How 'dawizards' cast a spell on D&D
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 ก.พ. 2024
- Hannah Fry, Brian David Gilbert and Lily Hevesh discuss a question about worrisome wizards.
LATERAL is a comedy panel game podcast about weird questions with wonderful answers, hosted by Tom Scott. For business enquiries, contestant appearances or question submissions, visit www.lateralcast.com
GUESTS:
Hannah Fry: / fryrsquared
Brian David Gilbert: @briandavidgilbert, / briamgilbert
Lily Hevesh: @Hevesh5, / hevesh5
HOST: Tom Scott.
QUESTION PRODUCER: David Bodycombe.
RECORDED AT: The Podcast Studios, Dublin.
EDITED BY: Julie Hassett.
GRAPHICS: Chris Hanel at Support Class. Assistant: Dillon Pentz.
MUSIC: Karl-Ola Kjellholm ('Private Detective'/'Agrumes', courtesy of epidemicsound.com).
FORMAT: Pad 26 Limited/Labyrinth Games Ltd.
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: David Bodycombe and Tom Scott.
© Pad 26 Limited (www.pad26.com) / Labyrinth Games Ltd. 2024. - บันเทิง
Is mage such a rare word? I'm surprised two people out of four didn't know it.
Same here 😂
I'm surprised as well, that I, as a non-native speaker and non-AD&D player, knew the word. I thought it was standard English.
@@AalbertTorsiusit is standard English, related to terms like magician and magic. Very common term within the specifics of fantasy, folklore, mythology, etc
i mean, it's in the bible, in a sense. Its term of origin is. The Magi.
Yup! A mage is a Zoroastrian priest @@littlesnowflakepunk855
Sharing this with friends has revealed how many people don’t know the meaning of the word “Mage”
I would have thought even people outside of roleplaying games and fantasy would have known mage and wizard are the same. Just from movies, TV and generally acquired knowledge. I guess not, at least not for two in the video and some of your friends. Do they know not know what a sorcerer is too?
Elwaves2925 I would imagine most do because of the whole issue with the first Harry Potter book having a different name in the USA than the rest of the world.
@@Elwaves2925 i can't say for sure since i grew up with warcraft and have always known what a mage is... but my guess is that sorceror and wizard are more mainstream? mage seems less so, maybe?
@@Elwaves2925 Like you say, the word 'mage' goes beyond mere 'fantasy literature' - it's been around for literally THOUSANDS of years - Jesus's birth was visited by three mag*i* (pl).
...I shouldn't be surprised that no one reads O. Henry anymore, though. :(
Yeah, that really surprised me. How do they not know what a "mage" is? As an alternative form of "magician" it's been around for a very long time. Sure, it's more popular in the fantasy genre, but it is a legitimate word in the English language...
"You cut me open and I bleed 'nerd'". This here.
But I would also expect everyone to know "mage" as a word.
yeah, does no one read O. Henry stories anymore???
I'd never heard of mage as a word. I almost immediately clocked it as a find and replace error, but had no clue what possible word it could've been.
On a T-shirt.
HOW@@Chillidude22
You would only encounter "mage" in dedicated fantasy settings. In most cases of common usage, you would more likely hear any other synonym used historically, magician, wizard, witch, sorcerer, etc. And in any given context you'd only need one of those, until you start trying to write fiction that pulls in various traditions with their ideas of what a magic user is.
My favorite example of this: in the UK edition of The Great Leader and the Fighter Pilot, they localized the book from American English to British English. So "pants" became "trousers" because in the UK "pants" means what we Americans would call "underpants". Unfortunately, "participants" became "particitrousers".
LOL
"I really like the word particitrousers"
Oh my god. That is FANTASTIC. 🤣
Another example of why you might want to include leading and/or trailing spaces in your find/replace query.
That last line had me laughing out loud so hard! :)
(Even though in my part of the US we just call them underwear, at least for men, even though that's more of a blanket term.)
This was actually a question on “Um, Actually”, speaking of dropout, also I just realised BDG now the new co host of that show
The mighty fact-checker
Oh, man, THAT is where I first learned it! I couldn't remember why I knew, I just knew 😅
He what? That's cool.
Was that more recently? I watched a lot of the older ones but I don't remember this one.
