Space the Rodian

Go on, try it.

Every Sunday for the last six years, or near enough as makes no difference, I've been playing tabletop Role-Playing Games with the same group. We started off playing Rifts, and have flipped back and forth between several other games, such as the Star Wars RPG and Dungeons and Dragons 3.5. Six years is a long time, even if it is only one day out of the week, and we've amassed a collection of stories and shared experiences that is rather mind-boggling.

It's gotten so that people who've never even gamed with us are familiar with many of our stories. And for those of you who have never played an RPG, it's not all stories like "Have you heard about the time we trounced that 20th Level Black Dragon?" In fact, most of our favorite stories aren't about defeating huge monsters, unless something really amusing happened during the fight. A lot of them are the kind of stories most people tell, stories about when so-and-so did something very foolish or embarrassing. The kind of stories where repeating one certain phrase from it will send anyone who was there into gales of laughter. Like "Do we still have a problem?" or "Look, it moves you at a speed."

Sometimes, the right statement can enter the vernacular, and become almost idiomatic within a group. as is the case with slang within our own society. One in particular that exists within our group stands out in my mind. It goes as follows:

I want two arms, and I want two other arms.

It came about from an out-of-character conversation (meaning that we were speaking as a bunch of guys sitting around a table, not as though we were characters in the game). I was running that game, and one of the players, well known for his rampant munchkinism, was asking me if he could get an extra pair of arms for his character. However, he wasn't making himself understood very well.

"Hey, I want another some new arms for my character."
"So you want to replace your arms with bionic ones?"
"No, I want them under my real arms."
"So you want four arms?"
"No. Listen. I want two arms, and I want two other arms."

The reason the conversation came up was that while the rules allow you to have bionic arms, he wanted them to be detachable. I don't remember if he explained why, but my thinking was that to him, it'd be the best of both worlds. He'd have an extra pair of arms when he needed them, and the rest of the time he wouldn't have to worry about people giving him weird looks in the street. It was odd, as he wasn't the kind of player who normally cared about how strange he looked (the guy thought nothing of carrying five or six guns at all times, concealed behind a flowing cloak), but having only two arms in social situations must have been important to him, as when I told him he couldn't do it, he dropped the matter entirely.

Well, point is, we still use the phrase "I want two arms, and I want two other arms" today, usually to describe a situation where neither side has any idea what the other wants. Also in situations where someone is asking for two sets of things that are superficially similar (like arms), but fundamentally different (one pair is metal), and the person doing the asking hasn't specified the difference. And as you can imagine, we've built up quite a collection of such sayings in 6 years.

In case you're wondering about the title, it comes from a Star Wars game we were playing. I played a Rodian (see the picture above for an example of that race), and was playing him like a typical member of his race. That is, he was an aggressive arrogant jerk. As you can imagine, he really endeared himself to the rest of the party. They probably kept him around only because I'd built him into a crack-shot. Regardless, it became a running gag during that campaign that the solution to every situation involved "spacing the Rodian." As in shoving him in an airlock and jettisoning him into space. They never actually did it, but it was always brought up.