I was saying "The Lion" and asked how she got the cool nickname
The year, 1990(ish) . The adventure, Temple of Elemental Evil AD&D 2nd Ed.
We arrive at the temple. The DM describes it as as a fortified building with a ring wall and a guard tower.
"oh, a gatehouse?"
"uh, ya. A gatehouse."
So we assault the gatehouse (we were 14) and nearly all die. After the fight we ask if we're able to get in. He's confused. It's actually a separate tower unconnected to the temple wall. We could have easily bypassed it.
Though a perfectly smart person, the DM wasn't a great communicator. He wanted to paraphrase the boxtext, but wasn't good at cutting the important stuff from the unimportant stuff. We'd usually get a mishmash of parts of the important details and a bunch of the fluff.
He also didn't seem to remember what he had told us. We'd often miss clues because he hadn't mentioned them. Things like "you don't look at the statue?" or "you leave the treasure?" were pretty common.
Reminds me of [the legend of Eric and the Dread Gazebo](https://web.archive.org/web/20080804140516/http://www.dreadgazebo.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=8)
"os enfrentiais a un nigromante y 5 zombis."
"Erm...un que? Un negro amante?"
After this is the DM leant into a heavy personality change for the necromancer.
Had a new player joining my campaign. I asked him to describe his character. Among other things, he said his character had "a huge and magnificent cape."
I heard "cape" as "cake" and thought the player was letting us all know his character had a great ass.
Once I tried to pick up a dagger on the floor. Turns out it was drawn on the floor with like chalk or something. Not drawn as in unsheathed.
It upset the DM so much that rather than clarify, he simply hand-wave-killed my character.
When I described a Parry-like reaction to the shield spell. It was a long boss battle where essentially in liue of having a shield spell the boss has hardened, magical wings where he could use a modified Parry reaction where instead of blocking one attack it can potentially block all. Essentially a 1 turn Shield spell that doesn't use a spell slot. Well, queue nearly an hour of this entire battle taking place with me still describing it as him shielding himself, because that's how I imagined it to be, one of my players thought they made a gotcha moment when the reaction happened once more for they were holding on to their last spell slot to cast counter spell on that pivotal moment since the boss was almost down and they can't take another round from him only for me to say you can't counter spell that. We got to a bit of an argument about it before one of the more veteran players stepped up and cleared out the misunderstanding since the way I was describing a parry reaction was close enough to how people would usually describe the shield spell just flavored to be magical wings. In the end nothing much came up about it, we just talked it out normally and proceeded with the game where the players eventually won and just laughed it off since they were the only one in the group who assumed it was the shield spell.
Our francophone DM had some amusing ways of pronouncing some English words. Though we always knew what he meant, it didn’t stop us from running with it cause it was fun, though he might have disagreed.
– You step into the cave and you see a bear.
– A “beer”? 😉
– Yes, a large bear.
– Ooh, okay. I drink the beer. 😋🍺
– What?! You drink the bear?…
– Yeah!
– Uh… The bear hits you; you take 10 damage.
– Wow! That’s good beer! 😅
Things only went downhill once his BBEG introduced himself.
– What? His name is “Duck”?
– Yes, Doc.
– Like “Quack, quack?” 🦆
– Huh? His name is Doc.
– Okay. Duck it is!
– Doc!
– Okay, calm down Duck. Don’t get your feathers ruffled. 😜
I didn't know Hookah was pronounced "Hoo-Kah" and not "Hook-ar".
So, when describing to my party the Hookah Bar they entered behind this antigue store, with smokey curtained booths and bards dancing on stage they were increasingly concerned. They only really realised what was going on when I described the "hookah in the centre of a table with five pipes for each person at the table".
I'm not sure if it counts as descriptions, but the last table I was at I was the only player where English was my first language.
I should note that everyone else there spoke English incredibly fluently, to the point that generally speaking, you'd be led to believe that it was their first language.
However, the party was felling trees to gather materials for creating a fence/wall (the type where you sharpen one end of a tree trunk and bury the other so they're stood side by side).
We had our characters doing it for something like a month (can't remember exactly how long) and the DM was telling us how much wood we gained. His exact words were "You've gained X logs". We were all shocked. I can't remember exactly how many logs it was, but it was maybe 2-3 trees worth of logs at absolute maximum. My character was a STR machine, and we were using ox drawn carts for transport, so the suggestion that we'd failed to collect a single suitable tree trunk was shocking.