If it's on YT please link =)
its in the new season starting on the 27th@@HunterDigi
For anyone curious on how this came about:
In the earliest versions of D&D there were only 3 classes; fighting-man, magic-user, and cleric.
In Advanced Dungeons and Dragons(think of it as being D&D 1.5) this was mostly the same, but class names were simplified: Fighting-man became Fighter, Magic-user became Mage.
In AD&D 2nd edition a lot more classes were added and the classes were grouped based on play style(so fighters, paladins, and rangers were all now grouped as warrior classes; and more importantly mages, illusionists, and elementalists were all grouped under Wizard). A lot of the existing mage specific logic now applied to all wizard subclasses. The book having originally been written for first edition releasing so soon after second edition dropped underwent rapid changes to fit second edition including replacing all existing references to Mage with Wizard.
A few pedantic quibbles, apologies. Magic-User was still the in use term in 1st AD&D.
The groupings existed then as well. There is an errata that regrouped paladin from fighter to something called Cavalier (which had an early version of ASIs as a class exclusive).
And while subclass is a good analogy to 5E (because you couldn't multiclass anything within groups) it can cause misunderstandings.
Because those classes were still pretty distinct things. Rogue was used to encompass thief (which would take the name Rogue in modern parlance) and Bard.
Unsure of what you are saying about 2E at the end there. I agree with the 1.5 approach vs OD&D (the unconsolidated Chainmail Add-ons) however 2E had a Revised Edition.
Mostly that 2.5 was a marketing ploy because it came early and it was thought that a 3rd Edition would aggravate fans/players.
D&D had 7 classes. Fighter, Thief, Magic-User, Cleric, Elf, Dwarf, Halfling. (yes those last three were classes originally... Elf was basically a Fighter/Mage dual class, Dwarf was another type of more barbarian-ish fighter, and Halfling was another type of burglar/thief...)
more pedantry. 1.5 is a derogatory term used for the AD&D books that came after the first four AD&D books. What I think you were referring to when you say Fighting-man was OD&D (Original Dungeons and Dragons), the original pamphlets that gave rules that turned tabletop miniature battles into an adventure/roleplaying game.
@@MorinehtarTheBlue I think the relevant bit about the 2nd edition is that that's when "wizard" was standardized as the name for the class. And yeah, it wasn't exactly a mage->wizard change at that point, but "mage" is one of the words that got replaced with "wizard". It's not that TSR didn't do a lot more find-and-replace changes in source books for 2nd. It's just that mage->wizard specifically happened to bite them.
Wow remind me never to talk about old editions of d&d on the Internet
I was going to add more pedantry but I am not that confident in my knowledge
The first thing I thought about was Hungarian notation, something like "integer wizard" and "array of double wizards"
I laughed out loud at this, lol.
Careful with your wizard precision; when wizards overflow, you end up with way too many magical mouths to feed.
LOL
The reason wizards are rare and nerdy is that spells are written in Reverse Polish Notation. :-)
Hungarian notation.... welcome to Hell lol
I immediately knew it was a “clbuttic” mistake but I couldn’t figure out the specifics for most of the question
Ooh, i've always called it a Scunthorpe/S****horpe problem, but "Clbuttic" is way more fun
The mistake that buttbuttinates messages
This is confusing as someone that still uses the cloud to butt browser extension.
Tom Scott with BDG mentioning Dropout, the multiverse is finally connected
OMG YES !!
Clbuttic!
Knew this one immediatedly from it being mentioned in a "Um actually" episode
Maybe that's how I knew it.
Same! Love how BDG is going to be part of that show this upcoming season and was on this episode
Came to the comments to say this!
sammmeee
@thebabypenguin2 i was going to mention this and then immediate bdg jumpscare, genuinely kind of scared me
Somebody commented about this under Tom's "onosecond" video, which is why I immediately knew what this was about before even clicking on this.
You'd think it was his Penistone video.
Epic video.
Somebody forgot to initiate a SQL transaction before doing the search&replace... 😁
I didn't read that comment but iwizard and dawizard are exactly the kind of words that come out of onosecond situations, so I immediately thought about that video and it turned out to be correct! Glad someone else made the connection to that other video
Yes! As soon as I realized what they were getting at, I had to wonder whether it was giving Tom some uncomfortable flashbacks.
