The TTRPG glossary - words for the table

Every hobby has its own language, and tabletop roleplaying has more than most. This glossary gathers the words you will meet on the shelves, in a rulebook, or around the table, and explains them in plain terms with an example where it helps. New to all this? You may want to read how to choose your first game first, and then use this page whenever a word trips you up.

A

Actual play
A recorded session of a roleplaying game, watched or listened to as entertainment. Actual play shows on video and podcast, such as those that made Daggerheart and Candela Obscura famous, have brought countless new players to the hobby.

Advantage and disadvantage
Rolling an extra die and keeping the best result when circumstances favour you, or the worst when they do not. Dungeons & Dragons made the mechanic famous, and many modern games use a version of it.

Adventure (module)
A pre-written scenario a group can play, with a setting, characters and events prepared in advance. A boxed set often includes a starter adventure so you can play straight away.

Alignment
The classic moral grid from Dungeons & Dragons that places a character between law and chaos, good and evil. Endlessly debated, often house-ruled, and the source of half the arguments about what a paladin would do.

Ancestry (species, race)
The people a character belongs to, such as elf, dwarf or human, with its own traits. Modern games have largely moved to the words ancestry or species for what older books called race.

Armour class (AC)
A number showing how hard a character or creature is to hit in combat: the attacker must roll at least that high. It comes from Dungeons & Dragons and lives on in most OSR games.

B

Backstory
The history of a character before the game begins: where they come from, what they lost, why they left. Some games want a page of it, others prefer you to discover it in play.

Bestiary
A book or chapter full of creatures for the game master to use, with their statistics and habits. Nearly every game line has one, whatever it calls it.

BRP (Basic Roleplaying)
A rules system from the publisher Chaosium that resolves actions by rolling percentile dice against a skill. Call of Cthulhu is built on BRP, with its own added rules for sanity.

C

Campaign
A series of connected sessions with the same characters, telling a longer story over weeks, months or years. The opposite of a one-shot, which is finished in a single evening.

Character sheet
The page that holds everything about your character: their abilities, skills, equipment and current state. You fill it in during character creation and update it as you play.

Check (roll)
The basic action of a roleplaying game: you roll dice to see whether your character succeeds at something uncertain. A game master might ask for a check to climb a wall, spot a lie or swing a sword.

Class
A template that defines what a character is good at, such as the fighter, the wizard or the thief. Classic class-based games include Dungeons & Dragons and Shadowdark, while many indie games skip classes entirely.

Clock (progress clock)
A circle divided into segments that fills up as something comes closer: an alarm, a ritual, a collapsing roof. Blades in the Dark made clocks popular, and they have spread through modern design.

Core rulebook
The one book a game needs to be played: rules, character creation and usually guidance for the game master. Everything else, from sourcebooks to adventures, builds on it.

Critical hit (crit)
A roll of the highest possible number, usually granting an extra strong success, such as double damage. Its dark twin is the critical failure, where the lowest roll makes things actively worse.

Crunch
An informal word for how much rules detail a game has. A crunchy game like Dungeons & Dragons has many rules and options; a rules-light game like Mörk Borg has few.

D

d20, d6, and the dice
Dice are named by their number of sides, so a d20 has twenty and a d6 has six. Many games use a set of polyhedral dice (d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20), while others use only ordinary six-siders.

d66
A way to roll on a table of 36 entries with two six-siders: one die is the tens, the other the units. A favourite tool of compact games and zines, because one spread can hold a whole world of results.

Dice pool
A system where you roll a handful of dice at once and count the results, instead of rolling a single die. Blades in the Dark and many story games use dice pools.

Downtime
The quiet stretch between adventures, when characters heal, study, scheme or spend their coin. Some games make it a full phase of play with its own rules.

Duet (two-player roleplaying)
Playing with just two people, usually one game master and one player. It makes for intimate, character-driven stories, and more games now include guidance for it.

Dungeon crawl
The classic format of exploring a dangerous place room by room, weighing every door and torch. It is where the hobby began, and games like Old-School Essentials and Shadowdark keep it sharp.

Dungeon Master (DM)
The name for the game master in Dungeons & Dragons. See Game Master.

E

Emergent storytelling
A story that arises from play itself, out of choices, dice and consequences, rather than from a script. It is the great promise of sandboxes, hexcrawls and games like Mythic Bastionland: nobody at the table knows the ending yet.

Encounter
A single scene in which something happens: a fight, a puzzle, a meeting with a stranger. A session is usually a string of encounters tied together by the story.

Encumbrance
Rules for how much a character can carry before it slows them down. Old School games take it seriously, and slot-based inventories in games like Cairn and Mausritter turned it from bookkeeping into real choices.