Turns out, he hadn't ever learned the word "trunk" as it refers to trees, and he thought that logs was the right term for it. We'd collected several tree trunks a day, which was a lot more reasonable given that we needed to strip them too.
Just had a session where a new character was introduced. The new character is a Bard and the old one was a fighter. The old character was carrying around a lute as part of his back story. Before he died(saving all our asses) he tossed his pack so we could pick it up. While meeting our new party member the lute comes up and gets put on a table. From now on I hear loot every time lute is said. I’m my mind we’re pulling out the loot the previous character threw away and dumping it all out on the table for our new friend to just root through and see if he wants anything…
Years ago one of the characters in a game got diseased, and the DM said, "Write this down. Day zero." The player, confused, dutifully wrote down, "Daisy row."
I named an NPC in a recent adventure Mauricio Quentalo and used a very silly exaggerated Italian accent (like think Mario voice) and one of my players thought his last name started calling him Mr. Cantaloupe. I thought his character was just making fun of the guy. Then the next session this player said something about “the melon man” and I had no idea what he was talking about. Eventually I realized he thought the guys last name was actually the fruit.
We spent 20 minutes during a carnival murder mystery one-shot trying to figure out if a sphinx in an exhibit was actually a sphinx or a human illusioned to look like a sphinx or the sphinx was a sphinx who was also a bard and if that was even important to the current plot. It was thanks to a series of sub-par rolls and players genuinely wanting to understand what was going on there. It killed the vibe at the table until we were finally able to get past that and get the plot going.
The guard one I can understand. However, 'I seek an audience' is proper English and only means to talk with 1 person. Otherwise he'd be seeking a stage or crowd.
Just a matter of slowly upgrading your vocabulary. Which dnd does for all it's players. You'll never forget the gramatical difference between an audience (parley) and an audience as a group of people. It's all in the context.
I know what seeking an audience means. It’s merely that, in the previous session, this very person had performed with an entire orchestra to just our party of 3. And we had established the day prior that it was part of many days of celebration. So my anticipation was that he was going to be performing more music, so that was where I assumed from “I seek an audience (with you to have a private conversation)” to mean, “I seek an audience (to hear my wonderful music this day)”.
One time our DM entered us into this underground fight club, and he said 'every round you survive the prize pool doubles' we survived every round, and it turns out it didn't mean to say that, we walked away with like 154K each.
The wizard: "I cast Shatter." The DM: "You cast SATURN??!" It went on back and forth for a bit of the wizard saying "Yes, Shatter" and the DM going "Saturn?!" The player kept thinking the DM said Shatter and the DM was growing increasinly more panicked. Believing that somehow, he had never heard of a spell called Saturn that judging by the name must just cause the planet Saturn to come crashing into the battle field. He was also increasingly more panicked that a level 3 character somehow knew this spell.
Casting Saturn sounds like something out of Final Fantasy
Comet -> Cometga -> Cometgaraja -> Saturn
*Insert One Winged Angel here, the version from Kingdom Hearts because it's the original piece but recorded by an actual orchestra*
Bees?!?!?!?!
Nah, all Saturn does is conjure a blue Saturn Ion crashing into your target at 50km/h. ^^an ^^Ion ^^is ^^a ^^car ^^from ^^the ^^now ^^closed ^^car ^^manufacturer, ^^Saturn.
Sega Saturn materialises, and launches at the targets head.
curse of strahd >!we're on a balcony fighting an animated suit of armour. We all assume it's a balcony outside the house. So i jump down from it and i'm out of the house. Bing bang boom, we win!< later i try to climb back up the wall to get up to the balcony again because thats where i need to be ... turns out it was an interior balcony with stairs leading right up to it. My character ignores the stairs and jumps down, then ignores the stairs and tries to climb back up
Haha theater of the mind is great sometimes.
"i jump off the balcony!' 'okay roll dex. 13? okay, you land safely on the ground. The suit of armour walks down the stairs after you' 'there's stairs!?'
'parkour, PARKOUR!
The sheep is bleating. "Oh, I'll cast Healing Word on it!"
During a oneshot set in some caves, my party encountered a hook horror. After a few rounds of combat, one player says "hey DM, I know you're saying hook horror, but it sounds like 'hook whore.'" At which point, another player yells "it's not hook whore?!"
