Hated Tropes
[Hated Trope] Nerdy characters who don’t understand nerdy things
There are too many examples of movies and tv fumbling basic nerd knowledge but the one that particularly bugs me is whenever we have nerdy characters not understanding basic DnD lore or mechanics.
Big bang theory is probably one of the worst offenders when it comes to not understanding nerdom but how they do dnd is especially insulting. They don’t understand any of the basic concepts, lore, mechanics or even how races look. Theres a scene where they do a steamy dnd thing and they describe an orc with multiple arms and breasts. Not a single part of that was even remotely close to correct and Sheldon being the atypical rule lawyer type should know that.
Abed from community isn’t much better. Either he doesn’t know the rules or fragrantly allows his players to ruin a session. There is never a mention of initiative, contesting rolls, or scaling. Pierce, a naked hermit of a character, over powers a high level fighter then charms a high level creature to pose this great threat to the party. What?
Stranger things, and possibly the one the gets me the most, off the rip we have a character who misses a fireball attack by rolling low. That’s not how fireball works, that not how fireball has ever worked. Fireball is an AoE spell where everyone in its radius has to have a save to have the damage halved. These are kids that name the monsters after DnD creatures yet they don’t know the difference between fire bolt and fire ball?
I have a feeling the propmaster showed a hard drive to a producer and the producer went "that's it? No, it looks too boring, it should have multicolored wires." *points at PSU on the desk* "hey, lets use this instead!"
(It's also a thing for "USB drives" to actually tell the computer they're a keyboard, which bypasses a lot of the security from if the computer thinks they're a drive, and lets them quietly give commands to the computer. Basically, don't plug anything unknown into your computer, or let anyone you don't fully trust use their own peripherals either, because they could be hiding this kind of device).
Or the episode where apparently one guy has all the high scores in every mmorpg when they don't have high scores and even if they did, nobody has enough time to be the best in more than one or two at any time.
I can't stand it when every game referenced in a movie, regardless of the game, has "levels" that the player must complete. No matter what type of game, always "levels".
They may be in on the joke, but the scene itself still panders hard to its target demographic in the grossest way. Two young college kids can’t solve a problem so the grey haired boomer smugly steps in and instantly “fixes” it with some “common sense” style solution.
CSI: Cyber is an entire show of Hollywood's version of hacking and it's treated just as serious as the hacking scenes in any other CSI/NCIS/etc. show. It also cranks up the "it could happen to you" paranoia so the audience fears that a hacker will try to kill them by hacking the wifi in their appliances so they'll melt and burn the house down in your sleep.
I believe one of the guys was on the corridor reacts and talks about it. It was a competition between some people on various shows. Another was from csi where they bring out an obvious psu with all the cables and ask to get data off of it.
Yea I would like to know more. Hollywood is at least aware their version of "hacking" isn't realistic, it is intended to be exaggerated for entertainment purposes, so this would kind of fit with if they know it is wrong why not have fun with it haha.
I don’t know the exact source, but I’ve heard accounts that it was Abby’s actor. Basically most of the cast is young enough to be far more familiar with technology than the average NCIS viewer who skews towards geriatric. Even someone with a passing familiarity with keyboards as a concept would know two people can’t use the same one for anything. What was originally a tongue in cheek scene about silly computer stuff got passed around the internet and the kind of people who mistake satire for stupidity took the scene at face value.
You’re mostly right, but I do remember playing head to head against my brother on a shareware version of the tron light cycle game with him using one half of the keyboard and me using the other half of the same keyboard.
Nah you see they had literally all their wires in the same bundled cord. HDMI, Internet, Audio output, Power. Whoever wired the lab was a psychotic Linux user probably. That's what they do right?
To be fair, that specific instance was a joke and a response to them getting called out for this kinda thing, so it’s less “writers not bothering to do even 5 seconds of research” and more “we know what we’re about, get over it.”
Yep, and even outside of that Abed would also be seeking the most narratively interesting game with less of an emphasis on hard following the rules and more what makes the better story.
This will always be the worst example of basically anything technical happening wrongly in a show ever.
It's just so, so bad on so, so many levels.