Mongoose had a similar problem with the Conan game. They did a late change to replace "pound" with "lbs." so a sentence like "..the following magical compounds are required" would become "..the following magical comlbs.s are required".
...The WII game? Where is it? I don't think I've ever found out about any magical compound, let alone the comlbs.s, but I did never finished it.
Mongoose have always been absurdly bad and lazy at editing. Their first Conan was bad enough they were shamed into fully replacing all the hardcovers they sold with a revised edition. They produce superficially pretty books, but god are they contemptuous of their customers.
"You cut me open, and I bleed nerd" man Hannah is the best guest
Ironically by some definitions Dr Fry would herself count as one of the magi - it seems to have been a term commonly applied to mathematicians, astronomers and the like.
Can we talk about the fact that two of the guests didn't know the word 'mage' means 'someone who uses magic'? Is that not common knowledge? It was used in other media long before DnD.
yeah that was really surprising to me as well.
Me too. I'm not even a native English speaker, never played D&D but still know the word 'mage'. I do like fantasy, so maybe I picked the word up from reading.
@@diane_princess I mean "magos" in ancient greek...and they got THAT from Old Persian (the title of a Zoroastrian priest was "magus")
heck, the baby Jesus was visited by three magi (the plural).
O. Henry wrote a story about ironic gift-giving...
I've even read a young-adult fantasy novel at some point where 'mage', 'wizard' and 'magician' were all used for different things, and 'sorcerer' was the collective word. Of course a lot of people disagreed with that book, though people can't quite agree what word means what. (See also 'witch', which is not quite a female wizard.)
@@peperoni_pepino There's a whole lot of books from various authors who disagree with that collection; many will have wizard as the collective; some don't have a collective; some define wizard as someone who uses books, mage as someone who uses power directly, psion as someone who uses mine power (think telepathy or telekinesis), etc. It's all in the setting as to which is what, and the language morphs to the use case.
And yes, witch is often very not the same thing as female wizard. But then, I read a lot of Sir Terry Pratchett when I was younger, and he had definite opinions on the wordplay - unsurprisingly, really, given how much he both read and wrote.
First time I actually know some lore about these questions! The reason they went with "Mage" originally was because Mages were a separate class from Wizards in D&D 2nd edition. By the time the book was about to be published, the 3rd edition came out and basically combined the two groups back into Wizard, hence why they got replaced, hence the typos
The distinction was only necessary in AD&D due to Specialists who favoured certain magic schools.
WotC didn't use those but created Sorcerers instead. And the rules that governed Sorcs and made them useful became very different in subsequent editions.
Ah, I actually didn't know about that second part. Thank you for the correction
No. In Second Edition, there were archetypes that the classes fell under. For magic users (Who didn't get their powers from gods or other supernatural beings), their archetype was called Mage. Under Mage, you had Wizard, Illusionists (technically one of the schools of specialty that a Wizard could be part of, but often treated as a separate class), and Sorcerers. I think they got rid of the archetypes in third edition, but I didn't play 3, 3.5, or 4. Fifth edition does not have the archetypes. You just have 12 classes with nothing to tie them together thematically.
I could see early drafts referring to the archetype and someone else saying, "No, that only applies to Wizards, not all mages." and the Find and Replace debacle is created.
I love how Hannah was wholly insulted that it was implied she was not a nerd
She thought mage was a made up word lol
Like mage even is the older word and comes from the same greek word as magic
I'm enjoying the lovely shade of wizardnta in Tom's background
good one
Oh wow, I instantly got it. Granted I've had similar issue in previous companies I've worked at where some people blindly search and replaced strings.
It's a pretty clbuttic case, a lot of words are buttbuttinated this way.
Been burned by this myself. I've learned to use the ol' CTRL-H with more respect now!
Yup.
Yeah I nailed it within 5 seconds, extremely proud of myself, but for exactly the same reasons as you, could easily imagine a find and replace and the first synonym that came to mind fit the bill immediately 😁
It's always better to include the spaces before and after in your find and replace (or use the 'whole words only' option if you're in an app that has it).
Ahh. A moment's thought solved this one.
Years back I worked on a product called "P4AS" which was often written "PAS". Someone decided to standardize the naming convention and did a search-and-replace on the operating manual, leaving us with things like "P4ASsword" littering the document. It was never properly fixed.
just replace P4AS back with pas and then replace [space]pas[space] with [space]P4AS[space]
@@kloklon Also fix instances at the beginning of a line, and with some punctuation afterwards, and fixing capitalization where the replaced bit was at the beginning of the line, etc etc.