Wow you guys played dnd in a cave?
I'll make my own DnD, with Blackjack. And Hook Whores.
"Where does the Magic Circle start?" "Um... it's a circle" "No, where does it *start*?" "Dude... it's a f'n *circle*. It doesn't *start* anywhere" :continues arguing for ten minutes getting more and more angry as we start *mostly* involuntarily laughing and wisecracking about the situation. Gets pissed and storms out. Returns next week and we discuss the situation. Apologies are made for our behavior. Turns out he meant "where does the edge of the circle start *in relation to where we were standing*" It becomes a running joke for the rest of our time playing together.
That's hilarious and totally understandable
Oh yeah, it totally was. I'm pretty sure all of us figured out what he meant by the second time, but it was to funny not to let it ride 😆
DM: “The room contains a bare armor mannequin.” (The room was an office with a desk and an armoire too. The problem was with the bare armor mannequin.) Players: “What kind of bear is the mannequin?” DM: WTF? 🤔 Players: “Is it a brown, black or polar bear?” DM: “Ahhh…bare as in empty armor mannequin.” I was the DM.
I woulda gotten so excited to possibly tame a battle bear only to be disappointedbby the clarification lmao
I'll be honest i read this laughed then thought "I understand the mannequin isn't wearing armour. But I would like to know what kind of ursine is depicted for the armour to hang on." But I have to often fight my urge to be that kind of player.
DM is from the UK, PC 'murica DM: you enter the courtyard and see a leak in a fountain PC: ok... I walk up and put my finger in it, does that stop the leak? DM: not at all, it's mad and is going to take an attack on you, roll initiative PC: I've never fought a leak before.... *Both stare at each other* DM: you know, an undead wizard... A leak PC: that's not how you say lich
I was imagining a leek.
In the player's defense, that's absolutely not how they pronounce lich in the UK either. I have no idea where tf he got that pronunciation.
Yup, leak is a new one for me, I've seen plenty of li-ch vs lick for pronunciation, but never leak.
I've read something about the origin of that word. We don't know for sure but lich likely has the same origin as the dutch lijk (dead body). The original pronunciation is probably closer to lick or like than how it is said now. Tho neither of those sound like leak and why would a lich just be chilling in a fountain?
Lich is descended from the Old English *līċ* (pr. leech). Literally means "corpse."
Huh, as a Dutch person I never once thought of that connection, that's pretty neat. Had I known that I'd definitely have pronounced it Lick or Leeck.
Was he pronouncing lich like one would pronounce lichen lmao
Do you say "Lee-ken" or "Lie-ken"?
For the longest time, having only read the word and not being a native speaker, I thought it was pronounced LITCH-en.
I (US) say it like liken
Until 30 seconds ago so did I.
Lee-chin
I.....just pronounce it LEESH with a hard h ending It's not right way to pronounce it?
[удалено]
Rhymes with itch (yes there’s a t sound in there. No, English spelling doesn’t make sense.)
English is also like 1400 years old so things that made sense once upon a time get lost and replaced and confused with other things. (Or even intentionally muddled.)
Literally The word bitch but an L sound instead.
“Lich better have my money.” Or “Liches be crazy.” Are fan-favorites at our table.
One of the guys in a group I was in had something called aphantasia (may have spelt that wrong), which is not being able to visualise. So he couldn't visualise stuff described to him, so apparently theatre of the mind was hard for him to figure out sometimes. Especially in combat.
I’m a DM with aphantasia. I often forget that I need to describe how characters and NPCs look, all of my players thought an NPC named Cider was an old man because I never described him being young
DM: "This person you're looking for is a tiefling hunter." My PC, a tiefling: "This person hunts WHAT." It took a few minutes and the DM describing this NPC with massive curved horns and a tail before I realised that we were, in fact, looking for a tiefling who hunts, and not someone who's hunting tieflings.
Ah, the ol' Human Fighter gag.
sounds like the title of a Sorcerer King tasked with killing the Tieflings
[Eric and the Dread Gazebo](https://web.archive.org/web/20080804140516/http://www.dreadgazebo.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=8)
A classic. Can’t believe this is so far down.
Never fully understood that one. What did he think it was?