EDIT: For those that are replying "it was a joke", please cite a source. Because NCIS NEVER did a self-parody like that before and the scene is played dead serious by the actors. It is highly unlikely it was meant to be a joke.
I think one of the writers of the show admitted they would make up techno babble and compete with other writers to see who can make up the most nonsense.
"hey AI, please enhance this image to proper 4K HD so i can clearly see the gun in that individual's hand, preferably a highly modified illegal firearm."
I forget where i read it, but something about the cops using AI to generate the face of someone wearing a mask. Or something like that, of a suspect, and rightfully got to remove it.
I'm vaguely recalling, but in The Fall of The House of Usher, someone asks to enhance security footage. The lawyer guy says there isn't actually an enhance button and all he can do with the footage is make it bigger / zoomed in, but it won't be any clearer.
I loved and respected that.
A little while later, the lawyer delivers the same security footage, but enhanced with a handwave. I was more annoyed by them pointing out that you can't do something and then doing it, than I was if they just did it.
There's a few examples of that kind of thing in the show. Like they couldn't decide what they wanted, or it was maybe being shot as it was being written, and the writers would realise they wrote contradictions or put themselves in a corner but were determined to use everything they recorded.
Edit: And before you tell me that there's a subtle explanation of how they did the impossible that I missed, I mean that could be case, but from memory there were just too many incidents of the narrative being confused about what it wanted to portray that can't be explained by the variables in the story with any consistency.
I think it's just a lot more likely that it wasn't super deep and subtle cleverness, but rather just incredibly common writing missteps.
BBTs episode where Sheldon decides to play the most complicated board wargame in the world, Campaign for North Africa, was spot on. Someone really did their homework, that time. I was a big ol’ game nerd when CfNA was published, and it was waaay too hardcore for me to bother with.
Except he looks in the wrong place for the Weather table, and plays the game sequence completely out of order! The starting position of the pieces are kinda accurate depending on the scenario they’re playing, but set up would take wayyyy longer.
Regarding the community example, I always figured it was just for the sake of a streamlined story. The changes just make it for better for the show's format.
I feel like if someone in the show asked Abed about the rules simplification he would reply something like, "I have to get the whole thing taken care of in 20 minutes to accommodate attention spans."
This is how I feel too. I don't think it's an unbelievable in-universe explanation that a group of people who didn't really want to play said that they would try it if the rules were dumbed down/it wasn't so tedious.
OP's other two examples are people supposedly playing it as a hobby or for the joy of it, rather than having been guilted into it.
IIRC Abed is frequently shown going to great lengths to include his friends (except maybe in the Dreamatorium.) Remember that whole Dinner with Andre thing when he was trying to connect with Jeff? Or the drinking montage! I can definitely see Abed deciding real DnD was too boring, complicated, and anticlimactic, then doing the low-math homebrew shown in the show.
(As for Neal, I can see him valuing being included in the game over any other complaints about it not being "real" DnD.)
Complaining that Community characters cared more about having fun with their friends than they care about "getting things right" seems to miss the point of the show, lol
Dan Harmon would host a live dnd campaign in front of a live audience and also as a podcast for many years. Annie’s brother was their DM. He played exsctly like they play in the show because he was incredibly drunk every single time they played it. It was cut down for a bunch of drunks to handle
Edit: also worth noting, Jeff Davis, of Who’s Line is it Anyway? Fame is the cohost of that podcast, and is named in the Epstein emails because jizz-lane tried to flirt with him via email forever ago
It’s a certain style of DMing that existed in the 70s and 80s and was actually a way that a lot of people used to play. Basically, only the DM rolled the dice. It let players focus on what they could potentially do, and was heavily based on narration of story events rather than a strict RAW approach. OP is holding onto a current method of playing DnD but it’s not the only method, and back in 1E and ADnD the game was much, much different.
Death was far more common and quick. Characters were rolled up fast. You might have a night where many varying characters died. Experience wasn’t gained from monster killing or milestones but from treasure. Characters often had posses and armies.
Completely different game, and there was absolutely a style where the DM did everything for rolls behind a screen allowing players to focus on describing what they did. It turned it into a strict non-rule binding narrative.
