Curated category
Role-playing game terminology
- Experience pointExperience points, abbreviated as XP or exp, are a unit of measurement used in tabletop role-playing games and role-playing video games to track how much a…
- System Reference DocumentIn 2000, Wizards of the Coast handed other game designers something unusual: the rules to Dungeons and Dragons, wrapped in a legal document that said, in…
- Statistic (role-playing games)A statistic in role-playing games is a piece of data that represents a particular aspect of a fictional character. That piece of data is usually an integer…
- Non-player characterNon-player characters, better known as NPCs, began their life around a tabletop, not a screen. In the world of Dungeons and Dragons and games like it, the…
- Party (role-playing games)A party, in the world of role-playing games, is a group of characters who band together to adventure as one. At its simplest, this is a handful of…
- Random encounterRandom encounters have interrupted countless players mid-step, pulling them from exploration into an unwanted fight with no warning and no way to predict…
- Player characterPlayer characters occupy a strange middle ground in fiction. They are the heroes of the story and the instrument of the person holding the controller at the…
- Dice notationA player rolls three six-sided dice and adds the results to a character's skill score. The notation 3d6 appears in rulebooks from the mid-1970s onward as a…
- Character creationA player sits at a table with a blank sheet of paper and polyhedral dice scattered nearby. This moment marks the start of character creation in role-playing…
- Alignment (Dungeons & Dragons)Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, introduced the alignment system in 1974. The original game allowed players to choose among three alignments…