When I was younger and learning D&D, the old editions made the fantasy worlds we explored a foreign, exciting place...

Yeah they should just Google the solution to every problem.

Instead of DMs and dice we should just program our own games with mini wiki's to reference game data

No you fucking dingus, that's not what I said. Stop being a retarded luddite.

But bruh I need to Google this riddle

I'm more confused as to how someone doesn't know what alacrity or greaves are. Like you wouldn't use them in conversation, but I'm pretty sure my *reee Normie* friends would understand what I mean if I said that.
Or you know, they wouldn't interupt and try to get it contextually

Prima noctis is total bullshit perpetuated by gross fetishists from ages past and shitty Hollywood writers from the modern era.

I can understand not knowing Alacrity but whonly plays a medieval RPG and doesn't know greaves?

Historians read: propagandists too, right?

>Looking up a word you don't know is the equivalent of outright cheating.

You are so fucking dumb jesus christ holy shit you are dumb.

Fags, the lot of them. No such thing outside the mind of gross masturbators and greedy producers

and people writing about other people who were disliked by the people who paid the people to write

To be fair the DM should be willing to share the definition of the words he uses without having to pause the game to berate his players on Veeky Forums.

I'd prefer that to accidently googling spoilers because Alacrity in this campaign is actually the bbeg and he's been crossdressing as the bar maid all along

>I learned a lot from those old books, about medieval arms and armour, and the rich language of antiquity. D&D was for people who knew things.

Of course, the research going into those books was, to put it politely, not up to academic standards,. and what little there was appears to have ended up digging into non-primary sources which were very badly dated and obsolete even in the seventies. So where you think you've learned a lot, most of that "knowledge" is pure rubbish that does nothing but push you into Donning-Kruger overdrive.

>glaive-guisarme

Yeah, that kind of shit. For all your claims to knowing shit, you never bothered with basic source critique. "Is this RPG module really reliable as a work of historical fact?"

>The Dread Gazebo story was a warning
It was shit that never happened.

I've seen this reaction image three times today. Is it just you posting it over and over?

Check if it has the same name everytime
Then your chances are a lot higher it's the same person

>Henry Jones Sr.: Well, he who finds the Grail, must face the final challenge.
>Indiana Jones: What final challenge?
>Henry Jones Sr.: Three devices of such lethal cunning.
Indiana Jones: Booby traps?
>Henry Jones Sr.: Oh yes! But I found the clues that will safely take us through, in the chronicles of Saint Anselm.
>Indiana Jones: Well, what are they?
[Henry Jones Sr. tries to recall]
>Indiana Jones: Can't you remember?
>Henry Jones Sr.: I wrote them down in my diary, so that I wouldn't *have* to remember them.

Henry Jones Sr.: Well, he who finds the Grail, must face the final challenge.
Indiana Jones: What final challenge?
Henry Jones Sr.: Three devices of such lethal cunning.
Indiana Jones: Booby traps?
Henry Jones Sr.: Oh yes! But I found the clues that will safely take us through, in the chronicles of Saint Anselm.
Indiana Jones: Well, what are they?
[Henry Jones Sr. tries to recall]
Indiana Jones: Can't you remember?
Henry Jones Sr.: I wrote them down in my diary, so that I wouldn't have to remember them.

People are lazy. If you give them an alternative to doing stuff, they'll not do stuff.
Convient reference material is the death of learning.

Thanks Socrates.

No brah, you've just grown jaded. The problem stares at you in the mirror.

I like you mate.

Get over yourself faggot. If you haven't moved on to RPGs with real, accurate historical research in them then you've got no place looking down on the dungeon nerds of today.

What's the difference? Honestly, tell me what's the difference between using a smartphone to look up one piece of in-game information as opposed to another piece of in-game information.

Looking up what greaves are is entirely different from looking up the solution to a riddle you fucking autist.

No it isn't, it's using a device to access in-character information from outside the game's parameters.

