Nerf

A nerf with it's associated herder, who are a scruffy lot

Nerf (n.)

A product line of toys made from soft foam. These toys are in the shapes of objects to be thrown, launched, or swung at other people; their soft foam nature insures that they will cause little harm on impact. Common items are balls, arrows, missiles, bats, truncheons, swords, hammers.

Nerf (v.)

to make something safer, so that people won't be so butthurt when it is used against them. When a change is made by a game designer to "improve" a feature by making is less useful in contests, players say the feature has been "nerfed" and will complain loudly in the hopes the change will be undone and they can resume exploiting this feature to beat on other players too naive to avoid it.

Examples of Nerfing

Players demanding a nerf - OR - players who've just been nerfed. You can't win.

(tabletop/traditional games only please)

• Psionics in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons gave players a set of spell-like abilities without the drawbacks of Vancian magic, and were not subject to anti-magic defenses. Later editions reduced the amount of power points available to fuel these powers and made it dependent on character level, balancing it with a Sorcerer's spell casting abilities, and explicitly stated that anti-magic and anti-psionic effects were one and the same.

• The Winnu racial technology in Twilight Imperium 3rd edition allowed the player to stall everyone for two turns, long enough to over-extend their reach to get a winning amount of victory points even if their empire would self-destruct in the very next turn. Fixed with an errata to the game.

• Everything beneath the baleful gaze of Robin Cruddace. (Your time will come, Imperial Guard).

• The Iron Warriors chaos marines in 4th edition 40k, and Chaos Daemons in 7th edition Warhammer fantasy were both so damn powerful that GW had to release the next edition of both games just so they could re-release their codex and army book and nerf them.

• The Fireball/Channel combo in Magic: The Gathering had players converting most of their Life to Mana with Channel, than one shoting their opponent with Fireball until the latter was banned.

See Also

• Buff, the exact opposite of this subject.