Breakfast Topic: Rerolling our roots
The question arose in the WoW official forums "Why do they call it 'rolling?'" This is of course in reference to creating new characters. The original poster pointed out that there really is no rolling involved just selection. I'm sure its obvious to most of us that the terms comes from pen and paper role playing games where we roll dice to determine character statistics and sometimes other attributes. But it got me thinking of terms that we use for WoW that came from other games:
The battleground Zerg comes from Starcraft's Zerg race which was kind of a fast, battle driven faction.
DKP is short for Dragon Kill Points, a term that dates back to EverQuest when the main bosses were dragons.
Nerf means to make things less powerful, and refers to the Nerf brand of spongy toys.
For some reason we refer to instances as dungeons, despite the fact that Stockades is the only actual dungeon that comes to mind. Though I have to admit, even in D&D dungeon crawls were typically done in caves or castles.
It's surprising how terms seem to stick with us even when they're obsolete. Speaking of rolling, when was the last time you actually rolled down a window in a car?
It's good to go back and remember out gaming roots. I'm sure there are many more crossover terms, and terms from the World of Warcraft lexicon like Leroy Jenkins, will out live Azeroth. For the life of me I can't find the etiology of the term "twink." What else am I missing?