No different than taking out the MM and reciting word-for-word what each monster does as you're fighting it or taking out the DMG or the module to state that the glowing pair of gloves is, in fact, cursed.

If you think there's a difference then you're wrong.

.... what? What the hell are you talking about? This is something that they character would know, but the player may not, IE what you call SHIN ARMOR.

If a player was playing a Sailor, would you require them to know all the sailing terms their character would know?

You DO know that players and characters are separate entities, right? You can seperate reality from fantasy like us normal people can?

It's kinda dumb to pull up a phone and ask google what greaves are instead of asking your friends... Unless your friend is op and asking him a simple question is triggering.

It could even be in character. Most people wouldn't have such specific knowledge anyway. Some fighters, paladins, chevaliers, blacksmiths etc. But a ranger? Barbarian? Wizard?

This guy is either trolling or actually retarded. Either way, don't indulge him.

If the characters would know then the DM should just tell them instead of making them jump through hoops.

You wouldn't even need to pull out your phone in the first place.

I- sadly- wish I had a better vocabulary, and would be such a player asking you the same thing.

I can only hope that I would redeem myself because I WANT to learn shit like that. That is all.

Ideally, yeah, but I think he's saying that, in the event that no one at the table knows, it is not sacrilegious to pull out a dictionary. I think so, anyway.

I don't allow phones at my table, but for an entirely different reason.

Why would you, as a DM, use a word or concept that you know nothing about?

In fact, why would you even be running a game that doesn't at least attempt to explain what a thing is if it has importance within the world?

D&D's historical information and simulation is actual garbage. You probably learned a lot of wrong things from those old books.

Would it be ideal if you didn't have to stop gameplay to explain words to your players? Yeah probably. Would it help if you didn't insist on using shitty romance paperback purple prose? Yeah also probably it would, if an awkward-sounding mouthful like "ensorcelled greaves of alacrity" is your example of "why do my feebleminded players not understand my superior intellect and enquiring mind" then you're doing it wrong.

Protip the best writers aren't the ones that use the most complicated words. You'll do a lot better for yourself if you go out of your way to write/describe things lucidly and elegantly rather than just trying to show of how your superior roleplaying background has given you an ADVANCED vocabulary the likes of which normies tremble to look upon.

>You probably learned a lot of wrong things from those old books.
Name 5 things. The only one I know of it Studded Leather Armour.

Did you have to walk to school in the snow uphill both ways too?

lol kys honestly

I think it was the over-simplification and incorrect assumption that triggered the OP, not the fact that they asked. Maybe them also asking him to dumb it down to be like, "normal people."

At which point, the correct answer isn't to get triggered, it's to say, "Because they're not boots. Boots are made of leather and are fancy shoes, greaves are made of metal plates that don't completely surround the leg. Also, alacrity sounds fancier and it was made by a wizard. Wizards are fucking fancy."

I'll feel that feel.

*greaves are shin armor made of metal plates

>things that never happened offline

Which is why I only play offline and never online with /v/tards ruining everything with their whining and screaming.

>Name 5 things. The only one I know of it Studded Leather Armour.

Longsword as a 1-handed double-edged straight sword, rather than a two-handed sword roughly analogous to D&D's "greatsword." Swords like those are primarily slashing weapons? Large shields are made of metal. Never mind the fact that there's a lot of stuff in D&D that's just subtly out of whack or anachronistic with real life (you get articulated plate armor, rapiers, halberds, arming swords, longbows, chainmail, scale-mail, fucking segmentata ('banded mail'), all coexisting in the same setting).

I'm not saying that D&D is universally horrible at depicting some medieval zeitgeist, if someone came to me and was like "D&D IS THE MOST INACCURATE MEDIEVAL SIMULATION EVER CREATED" then I'd probably tell them they're being a bitch because there's a lot of stuff out there with a lot less respect for the historical setting than D&D, but you can't really walk around being like "My D&D background has made me so educated and intellectually superior to these newfag normies who participate in the hobby nowadays" when D&D is hardly a brilliantly-researched piece of medieval scholarship.