Experience points (XP)
Points earned by adventuring, which let a character level up. Games award them for different things: treasure, defeated monsters, goals reached, or simply showing up and playing.

Exploding dice
A rule where rolling the maximum on a die lets you roll it again and add the result, with no upper limit. It makes any roll capable of a small miracle.

F

Faction
An organised group in the setting with its own goals, resources and grudges: a guild, a cult, a noble house. Factions give a sandbox its moving parts, because they act even when the players look away.

Fail forward
A design principle where a failed roll still moves the story: you do not simply fail, something happens. It keeps the game in motion and is central to Powered by the Apocalypse games.

Fate
A narrative system from publisher Evil Hat, played with special dice marked plus, minus and blank. Characters are built from aspects, short phrases that describe them, which players invoke by spending fate points to bend a roll.

Fiction first
A design idea where what happens in the story decides which rules apply, rather than the other way around. Games like Mythic Bastionland and many indie titles lean fiction first, keeping rules out of the way until the story calls for them.

Fifth edition (5e)
The edition of Dungeons & Dragons that appeared in 2014 and became the biggest game in the hobby's history. It grew an entire ecosystem of 5e-compatible books by other publishers, which is why the label appears on so many spines.

Fluff
The informal counterpart of crunch: everything in a book that is story rather than rules, from setting chapters to boxed fiction. The word sounds dismissive, but for many readers the fluff is the point.

Forged in the Dark (FitD)
A family of games built on the engine of Blades in the Dark: dice pools, position and effect, progress clocks and flashbacks. Like Powered by the Apocalypse, it has grown far beyond its original heist game.

Fudging
A game master quietly ignoring or changing a die roll, usually to save a character or keep a story on track. Some tables consider it mercy, others consider it cheating, and the debate is as old as the screen it happens behind.

G

Game Master (GM)
The player who runs the game: describing the world, playing every character the others meet, and deciding what the rules ask for. Different games give this role different names, such as Dungeon Master, Keeper or Referee.

Gamebook
A book you read alone, choosing your path by turning to numbered paragraphs, sometimes with dice and a character. Early gamebooks like Buffalo Castle were among the first ways to roleplay without a group.

GM-less game
A game where nobody runs the world and the rules themselves divide that work among the players. Microscope and The Quiet Year show how well it can work: structure replaces the referee.

GM screen
The upright screen a game master sets up at the table: rules references on the inside, artwork on the outside, and secret rolls behind it. Many game lines sell one as an accessory.

H

Hexcrawl
A way of exploring a map divided into hexagons, where each hex may hold a location, an encounter or nothing at all. It is a classic Old School format built around discovery and an open world; Mythic Bastionland uses one.

Hireling (retainer)
An NPC hired by the party to carry torches, guard camps or fight alongside them, for a wage and a share of the risk. A staple of Old School play, where an extra pair of hands can be the difference between a haul and a TPK.

Hit points (HP)
A number showing how much harm a character or creature can take before they drop. It is one of the most universal mechanisms in the hobby, though many lighter games replace or shrink it.

Homebrew
Content a table makes itself: monsters, settings, classes or entire rule systems. Half the hobby runs on it.

House rule
An official rule a table has changed to its own taste, from small tweaks to sweeping surgery. The rulebook proposes; the table decides.

I

Indie RPG
A roleplaying game made outside the large publishers, often by a small studio or a single designer. Indie games frequently experiment with mechanisms and story structures you will not find in mainstream titles.

Initiative
A system that decides the order in which players and enemies act during a fight. Some games roll for it, others fix it by a statistic or simply by who speaks first.

J

Journaling game
A game you play by writing, keeping a diary as your character while dice or cards prompt what happens next. Thousand Year Old Vampire is a well-known example, played alone with a notebook.

K

Keeper
The name for the game master in Call of Cthulhu, short for Keeper of Arcane Lore. See Game Master.

L

Level
A measure of how far a character has advanced, usually gained with experience points. Levelling up is the reward loop of class-based games, though plenty of games do without levels altogether.

Lines and veils
A safety tool with two levels: lines are things that will not appear in the game at all, veils are things that happen offscreen. Agreeing on them, usually at session zero, lets a table play dark material with confidence.

Lore
The background world, history and mythology of a game or setting. Lore gives players context for their adventures and something to build a character against.

M

Mechanic
A single rule or system that decides how something in the game works: how you make a check, how combat flows, how stress builds up. A game is, in a sense, a bundle of mechanics working together.

Megadungeon
An enormous underground complex of dozens or hundreds of rooms across many levels, meant to be explored over a whole campaign. It is a classic Old School format.

