Comment Fest: What are your running gags / inside jokes / etc?
Every group of friends has a few jokes that just keep popping up over and over.
I am that person who unfortunately always either takes the joke one step too far or beats the horse far beyond death (perhaps into undeath?).
That being said, what have been some of the running gags, inside jokes, etc in your campaigns - past and present?
Some of my favorites from our Eberron campaign:
- “Weast” - We are always disoriented when it comes to direction, so instead of going through all the possible options, we will announce that we are headed weast.
- The celestial bee incident. We miss you, Frank.
- Uncle Teeth and Bubbles. Again, a Frank creation (but not something Mar’Kessa knows about, which is why you are also in the dark). I’m still waiting on Frank to settle in with his new job so he can write me up the beginning of our campaign from Frank’s point of view. I’ll post it as soon as I get it!
- Magic Fingers, the story of how we replaced Frank with a guy from craigslist.
…that’s about all I can think of for now. It’s nearly 4 am. Spent an awesome day playing Rock Band with my geek and his old college buddies. Discovered that I kick some major butt on bass. However, now my sinuses have decided to revolt and I can’t sleep. Any insomniacs want to keep me company? (d20dreamgirl on AIM)
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Lessee…
From the current campaign, the biggest one would be the Screaming Toad of Lightning Death!
Additionally, Reza is on an obsessive quest to own/steal a boat. Just because.
From previous games:
The rope incident. A PC fell into a pit trap, survived the fall, survived the spikes, survived the poison. So we threw him down some rope.
DM - “How much do you throw down.”
Player - “I dunno. All of it?” [note: there was 500 feet of rope]
*DM gathers his d6s and rolls for a giant coil of rope falling on the PC at the bottom*
PC in the pit, after surviving everything else, is killed by falling rope.
“I touch the door!”
The biggest one, though, is probably what gave my blog its name; CriticalAnkleBites.com
I will explain this one day on my site, eventually, but I think I’ll save it for there.
We have a lot of recurring jokes in our games… none are at or below PG-13.
For instance, whenever I throw a screwy plot twist, my players philosophically quote from Clerks’ Randal:
“It’s like they’re $%?&ing each other and they are $%?&ing each other”
As for insomnia I can be reached on Gtalk (phil(dot)a(dot)menard(at)gmail.com)
I totally want to kill someone with rope.
ok…total inside joke, I will try and make it as simple as possible so others can share in my inside joke…
Game: 3.5 D&D Eberron(gaming group before this one)
Party: Half elf Bard/Warlock(bulls%#t artist/”face”), Warforged Artificer(ME), Warforged Fighter, Shifter Cleric, Changeling Rouge.
Adventure: The search for the Schemas(Im sure thats not the name of the module but finding the Schemas is the main goal), anyone familiar with this module knows that we are looking for all the Schemas to find an ancient forge.
GM:He was watching a lot of Buffy during that time so added some twist on the module, he added some recurring villein who was kind of quirky. Of course he was a vampire.
Scenario: So we got the 3erd Schema and were coming out of the dungeon and hear we face a Human woman in black with 3 skeleton minions and a deep rumbling voice (who we recognize as the Vampire that wont leave us alone) says “give me the Schema”…we get ready to roll initiative when out of nowhere the Half elf says “we don’t have it”(rolls bluff), the villein (and GM) got completely off guard.
Villein:(roll Sense Motive-FAIL)”Wait…What?…You don’t have it?” No longer the big booming voice but just a very confused humanoid voice.
Half elf: “Thats right…We don’t have it.”(Roll bluff)
Villein:(roll Sense Motive-FAIL)”What do you mean you don’t have it?…you were in their for 3 days”
Half elf: “WE DON’T HAVE IT, there is nothing their…you are welcome to go in and look but were tired and in need of a bath. Are we don hear?”(roll bluff)
Villein:(roll Sense Motive-FAIL)
(At this point the GM is getting his bearing again, so he tries one more time to see if he can beat his Bluff)
Villein: “Are you sure you don’t have it?”
Half elf: “WE DON’T HAVE IT”(roll bluff)
Villein:(roll Sense Motive-FAIL)…silence…”Well…kill them anyhow”
We roll initiative
Ever sins then every time someone in the group said “We don’t have it”/”I don’t have it”…we could not help our self…we giggle.=)
Ok…Is a had to be their kind of moment but thats way is called a Inside joke.