To be fair, in munchkin and optimization guides shared in the early to mid 90's on BBSes, this is EXACTLy the kind of things those shitters encouraged.

I remember one particular guide going over how to get your GM distracted enough that you could pore over his notes and get the solutions to campaigns, and I also remember people sharing info on infamously killer modules so their special snowflake characters didn't die.

Shitters never die. Or if they do, they just respawn younger.

You don't have to be a dick about it. When I'm DMing and I say a word my players don't know, it becomes the Vocab Word of the Day and everyone gets excited. It happens almost exactly once a session.

If you play offline, you play with people that you know off and trust me, people are friendlier and less likely to pull stupid shit that they already know other people hate.
And I don't treat friends like retarded OP do. If they don't know what I imply, I readjusted the notes and dialogues to their level so everyone can have fun.
Which is the primary purpose of playing tabletop.

Not to insult others or to feel superior.
Not to fellate yourself or your super special PC in front of a live audience.
Not to scream at others for not being logical.
But simply to have fun spinning a large yarn together.

Studded leather armor, like you said, never existed.

Longswords. The closest thing, name-wise, would be a langmesser, literally long/big knife, which is a two-handed sword. The closest thing, usage-wise, would be an arming sword, a one-handed sword that would be used as nothing more than a sharpened metal stick. I'm counting this as two, because both swords exist in D&D, and they're both incorrectly named.

Bucklers. They weren't worn strapped across the back of the arm like a larger shield. They're basically what would happen if you took a pot lid and bent it back around the handle. You could punch with one, and it was a common tactic.

Heavy/large shields being made of metal. Braced with metal? Sure. Metal cap in the middle to deflect blows off the center of the shield? Yeah. Solid metal? Not likely.

Extra, or in case you don't like the sword one being counted as two: Spiked armor. Welding spikes onto armor to get out of nets or to stop yourself from being grappled wasn't a thing.

If only it were that easy.

The problem is that the people who do stupid shit online tend to pull the exact same shit offline unless someone at the table corrects them or gives them the boot.

I mean, you'd think that would go out of their way not to act like a glorified dildo in public but this is generally what happens when you play with people who can't into people.

This is why normalfags are generally better players than long-term ones, yeah it's nice to play with people who have experience with the system but the tradeoff is that you have to deal with the baggage of someone who has run/played in so many shitty campaigns that they developed bad habits that'll end up ruining the game for everyone else.

At least normalfags have no expectations.

Studded leather is obviously just brigandine as interpreted by a historical illiterate, though.

And as we know a lot of D&D's misnomerisms are in fact, just misnamed items that really did exist.

Magic, for example, never existed, especially not in medieval Europe.

It's a good rule of thumb that medievalists are like philosophers: the only thing they can be counted on to do is contradict each other. Anything one expert says gets contradicted by five other experts and ten million amateurs who think they're experts.

Philosophers don't so much contradict each other as ascribe to different points of view.

Also, general rule, do not call on a Kantian philosopher to help you.

>The Dread Gazebo story was a warning
Funfact: The Dread Gazebo story is meant to teach the exact opposite of the nonsense you're spouting: that D&D's often ridiculous overuse of esoteric terms and purple prose was retarded.

Do you play with 12 year olds? All of my players- aged from 17-24- all know know relevant historical terms for arms and armour, and when they don't they are they never respond with a bullshit answer like that.

then why is it so shit in D&D when it was some of the best armor IRL?

>Longswords. The closest thing, name-wise, would be a langmesser, literally long/big knife, which is a two-handed sword.
Actually what D&D calls a bastard sword was also known as a "long sword."

And don't forget "plate mail." Mail-and-plate is a thing, plate is a thing, mail is a thing, "plate mail" is not a thing. While we're at it "chainmail" means "chainchain."

There's also the timeline anachronisms all over the place, half the weapons and armor list didn't exist at the same time as the other half, either because it wasn't invented yet or because it was grossly outdated and obsolete depending on which direction you want to look at it.