Nobody wanted to spend the time working out all the issues that needed to be resolved.
But anyway, that company shut down decades ago, and the software is long since dead!
Spoilers:
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The answer reminds me of the story of someone postponing a project at Julius Baer from July to August. "July" in German is "Juli", so they ended up with a document containing lots of instances of "Augustus Baer".
Took me a while to realise what the relevant synonym for 'wizard' would have been, but I just knew that it was the result of a
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global find and replace on a text string.
I got it immediately, but it helps if you're a fan of a ton of different TTRPGs where each one uses a distinct synonym for "wizard" to come across as original.
list them all 😂
@paradoxica424
In 1994 I don't think they used "sorcerer" or "warlock" to mean character classes, but those are canon now. Some of these are world of darkness, or shadowrun, or other RPG: Witch, Awakened, Hedge Mage, Will Worker, Caster, Invoker, Diviner, Channeler, Necromancer, Psion, Psyker, Rumesmith, Summoner, Biomancer, Santic, Firestarter, Templar, and even Librarian can refer to different types of magic users across different games.
Eventually when you open a new TTRPG book you may ask yourself "What do they call magic in this setting? Oh, Zblorg, which is the power of cringe. And people who use magic are either Zblorgists or Kxtrants who use the same "clichés" (spells) but Kxtrans get their power from making fun of cringe whereas Zblorgists *become* cringe. I guess that's why Zblorgists can't wear armor."
I don't know how I can explain this any more succintly: Niche table top roleplaying games are Mad Libs filled out by writers armed with a thesarus.
Yep. Still TSR days. Sorcerer didn't appear until WotC and 3rd Edition, let alone Warlock.
My favourite "synonyms" were Palladium fantasy's version of Paladin which was simply Palladin (some sort of brand association) and Pathfinder who decided to go with the generic GM to avoid DM. 😅
@@ericvicaria8648 "Mad Libs filled out by writers armed with a thesaurus" is a glorious description, and I salute you for it, sir.
And hide my own thesaurus, of course. ;-]
@@paradoxica424 P.S. There's a famous legal case involving this exact kind of search/replace error. "CDESIGN PROPONENTSISTS" Kitzmiller v. Dover, PA. Some creationists - I mean intelligent design proponents tried to push creationism - I mean intelligent design into school curricula and part of their scheme was the textbook " Of Pandas and People." Creationism was legally impermissible, but they claimed intelligent design was legally not creationism. The textbook was clearly originally written as a creationist book. The term "intelligent design" proponent was hastily search/replaced in by a word processor between one creationist edition and the next intelligent design edition, because the word "cdesign proponentists" keeps appearing by mistake in the book, where someone used a word processor to switch the terms and didn't proofread the artefact.
the first thing that came to mind for me was an old visual novel called ever17 where somebody did a find and replace of all instances of "youth" with "kid" which made some very strange sentences since it ignored spaces turning "you there" or similar into "kidre". And then it turns out that was the exact same answer as the question 🤣
Yeah, this story (or the myriad ones like it like what you pointed out) show up a lot in computer science and editing classes because it's very easy to overlook things you aren't meaning to target.
your story reminded me of "youth in Asia" (one of Ali G's interviews)
The reason for the search and replace is that the Encyclopedia Magica was a collection of almost every magic item that had been published for D&D or AD&D by TSR. This this spanned almost two decades¹ and involved dozens of different writers, there was an effort to standardize some of the terminology used.
So, anywhere an item description said things like "mage", "magic user", "sorcerer", etc., it was changed to "wizard" to match the 2ed class name.
1: IIRC there were even some items that had only been published in The Strategic Review, the short-lived magazine that preceded The Dragon.
Bdg and tom scott working together is heaven
I was there Gandalf, 2,000 years ago! (I was one of the D&D nerds confused.)
I too owned this book back in the day (and was confused for a bit before figuring out what had happened)
(i was still young enough and inexperienced enough that it took me a little while of wondering if this was some weird rule system I hadn't heard of before! i mean it wouldn't be the first time a TTRPG had made up strange words...)
This is the first one I got immediately. Was very fun watching them work through it.
