The basic glossary of role-playing games
While viewing different parts of our HomePage, you may have stumbled upon some terms whose exact meaning was not clear to you. Of course, we don't want to keep information from you which could be vital for the enjoyment of these pages! That's why we set up this page to tell you about these terms in the context of role-playing games.
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- Charakters
- Fictional persons within the game. Divided into: PCs - Player Characters - persons led by the players / NPCs - Non-Player Characters - all the beings led by the Gamemaster.
- Dungeon
- A term derived from an old part of medieval castels, the "donjon". It was the most fortified and therefor hardest to reach portion of the castle: a tower with walls several yards thick containing everything needed to withstand even the longest sieges.
In role-playing games, dungeons are not only prisons or cell complexes (as in the modern meaning of the word), but generally any (mostly subterranean) remote or closed system of rooms which the characters can explore..
- In-/Outplay
- Also: In-Character/Out-Of-Character: used to tell the difference between the actions of a player's character (In-Play: "I'll enter the temple") and those of the player him/herself (Out-Play: "Let me see the rulebook again.").
- Campaign
- A series of adventures played with the same players and characters, generally connected in story.
- LARP
- Life-Action-Role-Play: Unlike Pen & Paper games, the players actually dress up as their characters and portray their character's actions physically, as in a theatre play.
- Monster
- The term depicts a larger range of creatures than usual: technically, any NPC is a monster - except that the more "usual" races (e.g. those available to the players) are mostly called "NPCs".
- Paper & Pen-RPG
- The sort of role-playing games in which all actions are portrayed with thoughts and words alone (using pens and papers to take notes, record information or to clarify things).
- RPG
- Abbreviation for "role-playing game"
- GM
- The Gamemaster coordinates the story of the game: he describes the surroundings, lets the players (or rather their characters) act within these surroundings and then describes the results of these actions. (This is a very abstract description of the job, though.)