Rules
Enchanted Realms Rulebook
Charts & Tables
Glossary
RPG Terms
RPG Terms
| AC | Armor Class. Used as a representation how difficult it is to hit a creature. |
| Advantage | Game mechanic to allow a creature to have a statistical benefit for an action. |
| Adventure | A single challenge, often short enough to be completed in one session. It perhaps makes up one smaller piece of larger story with a beginning and an end, but may be stand alone. |
| Adventure Seed | a short description of a setup for an adventure, intended as a jumping off point for a GM to expand into an adventure/ |
| AoE | Area of Effect. The area affected by an attack/spell/etc which affects more than one creature or object. |
| Attribute | The numerical value applied to elements of a game. |
| Battle mat | A piece of paper, vinyl, cardboard, lucite, or even an electronic format marked off in a grid (hexagons, squares, offset squares, triangles) for use in simulating combat. Often designed to be drawn on with an erasable marker of some kind. Usually used with miniatures to determine precise position information during play. |
| BBEG | Big Bad Evil Guy. Most often the main antagonist boss NPC for a particular adventure or campaign. |
| BNG | Bitter Non Gamer. Person who is unable to join or arrange a gaming group and games by proxy, usually by complaining about RPGs that aren't the one he or she would prefer to play. |
| Breath Weapon | Refers to a weapon/attack type of a creature, often an AoE. |
| BTB | By the Book. Often described as RAW, Rules as written. This is the literal meaning of the published rules, as opposed to interpreting the designer's intent, either assumed or explicitly stated. |
| Buff | An ability, spell, rules change, or other game mechanic that improves a character's capabilities. |
| Bug Hunt | Adventure involving little more than killing some monster or monsters. |
| Caltrops | Occasional slang for four-sided dice. |
| Campaign | A longer story told by chaining or linking a number of adventures together. Sometimes, one single very long adventure can be called a “campaign”. Whereas an adventure may only encompass minor character improvement, a campaign allows PCs to achieve advancement. Also, the story and overall goals tend to be much more epic than an adventure. Campaigns almost always require more than two or three gaming sessions to complete. |
| Campaign Setting | The fictitious world where a specific adventure or campaign takes place. |
| Caster Supremacy | A game or setting in which magic-using characters are outright better than those without magic. |
| CGen | Common abbreviation for Character Generation. |
| Character | The persona being played by a player within the context of a game. |
| Character Sheet | The document containing a character's basic traits, skills, carried equipment, background, etc. Historically a single sheet of paper, but is more commonly becoming an electronic document or spreadsheet and/or may be made up of multiple sheets. |
| Class-Based | An RPG using character classes to define player character job or role within a group, commonly limiting a player character to one or two areas of expertise. |
| Combat Round | Unit of time in a game which generally limits the number of actions a character can take before another creature / character can act. For Enchanted Realms, this is a span of ten seconds and one action/turn and reaction per participant. |
| Creature | Term used generically to refer to anything that can take actions, interact within the game/story. |
| Crit | A "critical hit". Generally speaking, a successful attack that causes greater than normal damage to the target or possibly inflicts hindrances to the victim. |
| Crunchy | Rules-heavy. Referring to rules which detail how actions and/or action resolution is determined. Also includes rules which specify abilities, statistics, monsters, equipment, etc. Often includes little or no story information. |
| d[X] | Dice roll notation in which the number in place of X represents the number of sides on the die to roll. Example; d6 refers to the roll of a six-sided die, d8 refers to the roll of an eight-sided die, and so on. |
| d100 or d% | Notation for a percentile die roll, made with a 100-sided die or with two ten-sided dice numbered 0–9, one representing the tens column and the other the single-digit value, except where 0/0 is most commonly read as 100, not zero. |
| Damage | Harm that comes to characters is usually expressed as damage against either the Body, Mind or Spirit attributes. |
| DC | Difficulty Class. The player must meet or exceed this, by die roll and adjustments, to succeed in a resolution. |
| Decker Problem | When a game results in one player becoming the only one at the table able to participate for a long period of time, leaving the other players bored. |
| Deus Ex Machina | An unexpected NPC or plot-device, often only appearing for a single scene, that saves a seemingly hopeless situation. This is often seen as bad design or desperate choices of game play. |
| Dice Training | Superstition that rolling dice repeatedly outside the game will change its statistical behavior. |
| Disadvantage | Game mechanic placing a creature with a statistical hindrance for an action. |
| Drama | A method of action resolution where the GM chooses the result based on what would be most interesting for the story rather than allowing the dice and players influence the outcome. |