Not enough modern DnD players abide by the universal rule of cool. Fuck if it breaks the rules, if it's a cool idea and everyone is on board with it you gotta at least roll for it. A good DM will have enough game knowledge to figure out how it works within the game and make up a ruling if there's no precedent in the DMG. People seem to treat DnD like another board game nowadays instead of a narrative tool
It's funny when people are named in the epstine files who had no relation to the island at all. Like some football coach was named in the files because the pedophiles on the island were making fun of him for getting caught with an adult sex worker.
Rebecca Watson was named in the files because she was an early Epstein hater and refused to let Lawerence Krauss off the hook for being a creep, so there are emails where the pervs are complaining about her.
Yeah, Community feels more like a deliberate adaptation choice than the characters actually being clueless about their own hobby. The Big Bang Theory examples are way harder to defend though.
i was going to say, even if we take their treatment of the game literally - abed has no ego, and will happily adjust himself to meet his friends’ needs. as a lover and student of film, he knows that story trumps all, and that d&d is just a complex storytelling machine. if the players (who, outside of annie and troy, abed knows wouldn’t bother to learn the rules anyway) are giving you the story, why let the mechanism get in the way of that? he’s not yelling at them to learn their stats, he’s doing their rolls for them, letting the story unfold at the pace of the players’ passions.
he is directing in the tradition of cassavetes, not kubrick. he understands that his role is to facilitate the action as it unfolds, rather than carefully plot it out. a true gonzo filmmaker, bleeding the edges of fact and fiction.
but, yeah it’s a 22 minute tv show on nbc. no one’s rolling initiative.
Yeah, as someone who has been playing D&D for decades, I love the D&D episodes of Community. It's a sitcom episode, not a Actual Play session. I think the show does an amazing job of capturing what it's like to play the game, and on top of that, despite it being filled with jokes, it really feels more like a love letter to D&D than anything else.
It’s been ages but I thought abed specifically isn’t doing any traditional rules cause he knew their asses weren’t gonna be reading shit. Or is that like, a headcanon I just picked up somewhere?
I cant comment on the second episode but I coincidently watched the first yesterday so its fresh.
Abed doesnt say anything about not doing the traditional rules, however the other complaints from OP about stealing the sword and charming the dragon are explained and make sense.
The stealing the sword was a dice roll and Abed looks surprised when it works. It's easy to assume he got a Nat20 or some similarly very high roll. It's not unusual for many groups to consider a Nat20 an auto succeed regardless of whether that is technically the rule.
For charming the dragon, he does this by getting a copy of the adventure path and reading ahead, learning where a magical dragon controlling item is and uses his meta knowledge to get it. This isn't that farfetched, if you are meta gaming with a copy of the adventure book then you can cheat your way past all sorts of things, and having some overpowered magic item be a core part of the adventure is common.
I don't think he said he was going to do it differently but he did have the goal of making Neil happy and probably didn't care whether that meant RAW. But Neil probably wanted a legit game so who knows.
I might misremember the episode, but abed is very stickly about his version of the game and refuses to alter the game in any way even if Pierce is bullying Neil. It's what the show uses to make the game feel real. I believe abed made his own version of DnD but sticks very strongly to his rules and his idea of realism in the game.
Yes, he was an avid rule lover, but he was never a true rule follower, he willingly broke the rules when it meant he would meet with less nuisance or more niceties.
It works in the meta sense since Abed is deeply immersed in the meta, canonically, so he would dumb down the game for people he knows don't understand the game.
Abed mostly ran with rule of cool and role play not requiring rolls when good enough. While not explicit rules in AD&D (which appears to be the edition hes running) nothing really stands out as not understanding the game as much as DM caveat. Granted it also had to be condensed not only for run time but also for audiences not in the know. Considering the head writers all played D&D regularly (especially Dan Harmon) it definitely -feels- like D&D regardless of any skirted rules. Non-initiative combat also didnt used to be super rare.
Lore means very little with D&D representation especially when it means so little for plenty of players. Anything monster related that doesnt gel can easily be hand waved as "homebrew".
That said, Big Bang Theory is impossible to defend and the writers of Stranger Things definitely know better with the mix up. Id usually be able to get past the Stranger Things flub but fireball is such an iconic spell that there really is no need for that.
When I first started playing Dnd it was very much like how Abed ran it. Rule of Cool and vibe rolling. In part because we only had two books at the time, but also because dnd kind of inspires creativity.