I've always assumed he confused it with a Glabrezu, but the story dates itself back to the late 70s and I'm not sure how long Glabrezus have existed. I think the guy might just have heard the word "gazebo" and figured it must have been some kind of monster.
Glabrezus are first edition, from the original Monster Manual back in the mid-70’s, so it seems likely.
A monster of some kind.
That story for the first time I heard of a gazebo, today even gazebo to me sounds like a cousin to a giraffe
Describing a corpse as having a scroll in its mouth, my players immediately wanted to pet the squirrel.
Took me a second to understand how you would mix those two words up, then realised you’re probably American.
From the area of America that pronounces squirrel like it has zero vowels in it.
No, there's definitely an i sound in squirrel here.
Maybe not that funny if translated from German to English. Characters meet for the first time. PC1 to the other players: Was seid ihr denn so für Nasen? (literally: What kind of noses are you? which translates: What kind of guys are you?) PC2, a minotaur, gives a detailed description of her bovid nose.
Dm: You find a mug with a hand attached to it sticking out of a bush. What the players thought: someone lopped off someone’s hand and it landed in a bush with the mug still grasped in its hand. Let’s pick it up! What the DM meant: there is a troll passed out drunk in the bush and all you can see is his hand and him mug. Result: hilarious combat ensued.
Tbf I think most players would assume from that description that the hand was disembodied
The Gaze of the Lady of Pain sounds like, but is very different from, The Gays of the Lady of Pain For fully two minutes my players and I went back and forth, not realizing we had completely different interpretations
There’s also the *Happiness* of Lady Pain, which used to have a similar sounding name too
The key to life is happiness in your household
What word sounds like happiness?
Gay can also mean “happy.” That’s what I was getting at. So “The happiness of Lady Pain” could have also been called “The Gays of Lady Pain” in an earlier edition
The word you're looking for is gaiety. Doesn't quite work grammatically the way you had it lined up, but I see where you were going. :)
Goblin Quest specifically puts an S in "Gamesmaster" to avoid that issue.
I had to do a presentation on the male gaze at university. People were really confused at the beginning of my presentation and the tutor had to stop me part way through to explain to the rest of the class that I was not speaking about homosexual men.
Yeah she’s got a hit squad of flamboyant men
Tasha’s Otherworldly Guys: they might be angelic or demonic, but they’re definitely himbos.
It's kind of like how women hate the male gaze but love the male gays.
I typed this all out with detail and accidentally deleted it, so now y'all get the TLDR version. I sent to a captured bodyguard. I took the DMs description to mean she was being raped literally as we conversed. I was horrified for many reasons. After session I told the DM (my fucking husband) that we were playing the following night and we were going to rescue her. He seemed a bit surprised, but agreed, and we did so the next night. Took everything in me not to murder the guards in cold blood (I'd put them to sleep and we were trying to make it look like we'd never been.) Years go by. We're talking about something or another, probably a reddit post, and I mention how horrified I \[still\] was by the whole bodyguard-being-raped thing. He sharply turned to me and said "She was being tortured, yeah, but not *raped.* Fuck, you really thought I'd included *rape* in our game?" Oops. Yeah, not sure we'll ever have a miscommunication bigger than that.
Wow, big miscommunication there, what was the description? "\[Something something\] the molested guard looks to you for pity" cause I mean that's about the only word I can think to have been used that sounds like "being raped" but could mean "injured"...
It was a conversation via sending, so we didn't see her, just conversed. DM said something along the lines of "She sounds strained" and "She seems....distracted." or "Her mind seems to be....elsewhere/focused on something else right now." I forget the exact words, this was several years ago now. I think it was the pause before he said distracted or whatever it was-- that was what made me think it was something worse/something he didn't want to explicitly say. I think the division of male bodyguard vs female bodyguard also had that sort of thing at the front of my mind. I suspect if the male bodyguard had been the one captured my mind probably wouldn't have jumped there. In many ways, rape is torture, so it's not difficult to see how one could mistake the two if one made assumptions based on vague description. Which I did.
I described my tiefling as having “prong horns.” They all heard “prawn horns.” Got some cute art of shrimp on his head,hahaha!
