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 typically a unitless integer, though it can also take the form of a set of dice. That single number captures one…
- 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 notationDice notation is the shorthand gamers use to specify which dice to roll and how to combine them. A single line like d8+2 can condense a whole process of…
- Character creationCharacter creation is the first act every player performs before a role-playing game can begin. Before a single die rolls across the table, before the…
- 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…