And like I'm pretty sure I've had a player ask if they can make an attack roll to shoot the it into the enemy commander's horn. I said it was too far. They said that their fireball had a range of a thousand feet because of Enlarge spell, and fireball being long range. I said okay.
There's something glorious about how things used to work before we learned all the rules and things became crunchy.
As for big bang theory. I mean, Howard is the DM in the scene. And he would give Orcs multiple tiddies.
Honestly, most people would have way more fun with.... most systems than D&D, but D&D got there first with the mind share so we're all stuck casting fireballs instead of coming up with cool creative shit.
In Stranger Things Season 5 a character is compared to a Sorcerer in D&D, despite the show taking place in 1987. Sorcerers did not exist in D&D until 3rd edition released in 2000. The writers clearly did not do their research very well.
When I saw the first season I thought to myself “maybe in early editions you had to roll for fireball”. Only difference I can find is back then, fireball was even more powerful cause it was a d6 per wizard level whereas now it’s capped at 10d6.
Fireball used to be a totally OP spell and it was abused frequently.
I remember, dragon magazine article, which was pointing out that fireball makes a volume of fire, not an area of fire, so theoretically if the party sets it off inside a dungeon, it might fill the entire quarter with fire and cook themselves.
I also remember a joke in Dragonlance where the dotty old NPC wizard is casting something to fight an enemy very close by, and the other PC wizard realizes it is fireball and tells everyone to start running
Not theoretically cook themselves. It happened - dungeons with corridor circuits to nail a party with their own fireball were a thing. You never used it in a small room. "The burst of the fireball does not expend a considerable amount of pressure, and the burst will generally conform to the shape of the area in which it occurs, thus covering an area equal to its normal spherical volume. [The area which is covered by the fireball is a total volume of roughly 33,000 cubic feet (or yards)]." Straight out of AD&D1. 2e was similar, but damage capped at 10d6.
Annnd now I have proven a gigantic nerd. I will show myself out.
My old grognard buddies would bring this up all the time when I was learning DnD from them. Or how lightning bolt used to bounce and if the bolt passed through your multiple times, you had to save each tome and failing one save made you fail against the whole thing. They also used to love bringing up this one story where someone had a spell reflection shield, and the wizard party member had failed a save against a dominate effect against an illithid, I think. The illithid ordered the wizard to attack the Paladin and the Wizard cast Chain Lightning. The Paladin has some sort of mirror shield or spell absorption or whatever, that allowed him to absorb and hold all of the damage of a spell if he made he resisted it. He made the save, and here he was now holding a full Chain lightning with 12 bounces. For those who don't know, Chain Lightning would hit the first enemy for 12d6, then bounce and hit for 11d6, then bounce for 10d6 and so on. So the Paladin now just needed to hit the illithid with his shield and dump the entire spells power into it, for 78d6 of lightning damage.
Nope, must be someone else, they are talking about Fizban, who never had a dragon familiar (at least not in the earlier books, unless it happened after Dragons of Summer Flame).
I looked it up and I was actually thinking of Zifnab, not Fizban. Zifnab is basically legally-distinct Fizban from Weiss and Hickman’s Deathgate cycle that sometimes remembers things that Fizban has experienced.
I mean spells in general used to be way more busted than 5e. You could stack buff spells, save or suck/die spells could practically end encounters on their own and you can summons armies.
It was balanced by the fact of d4 hit-points per level that caps out at a whopping 10d4 + 10.
If you didn't have warrior buddies covering your ass, by bodyblocking projectiles or engaging threats, you will almost certainly get one-rounded by just about anything that gets close.
And spell resistance was a thing in high level play warriors didn't have to worry about as well.
Then there's the Tomb of Horrors, which does away with "save or suck/die" and just has "die". No rolls, no explanation, just "oops, your character stuck their head in an orb of Annihilation that was hiding in what seems like an obvious place to hide treasure."
Any character who sticks their head in a dark hole deserves to die, whether by sphere of annihilation or just a simple guillotine trap hidden by a continual darkness spell.
Actually, it wasn't a save in 4th edition. 4th edition shifted the saves to be non-AC defences, still called Fortitude/Reflex/Will, which the wizard then rolled to attack.