HA. I'd be sitting this one out, because I REMEMBER this goof. (Word processors = chaotic evil.)
Editing to explain the history of this a little further... in 2nd ed. AD&D, your average, generalist magic-user was called a "mage," and that's the class that most spell-slingers played. However, 2nd ed. also introduced specialist classes of wizard (such as illusionist or necromancer) that traded variety of spell selection for more powerful spells within their specialty as they advanced, so technically, "mage" was just *one type* of "wizard."
Since the book you're talking about was written for both mages (generalist wizards) and specialist wizards, "wizard" was the correct word to use, but it was an understandable slip for the writer to use "mage." The editor just didn't fully think through the consequences of that correction. :D
(In 3rd edition AD&D, they scrapped "mage" entirely and just called all of them "wizards," specialist or no, so there's that.)
There isn't a third edition AD&D. Of the roughly eleven D&D editions out there, only the second and… idk, sixth? were called Advanced D&D.
I didn't hit upon the "mage" bit at first (although I'm aware of the synonym, as it's also the root of magi and magic), but as soon as I saw the question, I thought "over-zealous find and replace", recalling the incident when the Midland Examining Group merged with a few others to become Oxford, Cambridge and RSA Examinations, so someone did a gobal find and replace on their acronyms, resulting in that year's students having to deal with the new SI Units Ocrawatt and Ocrajoules in their examinations...
Knew this one immediately because I've got that book sitting on the shelf behind me, and I noticed that issue (and immediately figured out what caused it) when I bought it, at the initial release. Ugh, now I feel old...
Also, now that I've gotten to Tom's explanation... it's not that Mage doesn't exist as a class in D&D. In 2nd Edition (which this was), a "Mage" was a generalist class of Wizard (as opposed to one of the various Specialist classes, like Evoker and Transmuter). So for rules clarity, they wanted to make sure that any type of Wizard could use the spells, and not only Mages, so they did the find/replace to ensure they weren't calling out Mage specifically anywhere that they shouldn't have been. Which lead to the image/iwizard and damage/dawizard issue, of course.
pausing at the start to make a guess:
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they were originally "image" and "damage", but someone made a book-wide replace of the word "mage" to "wizard".
correct!
Once the answer was revealed I realized I definitely remembering hearing about this exact thing and I still didn't get it. Now I can't remember what other podcast I heard this on. but this is the perfect Lateral type question.
I remember hearing it on a DND episode of Um Actually I think? I want to say it was Matt Mercer that mentioned it. Could have been Adventuring Academy too.
It could be a comment under his "onosecond" video where he tells about how a wrongly formatted command led to him replacing all content on a website with the word 'content', and somebody mentioned about this exact case in the comments
It was on Um Actually!
6:27 - ARGH. Thank you for that, Tom.
It always amazes me how some people who are incredibly smart are so specialized in what they're smart about that they don't know about some things that seem like common knowledge. I really would've expected everyone to know about mage meaning "magic user".
Not to mention how people who work in publishing don't understand how find and replace works.
i was so excited when i just already knew the story from the first reading by tom
I didn't know this going in, but got it in about a minute; helps that I'm writing a homebrew D&D alternative system myself.
In Second Edition AD&D, Mage was technically a group of subclasses of Wizard, there were mages that didn't specialize into any particular school of magic, and there were elemental mages that focused more on one of the classical elements than others. For example, your Necromancer and Illusionist were wizards, while your hydromancer and pyromancer were water and fire mages. Shoulf have gotten it sooner, given I played a water mage for a while back in the day.
I love that literally my first thought when seeing the question was “oh this is a ctrl f error” but it took me like 5 minutes to figure out exactly what the replacement was
One of my favorite old stories.
There must be a tonne of similar naïve find-and-replace examples like this. But for me the one that comes to mind is one Yu-Gi-Oh video game, the text of "Dark Magician Girl" mentions the name "Dark Spellian" (instead of "Dark Magician") because they had just renamed Magic Cards to Spell Cards (due to legal issues with Magic the Gathering) so just did a find-and-replace on the word "Magic".
Bryan David Gilbert and Hannah Fry are some of my favorite internet people, and I just want to watch more videos of them each explaining things that the other one has no clue about. They indeed both “bleed nerd” and watching the non-overlap of Venn diagrams is fascinating.