My GM loves for our gang to adventure in the edge of swamplands, and one of the pc’s was wanting to go hunting for a rabbit. GM says good luck finding one, PC says, OK, I’ll go get a fribbit, she meant frog, and ever since we live on a strict diet of fribbits.
While I hate the game and had to stop playing. I was a lizard man who got hit with a poorly targeted fireball. The joke started with “tastes like chicken”. It was a running joke for my final 3 gaming sessions.
Kat - One of my friends lived in an apartment that didn’t allow cats. So she didn’t have cats. She had “flibbets”, which look a whole lot like cats, but aren’t.
Jeff - Sorry to hear of your hatred!
Maybe come back for 4th edition? 
One gag that comes up every so often in our game is the bag of wailing souls. I can’t even remember how it started, but basically you open it and all the souls start screaming and the wind whips around. So if you only open it for a split second and close it, the scream gets cut of…well. It’s funny when WE do it!
In our Traveller game, we like to annoy our DM by attaching “space” to things, and the other half of the joke is…well:
Char 1: I need to stop by the mall and pick up a few things.
Char 2: What’s a mall?
Char 1: You know. The Space Mall.
Char 2: Oh. The SPACE Mall.
e - I haven’t given up on D&D. Just that group.
My 4e books are already on pre-order.
Sweet! I hope you find a good group.
The halfling potato thief song - every time the bard does something useless, out comes this old chestnut.
The Ted with a Net song - Ted was an orc with a net, not two orcs named Ted and Annette. Get it - Ted with Annette? Ah vey, had to be there I guess. That still cracks us up 10 years after it came out at a gaming session.
What are the words to the halfling potato thief song? do we want to know?
The words change regularly to suit the occasion, but the lyrics are mostly to do with the great derring-do of the halfling who stole potatoes from a field and then suffered the wrath of many farmers with pitchforks (and of course, as usual, nearly getting the entire party killed in the process, thrown in a dungeon, and generally made to eat turnips).
The words of the song don’t matter so much as the title :).
I don’t play D&D but I due play a game called Midian. I believe these will still be equally understandable by any gamer.
GM: “You going to stay up all night?”
Player: “I’ll take the point of fatigue”
GM: “Rocks fall everybody dies!”
We have lots of in jokes that make little or no sense because of Dok.
There was the time Asad was talking about Little Pakistan (Asad: “Its just like being back home in Pakistan”, Buff: “Then why would anyone want to go there?”, Asad: “I hate you Buff.”), at this point he then said “And I saw this guy standing in his doorway…” He let it drop and didn’t pick up on it, so Dok says “WITH NO PANTS” randomly which is now our response when somebody stops long enough for us to get those words in. It has spread beyond us and someone has infected Livejournal with it.
I have played Midian, is a fun game.
I don’t get the “rock falls on everyone” bit. =/
A mixed party of some dwarves, an elf, a halfing and a human paladin who was 6′5″ tall enter an old dwarven stronghold with ceilings about 5′8″ high, recently overrun by kobolds a few years back to retrieve a dwarven heirloom for one of the PC’s. I told the paladin’s player that he would suffer a negative adjustment to his THAC0 due to having to fight stooped over and he understood my reasoning.
The party searches through a few rooms and comes to one of the old guard rooms and there is a trap door set in the ceiling but no ladder nearby. So the dwarf that is leading the party (to find his heirloom) asks the paladin if he can reach the latch and open the door which the paladin does. Now the dwarf looks up into the opening and sees that there is an iron spike embedded into the wall of the passageway above and he asks if anybody has any rope and knows how to use it. The halfling thief says yes and he is requested to try to throw a lasso around the spike so that they can climb the rope up through the trap door opening. He tries and fails his skill check (rope use 2e). He tries again, and again, and again. The dwarves and halfling players are starting to get frustrated and the paladin says:
“Will you guys hurry up, my neck is starting to get a creak in it.”
Of course everybody broke out in laughter as we all realized that the paladin could have just lifted the other PC’s up through the opening. After that it became a standard question to ask, “how high is the ceiling?”