Metacurrency
A pool of points, held by the player rather than the character, that you spend to bend the rules or the story in your favour. Many modern games use one, such as tokens that let you reroll or add a detail to a scene.

Milestone levelling
Advancing characters when the story reaches a milestone, rather than counting experience points. It trades bookkeeping for pacing, and many modern campaigns prefer it.

Miniatures (minis)
Small figures that represent characters and monsters on a battle map or grid. Some tables cannot play without them; others prefer theatre of the mind.

Min-maxing
Building a character for maximum mechanical power, minimising everything that does not serve it. Done with a wink it is a sport; done grimly it is why the bard cannot have nice things.

Morale
A classic rule that lets the dice decide when enemies flee or surrender instead of fighting to the death. Old School games roll it with two six-siders, and it makes fights feel like encounters with creatures rather than sacks of hit points.

Murderhobo
A player character with no home, no ties and no plan beyond wandering the land, killing things and taking their belongings. The word is a joke, and also a warning about what happens when a character has no reason to care.

N

NPC (non-player character)
Any character in the game not controlled by a player. The game master plays all the NPCs, from allies and shopkeepers to the villain.

NSR (New School Revolution)
A loose modern movement that builds on Old School principles with lighter, sleeker rules and fresh presentation. Games like Cairn and Mausritter are often counted in it, alongside the family around Into the Odd.

O

One-shot
A complete game played and finished in a single session, with no continuation. It is an ideal way to try a new system or play with a shifting group.

Opposed roll
A check where two sides roll against each other and the higher result wins, rather than rolling against a fixed number. Arm wrestling, haggling and chases are natural opposed rolls.

Oracle
A tool, usually a set of tables and a die, that answers yes-or-no questions so you can play without a game master. Solo games rely on oracles to stand in for the person who would normally decide what happens.

OSR (Old School Renaissance / Revival)
A movement that returns to the style and rules of the earliest roleplaying games of the 1970s and 1980s: open worlds, deadly combat, improvisation and a game master with wide freedom. Well-known OSR titles include Mörk Borg, Old-School Essentials, Cairn and Shadowdark.

P

Party
The group of player characters adventuring together. Keeping the party together is one of the oldest jokes and hardest jobs in the hobby.

PbtA (Powered by the Apocalypse)
A family of games built on the engine of Apocalypse World, where characters act through "moves" triggered by what they do in the story. It favours narrative flow over heavy rules and has shaped a large branch of modern design.

PC (player character)
The character a player controls, as opposed to the NPCs run by the game master.

Percentile dice (d100)
Two ten-sided dice read together as a number from 1 to 100, usually rolled under a skill. Call of Cthulhu and Mothership both live on percentile dice.

Playbook
A character sheet, archetype and rule set folded into one booklet, typical of Powered by the Apocalypse games. Picking a playbook in games like Apocalypse Keys or Wanderhome is picking what kind of story you want.

Pointcrawl
A way of exploring where locations are joined by set routes on a map, looser than a hexcrawl but still giving structure to a journey.

Prompt
The question or instruction that drives a journaling game: draw a card, read the prompt, write your answer. A good prompt does in one sentence what a game master does in a scene.

Q

Quickstart
A free or cheap introductory version of a game, with simplified rules, ready-made characters and a short adventure. It is an ideal way to try a system before buying the full book.

R

Railroading
Forcing players along a fixed plot regardless of what they choose, so their decisions stop mattering. It is the opposite of a sandbox, and the word is rarely meant kindly.

Random encounter
An encounter rolled from a table rather than planned, often while the party travels or lingers too long. The old name is wandering monsters, and it keeps a world feeling alive and indifferent to the party's schedule.

Random table
A numbered list you roll on to generate content on the spot: an encounter, a rumour, a weather change, a name. Old School play leans on them, and our own Workshop series is built from them.

Reaction roll
A classic Old School roll, usually two six-siders, that decides how strangers or monsters respond to the party: hostile, wary, friendly. It is a small rule with a big effect, because not every encounter starts as a fight.

Referee
An older name for the game master, inherited from wargaming, still used by some Old School games. See Game Master.

Roll-under
A system where you succeed by rolling under your own stat or skill, so higher stats mean more room to succeed. Call of Cthulhu and Mothership work this way.

Rules-light / rules-heavy
Terms for how much rule detail a game carries. A rules-light game keeps things simple and fast; a rules-heavy game offers depth and tactical choice. Neither is better, they simply ask different things of you.

Rulings over rules
The Old School principle that a game master's quick, fair judgement beats looking up an official answer. It keeps play moving and trusts the table over the book.

S

Safety tools
Agreements and aids that let a table steer around content nobody wants in the game, such as lines and veils or the X-card. They usually get set up during session zero, and horror games in particular recommend them.