I dont know where i learned this from, but i immediately remembered the replace text from mage to wizard, that was just sitting in my head dormant for this very moment
"Mage" was the name of the class in 2nd edition. It was changed to "Wizard" in 3rd edition. Later, "Mage" was added back as a slightly different class (in an optional rulebook).
I can't explain it, but the Lateral background and music really just feels so wholly British, based on what television I experienced when I was over there.
I HATE HOW INGRAINED IN MY BRAIN THIS ANECDOTE IS I see 'dawizards' anywhere and this whole thing pops into my head
As soon as Tom asked the question, I was immediately brought back to the days when I was first perusing that particular book (having been gifted it on my birthday). I was more irritated that confused. I figured that a lot of the magic items were from disparate sourcebooks and possibly even earlier editions of the game, and had used the word "mage" in their text descriptions rather than the word "wizard."
Now, for those who played the 2nd Edition of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (which was the edition that this book was a part of), you might recall that a mage is a wizard, but not every wizard is a mage, and in the interest of allowing certain items that were restricted to mages in their text to be more accurately allowed to all wizards, TSR probably wanted to edit those descriptions. What's the fastest way to edit a large volume of material? Why, a "Find and Replace All" function (or something similar), of course!
Problem is, if they replace every instance of mage with wizard, then words that have those four letters in them will also have wizard inserted in their place. Thus, image becomes iwizard and damage becomes dawizard. Image didn't occur nearly as frequently as dawizard.
I was so irked, I couldn't believe the editors missed that before printing. Very sloppy.
I guess I should actually watch the video and see if I was right in my supposition. ...Yep, pretty much.
I didn't get it from the title, but as soon as I saw the question I knew the answer to that.
Yes, I am a nerd, what gave it away?
Brian is wrong about the Mage. In second edition (and in first, but I'd need to get my books from my brother's house to check), there were four archetypes to the classes: Warrior, Thief/Rogue, Mage, and Priest. Under each archetype were classes specific to that archetype. Wizard was a class under the Mage archetype, alongside Illusionists and Sorcerers. My guess whomever wrote the initial drafts used Mage instead of the specific class Wizard. Then the review saw this mistake and had them fix it.
But, yes, Second Edition (including both Basic and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons variants) had Mage and Wizard in the rules.
I could absolutely listen to Hannah and Tom all day.
Fun fact, Yu-Gi-Oh did something very similar in Master Duel! Waaaaay early on (and still to this day in the OCG), cards with a green border and blue orb in the corner were called Magic Cards. In the west, this ran into copyright issues because of Magic the Gathering. So, they have to change the name to Spell cards when printing cards here.
In Master Duel, there are a handful of single player matches you can play against an AI deck thats themed to match the show. One of them is a Dark Magician deck. When they were translating the flavor text before the duel, they left in the text of "Dark Spellian."
1st edition AD&D used "magic-user" from earlier editions, but 2nd edition used "wizard" as the category and "mage" as the class along with (the unpopular) "illusionist". The writer of Encyclopedia Magica was apparently told "Change 'mage' to 'wizard' to account for all arcane spellcasters."
Incredible! 😄
AAA IM EATING THIS I’M ACTUALLY GOING INSANE THIS IS SO GOOD
I knew this trivia going in, and that made this the must frustrating video I've watched in months
I immediately knew it was going to be find-and-replace issue because of the i- and da- prefix, but I couldn't quite get the word even though "mage" was starting me right in the face!
I think some of the blame for this type of error has to go to Microsoft. In Word, when you open the "Find and Replace" tool, "Find whole words only" is unchecked by default, and it's not even visible unless you click "More". So if someone didn't know to look for that option, they might not even realize it's there.
i am fairly sure that either tom (in his video on scunthorpe) or some other dnd youtuber like blaine simple covered this in a video, because i knew the answer immediately
I believe there was a comment on the scunthorpe video that described this situation
Image and damage! It only took me 20 seconds, but to be fair I am alone, and seeing the question in writing immediately made me think it was a search and replace error, just had to find the concerned words
A power house of a cast, needs more views
Would have had to sit this one out. I had only just started playing D&D in 1994, and I wasn't aware of this issue at the time, but it is something I've known about for many years.
I felt so smart when I figured this one out early.
I paused for a second, thought about what it must be, and laughed heartily.