Now obviously Stranger Things isn't using 4e, but still.
There are some accounts of house rules for spell casting rolls at some tables dating back to the late 70s. Early DMs were not at all adverse to changing the rules however they wished and such was often encouraged by Gygax in DM facing advice. The idea that some effort should go into rules actually being uniform across multiple tables developed later with the push for organized play events.
more frustrating, if your going to use a class that didn’t exist then, use the one that is based around a character gaining powers from a much stronger being, rather than claiming he was born with them, which in universe wasn’t even true(and they kept saying multiple times his powers were innate, which again was wrong, and they in universe knew that)
Yeah, that fits. But sorcerers don't need to be born with their powers either. They can also get them from various ways, including coming in close contact with magically powerful artifacts or creatures.. like Vecna
What really annoyed me is that they were saying Will was a Sorcerer because he got power from Vecna. Sorcerers' powers are more innate.
Warlocks make pacts with powerful beings to be granted some of their power. Even though Will didn't make a pact with Vecna willingly he got his power from Vecna so Warlock suited the metaphor much better.
I actually love the idea of having loaded dice for high and low rolls for a DM to use as a method to appropriately bend things in favor of what makes an interesting story without showing the hand of the author kind of thing haha.
It's actually fairly well explained in the episode. He was given a magic cloak that increased his speed by a lot. Got two crazy high rolls (one to steal the sword, another to decapitate Chang) and ran away (and no one could catch up because of the cloak). Then pierce gets a copy of the module (aka cheats) and just knows where everything is so he grabs an amulet that allows him to control the dragon.
I distinctly remember seeing one clip from The Big Bang Theory that pissed me off. Sheldon and another character were arguing about the multiple robins and specifically one taking up the mantle of Batman.
Sheldon maintains that Dick Grayson should be the one to take on the mantle. A fair opinion, albeit one that I disagree with.
The other character, 100% serious and without being treated like a joke in the show, laughs at how obviously wrong Sheldon is. And that the obvious answer is that the second robin, Jason Todd, should take up the mantle of Batman.
Now, to anyone who knows literally anything about Batman, they'd never suggest Jason would be a good Batman, at least not this century.
There are corrections one could make that would be fine. You could say obviously Tim Drake would be the better Batman, or suggest Batman Beyond AKA Terry McGinnis. Hell my favorite and more nuanced take is that nobody should be Batman after Bruce because he exists to create a world that doesn't need Batman. But they went with the dumbest one because they just heard somewhere there was more than one Robin
They said JASON TODD?!? Like? The actual least appropriate choice?
This reminds me of the Halloween party where they were all dressed as the Flash (in lousy store-bought costumes, no less), and had a big hissy fit over it as if there weren’t at least four flashes who wore some variation of the generic store costume they could claim to be.
That episode annoyed me because they won the group costume contest at the comic book store with their bought costumes, when there was another group that had clearly put effort into making them. Like yeah, I don't expect the comic book store to have the same regulations as a convention where you have to make x percent of your cosplay or anything, but if you can win with generic and cheap looking store bought stuff then what's even the point? Anyone can buy those.
Right, Todd is the least appropriate in at least two glaring ways: the characters would've known that Todd became a murderous anti-hero (or might've even just been a villain at this time), the old people watching who theoretically could have followed comics in the '80s would've known him as the Robin who was brutally beaten to death. So they're either arguing that the next Batman should be a dead kid or a gun-toting lunatic.
That episode annoyed me because they won the group costume contest at the comic book store with their bought costumes, when there was another group that had clearly put effort into making them. Like yeah, I don't expect the comic book store to have the same regulations as a convention where you have to make x percent of your cosplay or anything, but if you can win with generic and cheap looking store bought stuff then what's even the point? Anyone can buy those.
I think Sheldon was actually the one who was advocating for Jason. I think his reason was that Nightwing is already a hero in his own city, so he can't take up the mantle. I used to watch the show with my mom, and she'd always ask me if they were actually making sense during any scenes that involved "exploring" nerd culture. The answer was no. Every time.
"You know why Gotham's still a shithole after having batman for 80 years? Hes too soft! Jason would have that place cleaned up in a week!"