Sandbox
A style of play where the world is open and the group decides where to go, rather than following a fixed plot. The game master prepares places and situations, and the players choose their own path.

Sanity
A rule that tracks a character's mental state, which can fall as they encounter horrors. Call of Cthulhu made it famous: knowledge and terror erode the mind, so surviving means more than staying alive.

Saving throw (save)
A roll to avoid or soften something bad that is already happening: poison, a trap, a spell. The name goes back to the hobby's earliest days and survives in games from Dungeons & Dragons to Mythic Bastionland.

Session
A single sitting of play, usually an evening. A campaign is many sessions; a one-shot is just one.

Session zero
A meeting before play begins where the group agrees on the setting, tone, boundaries and expectations. It is where a table decides together what kind of story it wants to tell.

Setting
The world a game takes place in, with its geography, history and mood. Some games come with a rich setting; others hand you the tools to build your own.

Skill
A learned capability a character has, narrower than a stat: picking locks, stitching wounds, reading old tongues. In many systems a check combines a stat with a skill.

Solo RPG
A roleplaying game designed to be played alone, usually with an oracle or a journal in place of a group. Solo and journaling games are a fast-growing branch of the hobby.

Sourcebook
A book that expands a game with extra setting, rules or options, on top of the core rulebook. A campaign might use several sourcebooks over its life.

SRD (System Reference Document)
A game's core rules published free for anyone to read and build on. Many designers release one, which is why so many games share recognisable bones.

Starter set (boxed set)
A box that gets a group playing with everything included: simplified rules, ready-made characters, dice and an adventure. Alien, The Lord of the Rings and Invincible all have one, and it is usually the best first purchase for a new table.

Stat (attribute)
A number describing a basic quality of a character, such as strength or wits, used when you make a check. Different games use different names and lists; Mythic Bastionland, for instance, uses Vigour, Clarity and Spirit.

Stat block
The compact summary of a creature's numbers a game master needs at the table: health, attacks, abilities. A good stat block fits in a glance.

Stress
A mechanic that tracks pressure on a character and turns it into play. Alien lets stress add dice that can tip into panic, Mothership lets it feed panic rolls, and Blades in the Dark spends it as a resource; three games, one truth about bodies under strain.

Success at a cost
A mixed result where you get what you wanted, but something else goes wrong. Powered by the Apocalypse games built their middle band of rolls on it, and the idea has spread everywhere.

System (engine)
The set of rules that powers a game, separate from its setting: how dice work, how characters are built, how danger resolves. One system can drive many games, as the Year Zero Engine and Powered by the Apocalypse prove.

T

Target number
The number a roll must meet or beat to succeed, set by the rules or the game master. Different games call it different things, from difficulty class to threshold.

Theatre of the mind
Playing scenes purely in imagination, without a map or miniatures, with the game master's description as the only battlefield. Fast, atmospheric, and occasionally the source of friendly arguments about who was standing where.

TPK (total party kill)
The moment when every player character dies at once. In deadly Old School and horror games it is a real risk, and sometimes a grim badge of honour.

TTRPG (tabletop roleplaying game)
A game in which players describe the actions of characters in a shared imagined world, guided by rules and usually a game master. Everything on this page is, in the end, in service of that.

Turn and round
The units of time in structured play: on your turn you act, and when everyone has acted, a round has passed. Outside combat, most games let time flow freely.

U

Usage die
A rule that tracks supplies without counting them: roll the item's die when you use it, and on a low result the die shrinks a step until the resource runs out. The Black Hack popularised it, and it has spread through the OSR.

V

VTT (virtual tabletop)
Software that puts the table online: maps, dice, character sheets and video chat in one place, such as Roll20 or Foundry. It is how many groups separated by distance keep playing together.

W

West Marches
A campaign style with a large pool of players, no fixed group and no fixed session: players organise expeditions into an unexplored map, and the world persists between them. It is named after a legendary campaign run by Ben Robbins, the designer of Microscope.

Worldbuilding
Creating the geography, history, cultures and conflicts of an imagined world. It is half the pleasure of game mastering, and games like Microscope and The Quiet Year make it the whole game.

X

X-card
A safety tool: a card anyone at the table can tap to remove the current content from the game, no explanation needed. Simple, quiet and effective.

Y

Year Zero Engine
The house system of Free League Publishing: pools of six-sided dice where sixes are successes, and you may push a roll by rerolling at a price. Alien, Vaesen, Tales from the Loop and Invincible all run on it, each tuned to its own genre.

Z

Zine
A small, often staple-bound booklet, home to some of the hobby's most inventive adventures and games. The OSR and Mothership scenes in particular publish much of their best work as zines.