Also the image of a knight with a sword, shield, and full plate armor.

>If you play offline, you play with people that you know
Not a guarantee, you forget shop games and games that had to advertise.

>While we're at it "chainmail" means "chainchain
You do realize English has those redundancies all the time. Or did you think "manor house" is a dndism?

Chainmail is admittedly an anachronism, the term only dates back to the 1820s but I am so fucking sick of wannabe scholars claiming started with dnd

This is all OP needs to hear.

Well, that and that he's a pretentious faggot with a lust for cock only outweighed by his enormous sense of self-congratulation.

You.

Good post.

>Also the image of a knight with a sword, shield, and full plate armor.
Plate doesn't protect you against dragon breath.

>Also the image of a knight with a sword, shield, and full plate armor.

Comes directly from images and preservations of tournament armor. It's not an anachronism, it's a misinterpretation.

Depends, if it's their first time and they aren't familiar with fantasy lore/literature, then it's excusable to not know about a lot of the names for older weapons, armor, clothing, items, etc.

I only really played D&D because it was a fun thing to do with my friends, not because 'oooh fantasy settings, I love fantasy settings!' - the opposite is true for me, never been terribly interested in fantasy outside of the LOTR movies, but I still liked the D&D experience.

Stuck-up GMs/players who lord over 'normies' with their superior knowledge of fantasy and medieval lore are just going to discourage outsiders from joining in.

>Longsword as a 1-handed double-edged straight sword, rather than a two-handed sword roughly analogous to D&D's "greatsword."
While you're technically correct (though "longsword" also encompasses bastard swords), it's just a name, and a neologism at that. It may not be as academically appropriate to call it a longsword, but it's not like it's historically inaccurate. Or at least, it's no more historically inaccurate than calling it an arming sword. Neither term would have been used at the time.

Honestly, it's a damned if you do, damned if you don't sort of thing. "Arming sword" is unwieldy and lots of folks won't have a clue what you're talking about. Longsword is self-descriptive, and it's going to click with people on that basis, especially when contrasted with short swords. And it flows better, annunciation-wise. But academically, it refers to something else. Really, I think the issue is with the people who classified these things in the first place. They did a shitty job of naming the arming sword, and now there's no good answer.

That's fair, I'm not demanding D&D stop calling that particular weapon a "longsword," it's basically the universally accepted name for it in this day and age. It's just that OP is being a smarmy bitch about how D&D used to be for thinking men with superior vocabularies and other horseshit like that, so I feel like it's valid to point out that, from the standpoint of purely meaningless semantic argument, D&D is using a historically inaccurate term for one of the iconic weapons in the genre.

It's not so much that I care what people call it as the fact that OP was specifically whining about modern players not knowing what he perceives to be immersive and historically-accurate words and terms.

I get where you're coming from, but I also think that OP's post was largely about player laziness and lack of commitment to the setting, even if he was being intentionally haughty about it. Actually, it's a bit difficult to tell if OP's purpose was to mock the position he seemed to be taking, or simply to exaggerate the position he truly believed (and having a bit of fun at his own expense in the process). But I do believe that the setting is enriched with moderate, but not excessive, use of... uh... "specialized vocabulary". Saying "greaves" instead of "shin guards" or "gambeson" instead of "padded jacket" is more immersive. You just don't want to overdo it.

But their character can see that item, it should be immediately obvious what it is

>it's basically the universally accepted name for it in this day and age

Amongst the public at large? Nah, they won't even think of longsword as a specific term.

Amongst people into (European) swords specifically? Fuck no.

Amongst DnD players? There you may have something.

So don't feel bad about not letting DnD get away with this shit if you get a decent opportunity (you know, not every fucking time someone uses the DnD definition while you're playing) because DnD is not the world, just another little bubble.

But brigandine is its own, separate, armor write up?

>I expect my players to be the right kind of player

Why do you even bother interacting with other people

...