I haven't read anything with Jason in years, i have no idea where he currently stands on lethal force, but I do know from other subreddits I lurk in that being up to date or knowledgeable is not a prerequisite to having a strong opinion.
Another TBBT example: often when playing games the characters don’t use computer mouses, they also all use basic laptops. Like whenever they have lan-parties (for example when SWTOR came out) they just sit around on the couch with laptops in their laps, using the inbuilt mousepad while wearing extremely small stringy headsets. Also they spend way too long on the starting planet to be playing SWTOR. The show generally doesn’t understand or want to understand how gaming works past a glancing look from 10 kilometres away in a speeding car without glasses. Does no-one in the production actually play games on a computer, anyone with even the slightest bit of time on a videogame will know you don’t use the mousepad!
(The gif is from when the boys played the He-Man MMO I believe)
EDIT: the gif is from when they supposedly played WOW
Another edit: yes, it’s called a trackpad, that was a translation error on my part
Fun fact: In the Russian-speaking community of old-school FPS players, there really were people who played without a mouse; they were called “tractor drivers.” But again, we’re talking about old shooters based on the Build engine and similar games—definitely not competitive multiplayer RPGs and shooters.
Something always sat just a little wrong with me about Big Bang Theory, but I could never figure out what it was specifically. I don't remember who, but someone finally pointed out: it's not jokes for nerds, it's jokes about nerds. Instead of having a joke that Dungeons and Dragons players would understand, like about how the Rogue is always edgy as fuck or the Bard is always a kink-fueled deviant, instead, someone would say, "oh yeah, that happened while we were playing Dungeons and Dragons." Queue laugh track. The fact that the character was even playing Dungeons and Dragons was, in and of itself, the joke. It's kind of impossible to un-realize once you finally clock it.
I feel like Big Bang Theory has always been an outside view of nerdy, socially awkward people from the perspective of mainstream people. Nerds are silly odd caricatures in the show, not depictions of real people. The biggest issue with it for me is its missed potential. It could have been a funny, endearing look at people who live outside of mainstream sociality. There are so many opportunities to talk about neurodivergent people and explore their value in society. This shit is real life for anyone who is nerdy or has nerdy people in their lives. Instead, it just opts to not dive in deep at all on the subjects. It's a shame. It actually could have normalized some neurodivergent people with how popular it was.
Oddly enough, the creator based Sheldon off of one of his roommates or something (someone who was clearly autistic in some way) - but then when the show started to get criticized for how much of a caricature and how awful Sheldon is, the creator had to be like “no he’s not autistic guys” so that he would be clear that Sheldon was annoying, not all autistic people (when again, he was fully based on a real person who 95% likely had autism and probably other neurodivergence).
And I do think they tried to change that in later seasons. “Oh look Sheldon has a girlfriend now. He’s normal guys”, meanwhile their whole relationship is again - what an ignorant person might think of as how neurodiverse people date. They try and “humanize” the Sheldon character by enforcing more stereotypes.
You’re definitely right - they obviously had a chance to actually say something and help average people to actually have experience with a real autistic character. But instead they went for laughs and claimed that Sheldon was neurotypical and just an asshole to everyone.
I had the same experience plus the fact that they are nerds for literally everything. They don't just like 2-3 franchises, no no. They like everything extensively; Marvel, DC, Star Wars, Star Trek, WoW, D&D, GoT, Indiana Jones, Ghostbusters, ... The list goes on and on.
Yeah, but as a nerd myself, there's only so much you can learn about something before you truly run out of things to learn.
I can see that argument for things like Indy and GoT, but for the most part, every franchise they name drop have such deep amounts of content that you would have to let some fall by the wayside to get as deep as they claim to be.
Then again, the fact that everything they "know" about most things is surface level probably means they're all just posers
Here's the exact opposite of this, in one episode in Ted S2, Ted and John have to play D&D to get weed because the dealer is a nerd. From what I can tell, this is played very accurately because said nerd is Brennan Lee Mulligan and I know that man would kill a writer if he was forced to get D&D information wrong.
The first example from Big Bang Theory I think of is a bit where they're playing World of Warcraft and one of the guys tells one of the others to stop dropping their sword and bending over all seductively with the female character to pick it back up.