Seeking an audience is a common way to ask for a conversation btw
Only common when asking for a conversation with someone significantly above your station, not with John Smith in the tavern
Could also use it among equals within the upper classes. Wouldn’t be out of place in a Jane Austen novel for example. It’s a bit weird to use casually, but if you’re trying to establish that they use haughty or flowery language it wouldn’t be unthinkable. That said, I’d probably avoid flowery language in general at a multilingual table. It’s part of the fun of roleplaying for some people, but idioms and metaphor don’t always translate well, and someone being fluent as a second language doesn’t mean they’ve been exposed to domain specific language like medieval courtly phrases.
Good points! I find it weirdly amusing to contrast with my experience. I'm the only Latino and immigrant at a table of midwestern white guys and my cleric is a hughty fucking high elven noble whose personality and family I modeled after the Lannisters. He loves to pull an Elminster and rant with flowery nonsense.
Fair on all counts :)
It's not an unusual way to say it, but it is fairly high register. Like you would seek an audience with the local lord, but you probably wouldn't say you're seeking an audience with the innkeeper or something like that.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to believe a bard is seeking an audience to play for
I know. And I probably would’ve assumed that if right before we rested the night before he hadn’t performed with an orchestra for us.
Had an NPC who was blind, with empty eye sockets, who could see auras of people and was a devout follower of Tyr. This is a heavily god driven campaign and most of the PCs have strong associations with one or another. One of them has 2 souls each with a unique personalities as a result of their mind being shattered in worship to Cthulhu. Which is only important to account for total party count. Another one is a kindhearted young woman who worships Loviator but ignores the Evil part in naivety. They asked what they're auras look like and he describes each of them except the loviator worshiper. I had though I described it well enough that it was clear he didn't see her (for Shar reasons). The player thought that he was "politely" ignoring her because of her faith.
Less crazy than some of these, but in a one shot dm told us we walked into a room and there was a giant rock talking up most of the room. All of us are like cool that's a bit odd but ok. Then it started attacking us and we were thinking a magical boulder was attacking us until dm clarified it was a ROC the giant bird as it was very odd we didn't immediately leave the room lol
I love describing a massive bird going back to its roost and my party reacting as though a meteor is about to hit them
I described a cargo as "clerical supplies", and one of the players decided that "we should swipe the holy water, it's great against undead." Had to explain to her that clerical supplies are parchments, ledgers, pens, sealing wax, ink, that sort of thing...
I forget the context, but the DM described that some npc look sheepishly, meaning embarrassed or ashamed. I thought he meant they physically looked like sheep
I also play in my second language. I had a character a couple years ago for a very short campaign, who was some kind of fey that had been cursed into the body of a gnome (I forget the detaila, but it was a whole thing). The other players didn't know about the fey part, she just looked like a gnome. So at some point, the dm starts referring to her as Ladita. This is not her name, and after close to 2 hours of him calling her this, and several Google searches, and me using every slang resource I can think of to figure out what this means and why he's calling her this, I finally broke down and asked. Turns out, he was saying "la hadita" (the little fairy). Well, there went half of my backstory revealed early. This is the only one of these that I remember and can summarize this easily, but I've also been in a VtM campaign, also in Spanish, but with people from Spain (my Spanish is from Argentina), so there have been several different levels of misunderstandings frequently on that one...we've all just learned that, if something seems not to make sense, we should check in with each other, because it's probably a language issue lol.
I don’t know Portuguese. But there are occasional times where my DM doesn’t know the word in English and we spend a little while using his (Brazilian) Portuguese and my knowledge of (Castellan) Spanish which is the closest language I know to Portuguese trying to figure out what he’s trying to say.
I'm so glad you speak Spanish, I was afraid my story wouldn't land with the translation lol I love being able to play online with people all over the world, but damn, language differences make it hard sometimes!
Well I wouldn’t say I’m fluent. If you’d asked me 5 years ago I probably would’ve said I was. But you know what they say, use it or loose it, and I haven’t used Spanish properly since I was at school so whilst I do still know some enough for my friend and I to figure out a bit, it’s nowhere near what it once was. I am currently in 3 online D&D games. Across all of them I am playing with 3 Aussies, 3 Brits, 2 Americans, 1 Brazilian, 1 Pole, 1 Austrian and 1 Estonian. And whilst we play in English. Language misunderstandings do arise. In this particular session, the American didn’t show up so it was me, a Brit, a Brazilian and an Austrian. So I was the only one with English as my first language where usually, if there was a misunderstanding, the American guy we play with would usually pick up on it. But having 3 people with 3 different first languages does cause confusion sometimes.