On the inside of my DMG, like most good DMs, I have certain rules on world creation and so forth. On the inside of my PHB, however, are my rules of role playing. They are not guides to good role playing, but my rules for the table. They include things like “The DM eats for free” and so forth. One of my rules is “Don’t talk about role playing in front of hot girls.” (These rules are left overs from high school and college. But they still apply. Any player who comes up to me and wants to talk about the campaign when I’m talking to a woman knows that to do so would mean expulsion from the table.)
Currently, the newest Player at one of my tables is a very attractive woman. I’ll do the recap of the previous session, and then say something along the lines of “You enter a small room filled with dusty chests…” or “You pass through the airlock and encounter three customs officers.” Whatever the shpeal, I’ll end it with “So what do you want to do?”
And one of my male players will say “I’d like to tell you, but Robin has to leave…”
Maybe it loses something in the translation.
I feel bad for Robin!
Then again, if I were her, I’d just slap whoever said that upside the head. Eventually after they develop bumps on their heads, they’ll stop saying it. 
By all means, don’t feel sorry for Robin. She points it out all the time, too. When she first came over to mi casa for her first session with our group, she was browsing through my RPG shelf, and she opened my DMG and saw the inside cover and started cracking up. Now, anytime someone brings up that rule, she’ll get all faux-abrasive and say “What, you sayin’ I’m ugly?”
TCDM,
The random avatar strikes again with awesomeness. Somehow the word consummate and a monocle just go together like peanut butter and jelly.
The facial expression really says it all, too.
One things we do when we see something innocuous in a scene I describe, someone will scream “Caltrop!”
Why? Well:
In one of the bigger fights we had, a Hill Giant some how came into town and started slaughtering people for not giving him his proper payments. The Characters at the time were jailed because….well they were Jerks. Locked up in thier cells they could only hear as the town above was being demolished, and the hill giant was laughing his ass off.
Then they felt the gate to the dungeon opened and the rumbling o th Giant walking down the gate, they new they had a fight on their hand. After ripping the gate apart, the character did they’re best at keeping the giant at bay and busy while the barbarian, who was the fastest ran for the weapons. As they fought in the dungeon they used every trick they and finally after retrieving the weapons they started winning the fight against the giant. The giant gave as good as he got, though and the characters were all on their last hit points when the rogue through some caltrops to keep him at bay, away form harming the more injured characters. He threw a slew of them in succession, and Hill giant jsut laughed and walked through them…1 hit point of damage….2 hit points of damage…..another 2…and as the giant stood over his the wounded wizard about to smite him… he fell.
Amazing with only 4 hit points left on the giant he was well…. under 0 hit points…from Caltrops. With a mighty bellow, the giantnt fell yelling
“CAL-TROPS!”
After that, the players never left without Caltrops on them. Everywhere. The wizard even wanted to develop a caltrop spell of something.
Nice. I believe the Caltrop spell actually exists, too. Lessee…
Yep, Spell Compendium. Sorcerer/Wizard level 0 spell.
Covers one 5-foot square with caltrops.
Fun!
My group use to play 2.0 but reading about caltrops brought up a funny memory. We had the Complete Arms and Equipment Guide. They had a picture for what a caltrop was, which was in the Player’s Handbook but this picture was also a diagram. It showed a foot stepping on the caltrop. We just laughed that they would need a diagram of what would happen if you stepped on a pointy object. So whenever we hear the word caltrop we mutter, “and this is what happens when you step on them.”
The 4th Ed post’s comment by Graham reminded me of something that has happened. Well, with my limited Sorceror spells and our relatively low level/not wanting to waste everything on little fights, I occasionally use Ray of Cold (1d3 damage). Every time I fire it into melee (EVERY TIME AND ONLY THIS SPELL), I hit…my ally. And every time I don’t fire it into melee, it misses (usually on a 1, so we’ve decided it hits whoever is in melee somewhere else on a 1).
Odd, since firing into melee and missing doesn’t actually hit an ally without a house rule. The only way to do that is to fire into a grapple.
If it misses, we rule a 50% chance of hitting someone else adjacent. Makes sense if you think about it, though I’ve done more damage to our groups fighter than any enemy in any dungeon ever has so far 1d3 at a time.