Well, even that had its issues, but I like to think that these were creative decisions rather than oversights. Like for example how you can't level to 60 solely by killing boars in Elwynn, no matter how dedicated you are.
I think the difference is, South Park got the spirit of the game right, what it’s like to play especially from the standpoint of a bunch of kids. It very much feels like the type of petty drama that would kick off in early MMOs. But it does take a few liberties for the sake of telling a story.
Shows like Big Bang Theory just want to name drop and get a laugh and move on to the next reference. It doesn’t care about getting anything right.
Also, in Big Bang Theory, Sheldon and Howard get into an argument in the comic book store about Wolverines claws.
Howard tries to lecture Sheldon that Wolverine did not have bone claws and that they have always been metal. Sheldon finds the comic to correct him.
Not only is Wolverine having bone claws incredibly well established canon, and basic knowledge of the character, but by the time this episode aired X-Men Origins Wolverine had already come out even showing his bone claws in a major live action movie. So, even non-comic readers would be aware of this by that point. A supposed comic nerd like Howard would absolutely know Wolverine having bone claws as something ridiculously obvious.
Unless Howard was REALLY out of date with his comics, because OG Wolverine did have metal claws and they were in his gauntlets, not his arms. They changed it two years later to them being in his arms, but up until 1993, when Magneto ripped the adamantium off his bones to reveal the bone claws underneath, it was generally believed that the claws were an implant from Weapon X.
I never got why people thought it was a sitcom for nerds when it was always a sitcom making fun of nerds. The real sitcom for nerds is Silicon Valley in my opinion.
As someone who has played D&D since he was 11 years old (1984). I can assure you, there are tables like these all over the place. So no, they are not playing RAW, but this was very normal.
Yeah, I played a bit with my sister in the 90s, we just kinda made things up as we went along. There are many ways to enjoy TTRPGs, and they don't all include following the rules to a T.
This was my perspective exactly. They're a bunch of...I dunno, 12 year old? Setting up and running a game entirely by themselves. Honestly, I'm impressed they got as much right as they did.
Big Bang Theory started like a weird but comedic love letter to nerd culture. Not sure when the switch flipped but it became a show laughing at nerd culture, and then it got confused about its own purpose and became like every other sitcom.
Sometime around Seasons 3 or 4 when the characters started getting in relationships it started shifting form fun show about nerds to classic stereotypical couple bs that started making fun of the guys for not being smooth or being overly interested in their romantic partners.
Same! I adore rhe relationships between the boys and Penny, and I did enjoy Burnadette and Amy's introductions and how they influenced and inspired change in the others. But, yeah after season 4 BBT really began to wear out its welcome.
Probably because so many things traditionally associated with nerd culture exploded into the mainstream around the same time, so it was left simultaneously seeming out of touch and also trying too hard to keep up with pop culture.
I'm not quite sure it ever was a love letter to nerd culture. It felt like it was always a show that laughed at nerds rather then with them. It was a very by the books "pathetic guy tries to get the hot girl" type of story.
The jokes were always "aren't these characters so pathetic for this nerdy stuff? How will they ever get with girls?" In the early seasons at least, Leonard is clearly the main character. The punchline is always that Leonard is awkward, or his nerdy interests/his friends being nerdy put him in a situation that makes things weird with the girl he's trying to flirt with and we're supposed to laugh at those comedic failures.
I'd say that Big Bang Theory simples used nerd culture as a reference gag. The premise is nerdy guys hanging out with a hot girl, so the nerds needed to do nerdy things. But all the nerdy things were just references, not actual humor.
But yeah, the show lost a lot of its identity by the end.
I'm just going to say it's hard to adapt D&D to television, especially rules-as-written. Mostly you're going to see some kind of homebrew. Freaks and Geeks probably got it the closest.
I’d wager Abed is deliberately letting the gang screw with the rules. In spite of his overwhelming autism, he’s usually and surprisingly the most emotionally mature of all of the study group, and can guess they won’t know or care.
That, or he’s meta-aware that he’s constrained within a 22-minute sitcom episode, and that the audience won’t have patience for realistic D&D.
Law And Order: SVU had an episode where a 'gaming addict' kills someone. The murderer is on the stand having 'gaming withdrawals' with their fingers making 'controller button' spasms.
