As I have been browsing RPG communities on Lemmy, Facebook, and Reddit, I have noticed some of the slang that I used to hear is not present much in these discussions. Now I know over time, slang and lingo do change, and I want to know more about your experiences in it. One of the terms I used to hear was “fish-malk”, referring to players that take on a character to be goofy, silly, and “random”. They were usually useless and made playing the game for the rest of the players rather difficult. So what lingo or slang terms are you using in your groups, or terms you just don’t hear anymore?
I have never heard fish-malk. o.o
It comes from Vampire: TM, describing the kind of player that plays a Malkavian’s “insanity” as dumb shit like slapping people with a fish (a la Monty Python).
I think there was an illustration in one of the Vampire books that had a malk kissing a fish.
I’d known the term, and then forgotten it, but recently was reminded of it. I was complaining about how some players just always want to be zany and wacky, instead of just playing to the premise. Like, you pitch a gritty game about hunting vampires in 1980s new york city, and they want to play a talking horse. or three kids in a trenchcoat. or a dead man’s seeing eye dog. Just stuff that could kind of work, maybe, but is going to take a lot of work and take a lot of spotlight constantly. Instead of playing, I don’t know… An investigative journalist who’s been looking into mysterious deaths, a nurse at the hospital who’s seen some shit, a business man who just can’t get promoted (maybe because the owners are vampires).
Some of this is subjective, I guess, but I feel like some players are just not on my wavelength about what fits into a theme.
This also relates to my mention elsewhere in this discussion of what used to be called “special snowflakes” (before the birdsite ruined the word “snowflake”). Some people want novelty and creativity above all in their RP, and that doesn’t always come with a sense for how to balance that with intended theme or tone. And as you point out, if *no one* is playing things remotely straight, things can become farcical, or at least like an “Oops! All Foils” situation with no requisite normal.
It could also be applied to the “Chaotic Stupid” interpretation of Chaotic Neutral.
…Which does bring up the “stupid” alignments topic in general. There’s also “Lawful Stupid” (being an asshole enforcer of rules and laws beyond all reason; one of the more infamous ways to play a paladin), “Stupid Good” (“I’m sure the dark lord is just lonely and needs a friend!”), and “Stupid Evil” (being malicious and destructive in ways that don’t serve one’s interests and might even endanger oneself).
I bet “grognard” is only used by grognards now
For the uninitiated, a grognard is a person who likes older style wargaming. The usage suggests a person who is older, set in their ways, and somewhat curmudgeonly. Often preferring how things used to be in the systems they grew up playing.
Generally speaking, they prefer a crunchy game with high mortality and grit, as opposed to a looser system with a narrative or character-driven focus.
For a term in more active use, I submit “crunchy” since I just used it. A game’s crunchiness describes how complex the rules are - essentially how much number-crunching players have to do in order to play.
It used to be that the opposite of “crunch” was “fluff”. These days, instead of “fluff”, people say “lore” — definitely a more respectful term for worldbuilding, metaplot, and the like than “fluff”, which has implications of filler.
Nowadays, rather than contracting “crunch” with “fluff/lore”, people are more likely to contrast it with being rules-lite.
I use the following term from LARP into table-top
Bleed to talk about how in game drama impacts your emotion, it’s usually positive, but need clear discussion to not end-up in horror stories
Black box for flashback/workshop where you roleplay something happening before the actual game. It can be used either to clarify link between characters (especially in one shot) or be used in games like Blades in the Dark to have PC jumping to action directly and doing the preparation latter
Then the obvious IC/OOC to clarify what happens. And some game-term which I export everywher like talking about the Malkavian or the lawful good
I’ve heard of Bleed, but maybe in the context of a horror story. A player’s character was cursed so they couldn’t play music anymore without some unknown bad stuff happening. They were going to play anyway, since music was everything to them. The other player characters intervened, and took away their instruments. The cursed player had their character sneak back, break into the cleric’s chest, and steal their instruments back.
We were all like “Wow this is such good drama and tension!” But then the cursed player got really mad and upset at us in real life, and was like “Of course I’m upset! You wouldn’t let me play music and stole my instruments!” We were all like, “…in the game, right?”
They were like, “No! I’m really upset at you all! Don’t you feel bad when you watch a movie and bad things happen to the characters?”
We were like, “Well, sometimes, yeah, but it’s not like… the same as it happening for real.”
They calmed down eventually, but left a few sessions later in a similar blow up.
So whenever I think of bleed, i think of that player just yelling at us in real life for stuff that was happening to their character.
People still say fish-Malk all the time in VtM spaces, it’s a bit outdated but it communicates the concept pretty well if you have an understanding of Malks and the type of character playstyle it’s referring to.
“VtM”?
Vampire: the Masquerade. It’s an RPG in the World of Darkness, created by White Wolf. There are others with werewolves and mages and demons and stuff, but Vampire is the most popular.
“Special snowflake” used to be a common, if mildly derisive, way to describe players who sought to play unique characters, or the characters so played. Such players often wanted to portray new types of characters, though they were often accused of just trying to hog attention or disrupt the game world’s verisimilitude.
“Special snowflake” fell into disuse rapidly in the 2010s when political discourse on social media *utterly ruined* the word “snowflake”.