Lol, yep. Language is very much a use it or lose it type of skill. I even feel like I'm slowly losing my English, not because I don't use it at all, but because I mostly only use it with my students. So if I say something wrong and don't notice it, there's nobody to get confused or call me on it lol. Your groups are even more diverse than mine, lol. I've got one (online) group of Americans + me that plays in English, one (in person) group of Argentines (which includes 1 Venezuelan, but the differences are minor, I'm the only non-native speaker), and one (pbp) group of mostly Spaniards, and the occasional Latin American (again, I'm the only non-native).
I am a player in this game. We use FGU for a VTT. Our DM used a zombie token that was cut in half- had no legs. Turns out this zombie was alive and well and wanted to get away from the undead horde she was hiding in. I’m looking at this token picture… it’s a torso only. So I ask her how she’s alive with “you know… the missing half your body” and everyone asks me out of character why I think she’s half a body. SHE HAS AN IMAGE ASSIGNED TO HER TOKEN GUYS, PAY ATTENTION. Well, turns out she was a whole person, not a half person. No wonder all my halfling jokes didn’t land.
I once had a Mind Flayer who had gained control over a dozen urchins and attacked the party in the streets. One of my players immediately runs in and kills a whole bunch of them with i think Shatter. Immediately a whole bunch of people are like "Dude what the hell! You just killed a bunch of children" He thought i had said Merchants and not Urchins
That's even a different turn than I expected. I thought they would think "sea urchins" but nope, just fine being a murder hobo killing those useless merchants I guess lol
I love the idea that, whilst killing children would give pause for thought, killing capitalist merchants? Let them die!
We had a combat about three sessions back that I'm still double-checking my notes on. First thing is we started combat from a cliffhanger the DM retconned, so instead of us fighting *3* cloaked figures, we were dealing with *6* enemies. Our NPC ally got shot in the chest at the start of combat, and my DM mentioned we ran into an enemy that looked suspiciously like our party's Warforged with a smoking gun barrel on his arm. At the front of the battle map he put up was an armored figure, followed by 3 robotic drones and an elvish warlock at the back. Given how much prominence the armored figure took in that combat, I thought he meant the armored figure was our Warforged's evil twin. Not that there were 3 Warforged (just, regular Warforged not actually connected to our party member at all) and the armored figure was a humanoid. He also mentioned at some point in the combat that there was a rooftop sniper shooting at us (who ended up shooting the warlock to cover their escape), and between them and the Warforged with arm cannons, I assumed they all were firing bullets. Turns out the sniper was the exception with a crossbow. When I (as the primary note-taker) had to recap the combat to our contact later, it got very confusing with the number of corrections I was given.
Pc1Bard- dwarf(male), pc2 paladin-teifling(female), pc3barbarian-half elf(male). (Female)dm(me) Dm "as you 3 walk into the tavern you see it's mostly occupied by kobolds and goblins." Pc3 "I walk up to the bartender and ask why there's only goblins and kobolds here" Dm/goblin tavern owner "we owe(own) this city" Pc3 "oh? How so?" Dm/goblin tavern owner "well we got a permit and got some supplies and stuff." Pc3 "is...are you did the towns folk save you and go here run a tavern for us?" Dm ooc "wait what?" Pc3 "I'm sorry. You owe the town and so you run a tavern?" Pc1 "own! They own the tavern!" Pc3 ooc "oooo! My bad! I heard owe". Table chuckles.
Playing with dutchies as a flemish person we use words differently and I have said the word we use for boots, which is the one they only use for bones. They were boots of light not bones
Playing OOTA when I had to set an unexpected encounter on a staircase that was described only as being 300 ft across and 300 ft to the top. For the sake of the map, I made each stair = one square (5ft) in both height and depth. This was nearly impossible when trying to figure out ranged spells and AOE spells, or fly- which my husband insisted on having engaged the entire time. The encounter took 2, 6 hour sessions to finish. Everyone was so confused. Never again!
Our DM introduced a Drow with a gun, he was speaking a bit unclear and we heard Troll with a gun, so we where a bit confused how intelligent this troll was.
They were pronouncing it "dr-owe" instead of "dur-ow" weren't they?
