Just for laughs...

This brought back a lot of memories, nostalgia, and pointless self indulgent reflection. Thank you.

I know it's not as a stupid but I was about 13 we were playing a very crude homemade RPG (if a player tried something, they'd a d20 and a 15-20 always succeeds, 1-5 always fails, 6-14 depends on the GM's mood MAYBE taking in consideration where the character put their proficiency in to figure out.), I was running it. Anyway it was futuristic with aliens and spaceships but also wizards and ninjas.

So a player's futuristic ninja threw an enemy into another enemy. We had a long inconclusive discussion on who would take more damage. "The thrown, or the thrown upon."

That's right, at thirteen I used "upon" in regular conversation! The conversation was mostly us patting ourselves on the back for using a sophisticated word. Perhaps this planted the seeds for me irking coworkers, distant family members and slight acquaintances who take askance at my erudite parlance.

Over Christmas, my younger cousin caught me when I was drowsy. I was using a tool in a mildly unorthodox fashion. My cousin called me on it.

I said "it does the job."
She said "You are not going to say, 'it accomplishes the designated function."

It was at this point I realized my cousin was upping the complexity of her vocabulary all night when not talking to me, but no one else, and I had not realized it.

Ultimately I ruled that both enemies would take the same damage, but now that I revisited this at age 37, the age of Dennis. I am still running a homemade RPG, but this time with 100 pages of rules. I still improvise things a lot. I would now rule that if both the thrown and the thrown upon weigh roughly the same, the thrown would receive more damage than the thrown upon. Both the thrown and the thrown upon would be damaged by the initial collision, but only the thrown would also take high momentum fall damage.

That's how much wisdom I've gained in 24 years of playing homemade and published RPGs.


When you have your own fantasy setting, I can hand wave the aerodynamics of a cow. My fantasy world literally has different laws of physics. The laws of gravity itself are subject to my slightest whims. Just look whenever I say SCIENCE! Cows on Scarterras fly exactly as well as I say so, no more no less.