People did fight on foot, in full-plate or nearly full plate, with all sorts of weapons.
That is not historically inaccurate.

>"you find a pair of ensorcelled greaves of alacrity"
I admit the only word I understood was greaves and that through context I assumed ensocelled meant something similar to enchanted.

I don't really get people who complain that x and y didn't exist at the same time as equipment.
D&D usually has characters travel all over the places. In the 1820-30s the british were fighting Afghani tribesmen with lances and chainshirts and all that shit, using artillery and muskets.
And they were losing, too.

Cultures bump into each other, and for different tech-levels to exist in different cultures is entirely believable.

>Work a 40 hour job
>Have a family with kids
>Only time of the week I get to myself is Roleplay night
>New edition of RPG released and GM plans on using it
>Never enough time to study the book
>Ask what is the nature of the item I just got
>GM goes full REEEEEE at me

It does. That's exactly what it means.

Dammit, why do you have to be right.
>Crying anime character.gif

One piece of information tells you which way to go for which events and then how to beat them, while the other piece of information is an item description.

There's different value to the knowledge and that changes whether or not it's ok to look something up.

People love pretentious cunts, or that asshole who wrote Gardens of the Moon wouldn't be popular.

The better answer would be

>because there already are boots of speed, but you didn't find them. you found ensorcelled greaves of alacrity, congratulations

Linguistic pragmatism is vital for be a correct GM. The use of purple prose is irrelevant for the narrative experience that is pen and paper roleplay.
Now, a minimum of awareness on the literature production linked to a specific game is necessary for don't let the game degenerate into roll playing. If you only saw Peter Jackson's LotR but never read the novels you shouldn't have a seat in any gaming table because is a hint you don't have the patience to engage into the narrative aspect of the game.

ttrpg's are not meant for men who have families. If a player cannot do homework for the game then I don't want them at my table.

There is no such thing as required reading for tabletop, aside from rulebooks. All you need is an open mind and you can be an effective roleplayers regardless of cultural context.

> The kids these days!

OP, it's happened. You've lived too long. A euthanasia team is on its way.

Gardens of the Moon doesn't assume you should know the obscure terms they use though.

I wish more people were like you.

>seeing someone who doesn't know something
>actually teaching the thing to that person
>not just calling them retards and complaining about the quality of players

Are you sure you're on the right board...?

Faggot.

Yeah that sounds about right. You're a pretentious, elitist shitbag.

Oh so you're that kinda person. Here's what you do for every noun and verb you would use just pop open an online thesaurus and randomly pick shit to replace each word with, bonus points if its origin is not in the languge you speak! Present subsequently Performing the Ancient Ruse in the Tome you can claim to be a literary great like old Gaigax! He went out of his way to find words no one actually used or understood in English to make everything seem neater like a fucking 12 year old.

Seriously words are for fucking communication if you're using shit that no one but you uses and you expect others to magically have your upbringing in purple prose for the sake of elitist purple prose you deserve all the mental anguish.. sorry all the immaterial dole you get. Maybe the reason you found mystery in it was because you were a stupid minor and were easily amused by things that didn't matter. Kinda like players who need to make unique sequences of letters and various punctuation to make their unique special elf/orc/halfling/noble human name.

>There is no such thing as required reading for tabletop, aside from rulebooks. All you need is an open mind and you can be an effective roleplayers regardless of cultural context.
You're the reason that games like munchkin and video game simulators are the only thing that survives now. If everything players have is just consumption and no imagining or trying to figure out what the situation is they'll just have a boring mind that requires shit to play itself with no input from them besides how to best kill shit.

Yet at the same time, you're using OoC information to access IC knowledge that you wouldn't otherwise have.

And the reason I say this is because if the GM gives you something and you're expected to know what it is, the GM should be able to fucking tell you what the thing is without you having to use a smartphone in the first place.

Nice.both of you

Yes, god forbid someone decides to have a life and not wake up at the tender age of 40, still in their mother's basement.