As soon as Tom said to write it down, I did and immediately got the answer. Also, I still have a copy of that book in my closet (and I'll have to look if my printing still has that set of typos).
It took me a little too long to figure this one out... More so when I realized that I actually owned the second volume of the book mentioned, and came across the same error (IIRC it has a few more of a similar nature, but it was a long time ago)
I still have those books. It always brings a smile to my lips when I see something like 6D6 points of dawizards :)
My favourite item in the Encyclopedia Magicka vol 1 is The Pie of 4 and 20 Black Birds. It's an explosion of crows in a pie.
I knew this one already, which feels rare for this show.
I guessed this within 30 seconds of the question going up on screen, but probably just because I was able to see it in writing, and I've been personally burned by search and replace in documents like this before....
Oh I remembered this trivia at 4:00
I wasn't playing D&D at the time this happened, but the very next DM I had owned a copy of the book with iwizard and dawizard, and would show it to newbies.
Got it before you finished the first readthrough of the question. LOL.
Id completely forgotten avout this, but within seconds a memory from the deep corners resurfaced and I got it.
Spoiler below
Funnily enough, in 2e, mage is technically the right word for a non-specualized wizard. Instead of being an illusionist or an evoker, you were just a mage. A jack of all trades. This can, of course, introduce issues if you, say, have a magic sword which is supposed to work on wizards but the writer said mages
I should watch lateral!
I got it at about 4 and a half minutes and was yelling "clbuttic!!!" at my screen 😂It took me a while to figure out from there that the substitution was "mage" for "wizard", but I am very very aware of the clbuttic effect because I do a fair amount of text processing in my hobby work!!
for once i knew this answer as soon as the question was asked! hahaha very funny story
finally one that i knew the full explanation for right away!
7:21
In the ad&d times mage was the super type
As thete was 4 type of classes.
Fighter(stuff like fighter, paladin? Not fully sure about paladin)
Priest (druid, cleric)
Mage( wizard sorcerer)
Thief( rogue, bard)
And all the rest generaly with into those
I know the same stuff about D&D as Hannah. I smart!
Damn does this have both tom scott and bdg in it? Not an expected colab, but a welcome one.
5 minutes in I suddenly got it. It was the word processing hint that helped
Holy shit I remember the mage question being a question on Um Actually
Clicked on this as soon as I saw the title, hoping it's about what I think it's about :D (haven't read any comments as of typing this, nor have I watched the vid yet)
Edit: upon seeing the question, yup!
Tom Scott your the best
*you're
Are there full video episodes of this podcast?
We're looking to provide them when our podcast platform rolls out this feature, hopefully later this year.
So funny that Brian's on this as it was also mentioned on Um, Actually
Had I still been in school I probably could have gotten this one quickly, but it’s been a few years. To combat this problem you have to put spaces on both ends of the word you are finding and the word you replace it with, that way it is only that word that is replaced and not a part of a word.
The lesson: Don't find and replace in a large file.
Knew the answer immediately. I've seen a few instances of this kind of issue.
Original class was Magic User I believe.. became Mage then the find and replace.
One of the times I know the answer upon reading the question, even before Tom is finished reading it out
I love Hannah Fry so much! "You cut me open and I bleed nerd."
I'm definitely going to start rolling for dawizard on my attacks from now on.
Its funny Tom mentioned drop out because I knew the answer because of an "Um Actually" question
If I remember correctly originally the only classes were **mage**, thief, Warrior and priest. Later on as more classes were added they used Mage to mean any spell caster.... btw my initial reaction without watching is iwizard is me and dawizard is an emeny wizard...
Originally it was fighting man, magic-user, and cleric. Thieves were in the first supplement.
The original class was "Magic User", however the many people who originally wrote the various descriptions for the items in the Encyclopedia Magica used all sorts of different terms.
I was thinking it was something to do with quick find and replace command, my favourite that this happened was in yugioh was replacing the word magic with spell, thus creating the dark spellian
BDG is here! That’s my favorite guy!
Three people I know of independently but am pleasantly surprised to see in the same place.
I know almost nothing about D&D (I’ve seen a few episodes of Dimension 20) but this was on an episode of Um Actually so I got it immediately
Yea Mage word been around long time. And yes autocorrect pain.
Finally, one I knew from the start! 😁