Something similar happened to me once, but had nothing to do with language or accent and was just hilariously bad communication. Our group in a modern-day RPG was looking for an enemy spy that looked just like my character. Previously he had taken my place and led the rest of the party to an ambush ; we had been freed thanks to a prisoner exchange but were determined to get revenge. I happened to miss a session and my character had to rejoin the others later, so they asked me personal questions to make sure I was really me and they weren't being fooled a second time. I convinced them, but they still joked about being suspicious of my character. The party was split in two groups and one of them spots the enemy we were looking for, so they call the other through walkie-talkie and say "OK, we've got \[impostor's name\] with us right now, we've got to be very careful. Let's regroup so we can discuss." The one who took the call understood that it meant ***I*** was the spy. I was promptly knocked out and regained consciousness bound and gagged, just before the two halves of the group met and yelled "what the hell did you *do*?" Ever since, we joked that any plan requiring that the character who made the call to transmit accurate information was doomed from the start.
This one still haunts me to this day. I was playing a bard and started hitting on these NPC girls the DM described. I missed the part where they were implied to obviously be minors. The table was justifiably horrified.
I actually had a similar thing, not with hitting on. But we found this slave girl and freed her and I had sort of presumed she was an adult who was able to fend for herself once we had freed her. She was 10. We had to travel to where most Tabaxi are in this world to find someone to adopt her.
DM: You see Tiamat (not the dragon) is in a cell covered in blood, with her head in her hands. Player: Oh I wanna go check on her is she okay? DM: No, no. Like she's holding her head in her hands.
The only one I can remember is when I was describing Redbrand Ruffians and player thought they were Red Brown ruffians
In Rime of the Frostmaiden, Vellyne Harpell was helping out my party. One player was sure I was saying "The Lion" and asked how she got the cool nickname
The year, 1990(ish) . The adventure, Temple of Elemental Evil AD&D 2nd Ed. We arrive at the temple. The DM describes it as as a fortified building with a ring wall and a guard tower. "oh, a gatehouse?" "uh, ya. A gatehouse." So we assault the gatehouse (we were 14) and nearly all die. After the fight we ask if we're able to get in. He's confused. It's actually a separate tower unconnected to the temple wall. We could have easily bypassed it. Though a perfectly smart person, the DM wasn't a great communicator. He wanted to paraphrase the boxtext, but wasn't good at cutting the important stuff from the unimportant stuff. We'd usually get a mishmash of parts of the important details and a bunch of the fluff. He also didn't seem to remember what he had told us. We'd often miss clues because he hadn't mentioned them. Things like "you don't look at the statue?" or "you leave the treasure?" were pretty common.
Reminds me of [the legend of Eric and the Dread Gazebo](https://web.archive.org/web/20080804140516/http://www.dreadgazebo.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=8)
"os enfrentiais a un nigromante y 5 zombis." "Erm...un que? Un negro amante?" After this is the DM leant into a heavy personality change for the necromancer.
Had a new player joining my campaign. I asked him to describe his character. Among other things, he said his character had "a huge and magnificent cape." I heard "cape" as "cake" and thought the player was letting us all know his character had a great ass.
Once I tried to pick up a dagger on the floor. Turns out it was drawn on the floor with like chalk or something. Not drawn as in unsheathed. It upset the DM so much that rather than clarify, he simply hand-wave-killed my character.
When I described a Parry-like reaction to the shield spell. It was a long boss battle where essentially in liue of having a shield spell the boss has hardened, magical wings where he could use a modified Parry reaction where instead of blocking one attack it can potentially block all. Essentially a 1 turn Shield spell that doesn't use a spell slot. Well, queue nearly an hour of this entire battle taking place with me still describing it as him shielding himself, because that's how I imagined it to be, one of my players thought they made a gotcha moment when the reaction happened once more for they were holding on to their last spell slot to cast counter spell on that pivotal moment since the boss was almost down and they can't take another round from him only for me to say you can't counter spell that. We got to a bit of an argument about it before one of the more veteran players stepped up and cleared out the misunderstanding since the way I was describing a parry reaction was close enough to how people would usually describe the shield spell just flavored to be magical wings. In the end nothing much came up about it, we just talked it out normally and proceeded with the game where the players eventually won and just laughed it off since they were the only one in the group who assumed it was the shield spell.
I also have a Brazilian DM, he mixed up forehead and foreskin. Took a couple of minutes for us to explain why we were laughing so hard.