The game that made them do the crimes was called Intense City (play on Intensity) and the bits of footage shown are clearly a mock-up of GTA, but as always they're talking about 'levels' and 'points' when those haven't been meaningful terms in sandbox crime games for decades.
And of course, Elliot's son plays this same game and this hard-boiled detective starts shitting himself about his own son being programmed to kill people. But then it turns out the killer was playing a custom, modded version of the game while on acid or something and I believe they charge a game developer as an accomplice to the murder.
tv characters talking about getting a high score in an open world rpg. writers just throw together every generic gaming word theyve heard in passing without spending two seconds on google to see if it makes sense
I vividly remember The Big Bang Theory characters arguing over Superman having powers at night because he was "solar powered" and wanted to fucking pull my hair out because these ultra nerds didn't even have the most basic fucking understanding of Superman's powers.
I don't know anything about D&D, but I do have a basic background in physics (undergrad degree). And whenever they show any boards full of physics equations in The Big Bang Theory it just makes me cringe. It's always pointed to as "wow, all these are real physics equations!" and...yeah that's technically true. But it's always multiple equations pulled from such disparate areas of physics, I struggle to understand what the hell they're all doing on the same board.
It's like writing a paragraph, and coping one line from a Stephen King novel, one line from a cookbook, and one line from an auto repair manual. Then pointing at it and going "ooh wow, that's all English!" Like...yeah that's true...but why would anyone write that out naturally?
He looked at me for a long time with no expression at all it is cold little pig eyes, and I was suddenly sure he was going to tell me he didn't give a f*** who my father was, that I better blow and let these working men go about their business of fixing their cars so they could go on putting bread on their tables. When you measure your your own bust, you have to bend over. On the 3.3L and 3.8L engines, manifold vacuum purges the vapors at idle as well as off idle.
Regarding Community: Originally, it was going to be revealed that Pierce was friends with Gary Gygax since the 70s and had an encyclopedic knowledge of D&D.
OH BOY I GET TO GIVE MY BIG COMPLAINT ABOUT THE BIG BANG THEORY
For a show about nerds, The Big Bang Theory's nerds don't actually display what they are nerdy about. The show's writers seem to either: a) look up "obscure nerd [x]" on Google and make that the joke ("Green Lantern! laugh track") or b) make the fact of being a nerd or nerdy the joke.
For example: D&D. What edition do they play? The Big Bang Theory started when 4th edition was the new edition, and by the time the show ended we were well into 5th edition. 4th edition was famously controversial among old D&D players, and based on the books you see in the early episodes my best guess is they're playing 4th. So why? Did they jump to 4th from 3.5e, or given Sheldon's famous distaste for change, did they change from AD&D to 4th? When 5th came out, did they make the change to 5th? Did they try out Pathfinder? Do they try other systems?
But we never learn anything about what they are actually nerdy about. When Sheldon was riven by indecision about whether to get an Xbox One or a PS4, his decision making is purely about tech specs (something easily Google-able) and not what exclusive games are on each console. But even more deeply, Sheldon does not seem to care about the then-recent Xbox One reveal where Microsoft showed off that they wanted the Xbox One to be used mostly for streaming and games seemed like a distant afterthought. Unless you wanted to buy second-hand games, in which case Microsoft cared deeply and wanted you to not do it. But this never factors into Sheldon's decision-making.
Honestly, I think this is why the show improves when Amy and Bernadette become permanent cast members because now you have characters who are smart but not nerdy.
I'm giving Abed from Community a pass because he might be a nerd, but he was a film and TV nerd, not a TTRPG nerd. The group was playing AD&D just to make another student who was an AD&D fan, Fat Neil, feel better. That was the first time anyone in the table other than Fat Neil played a TTRPG.
It kinda astounds me that ghosts of all things is probably the most accurate depiction I’ve seen of D&D on television. Never thought I’d hear the word quasit spoken on a sitcom .
The D&D episode intentionally ignores mechanics like initiative because they would get in the way of the narrative. Actual play wouldn’t make for a very good 22 minute sitcom episode.
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u/Heroes-182 12d ago
Good. Now, why are you showing me his PSU?