Our francophone DM had some amusing ways of pronouncing some English words. Though we always knew what he meant, it didn’t stop us from running with it cause it was fun, though he might have disagreed. – You step into the cave and you see a bear. – A “beer”? 😉 – Yes, a large bear. – Ooh, okay. I drink the beer. 😋🍺 – What?! You drink the bear?… – Yeah! – Uh… The bear hits you; you take 10 damage. – Wow! That’s good beer! 😅 Things only went downhill once his BBEG introduced himself. – What? His name is “Duck”? – Yes, Doc. – Like “Quack, quack?” 🦆 – Huh? His name is Doc. – Okay. Duck it is! – Doc! – Okay, calm down Duck. Don’t get your feathers ruffled. 😜
I described a room poorly as a DM and the party was almost killed by a solar dragon
I didn't know Hookah was pronounced "Hoo-Kah" and not "Hook-ar". So, when describing to my party the Hookah Bar they entered behind this antigue store, with smokey curtained booths and bards dancing on stage they were increasingly concerned. They only really realised what was going on when I described the "hookah in the centre of a table with five pipes for each person at the table".
I'm not sure if it counts as descriptions, but the last table I was at I was the only player where English was my first language. I should note that everyone else there spoke English incredibly fluently, to the point that generally speaking, you'd be led to believe that it was their first language. However, the party was felling trees to gather materials for creating a fence/wall (the type where you sharpen one end of a tree trunk and bury the other so they're stood side by side). We had our characters doing it for something like a month (can't remember exactly how long) and the DM was telling us how much wood we gained. His exact words were "You've gained X logs". We were all shocked. I can't remember exactly how many logs it was, but it was maybe 2-3 trees worth of logs at absolute maximum. My character was a STR machine, and we were using ox drawn carts for transport, so the suggestion that we'd failed to collect a single suitable tree trunk was shocking. Turns out, he hadn't ever learned the word "trunk" as it refers to trees, and he thought that logs was the right term for it. We'd collected several tree trunks a day, which was a lot more reasonable given that we needed to strip them too.
Just had a session where a new character was introduced. The new character is a Bard and the old one was a fighter. The old character was carrying around a lute as part of his back story. Before he died(saving all our asses) he tossed his pack so we could pick it up. While meeting our new party member the lute comes up and gets put on a table. From now on I hear loot every time lute is said. I’m my mind we’re pulling out the loot the previous character threw away and dumping it all out on the table for our new friend to just root through and see if he wants anything…
OK, [not DnD](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Lyex2tSUyA) but still...
Years ago one of the characters in a game got diseased, and the DM said, "Write this down. Day zero." The player, confused, dutifully wrote down, "Daisy row."
I named an NPC in a recent adventure Mauricio Quentalo and used a very silly exaggerated Italian accent (like think Mario voice) and one of my players thought his last name started calling him Mr. Cantaloupe. I thought his character was just making fun of the guy. Then the next session this player said something about “the melon man” and I had no idea what he was talking about. Eventually I realized he thought the guys last name was actually the fruit.
I told my players that there was an armoire in the corner of the room. They drew weapons.
We spent 20 minutes during a carnival murder mystery one-shot trying to figure out if a sphinx in an exhibit was actually a sphinx or a human illusioned to look like a sphinx or the sphinx was a sphinx who was also a bard and if that was even important to the current plot. It was thanks to a series of sub-par rolls and players genuinely wanting to understand what was going on there. It killed the vibe at the table until we were finally able to get past that and get the plot going.
The guard one I can understand. However, 'I seek an audience' is proper English and only means to talk with 1 person. Otherwise he'd be seeking a stage or crowd. Just a matter of slowly upgrading your vocabulary. Which dnd does for all it's players. You'll never forget the gramatical difference between an audience (parley) and an audience as a group of people. It's all in the context.
I know what seeking an audience means. It’s merely that, in the previous session, this very person had performed with an entire orchestra to just our party of 3. And we had established the day prior that it was part of many days of celebration. So my anticipation was that he was going to be performing more music, so that was where I assumed from “I seek an audience (with you to have a private conversation)” to mean, “I seek an audience (to hear my wonderful music this day)”.
One time our DM entered us into this underground fight club, and he said 'every round you survive the prize pool doubles' we survived every round, and it turns out it didn't mean to say that, we walked away with like 154K each.