| Dump Stat | A character attribute or stat with little or no perceived value, thus one that is often sacrificed or shorted in favor of another one if there is an opportunity to distribute points. Hopefully, the design of Enchanted Realms does not have this design flaw. |
| Dungeon Crawl | Similar to a Bug Hunt, this is a game scenario or adventure in which the main focus is exploration of the environment, engaging and fighting any monsters, and collecting treasure. Commonly set in a dungeon made up of hallway and rooms with little to no story line. |
| Effect | Positive or negative element which affects a character, almost always causing modifiers to abilities or allowable actions. |
| Exploding Dice | When a certain number is rolled and you get to roll again, adding the second result to the first. Often this may be repeated as long as you continue to roll the trigger number. |
| Flee Attack | Special attack that a character can make as a reaction to a melee opponent running away. |
| Fluff | Opposite of Crunchy. Most often story based material designed to enhance role-playing. This material includes background information for NPC’s, scenarios, settings and/or even scenes. Material used to ‘flesh-out’ elements of a role-playing game so they appear in the mind’s eye as more than just a list of statistics. Non-mechanic based material. |
| Fodder | Other characters, NPCs, hirelings or henchmen used to absorb the initial attacks to force the enemy to expend more energy, magic, effort to get to the objection. |
| Frag | Often referring to killing another player character, but it might merely mean to kill anything. |
| Fudge | Secret modification of a roll or other action resolution by the GM to achieve desired results. |
| Fumble | A "critical failure", generally speaking a particularly bad result. Enchanted Realms does not have fumbles in the design, as the idea of this game is more about strategy over bad luck. |
| GM | Game Master. Term referring to the person runs the adventure, tells the story, determines what action resolutions means. |
| Glass Cannon | A character capable of doing a great deal of damage, but is easily defeated. |
| GM’s Buddy | The player who always gets preferential treatment from a GM. |
| Hit Points | A number which is used to track how much punishment a character can take in combat before collapsing. In Enchanted Realms, the Body score is used for this mechanism. |
| Hex Grid or Hex Map | A map or mapping system using hexagonal (six-sided) divisions to represent character position and movement. |
| Karma | A pool of points used to advance a character's abilities and skills. Players earn more as they adventure with the character. These points are also gained by role-playing of a character as appropriate to organizations, associations, guilds, ethics and personality. |
| LBEG | Little Bad Evil Guy. Refers to an antagonist NPC meant to challenge the PCs but is not the BBEG. (Often a lieutenant of the BBEG in a campaign). |
| Level-Based | Having character proficiency defined by a discrete number; all else being equal, a character of greater level will generally be more capable than a character of lesser level. Enchanted Realms is not a level-based system. |
| Life Points | Another term for Hit Points, or Body score in this game. |
| Line of Sight | Term used to describe the ability of one creature to perceive something, (another creature, object, location, etc.), at any distance. Most often used to determine if something may be targeted. |
| Lumping | A reference to a system where skills could be broad, such as melee fighting where all weapons that are found with in close proximity are grouped. |
| Magic or Mana Points | A designation of the amount of magic power a given character has to perform magic. In Enchanted Realms, this is either the Mind or Spirit attribute, depending on the type of magic used. |
| Mary Sue | A character who is over-the-top perfect and exists to fulfill the fanciful thinking of the player. The original Mary Sue was a fictional character in a set of fan written Star Trek stories where this nothing cadet out smarted Spock, slept with Kirk, saved the Universe, etc. |
| Meat Shield | A term used to describe a tough character able to withstand powerful attacks. The entity would place itself between the enemy and the party to shield them from attack. |
| Melee | Hand-to-hand, hand held weapon combat or to fight in close proximity. |
| Metagame | Things discussed about the rules by the GM and players as opposed to things happening in-game, sometimes used to calculate the success/failure of an action by reviewing character stats and game mechanics, as opposed to acting based on character personality and what the he or she knows. |
| Min-max | A technique of using the rules to try and squeeze every last advantage out of a character rather than design a character that is more reflective of the warts, quirks and disadvantages we all possess. Often this is the result of a player trying to build a character which will achieve unbalanced success in a game. |
| Miniature | A small model representing a person, persons, a vehicle, or other pawn or actor to be manipulated during the combat simulation portion of the game. In a VTT, this will often be called a token. |
| Monty Hall | A type of adventure centered around accumulating as much wealth as possible, as fast as possible, where story takes a back seat to killing the next monster and taking its stuff. |
| Munchkin | A player who uses the rules to try and gain power that is unbalancing to the game including possibly resorting to cheating. |
| Murderhobo | Slang term for a player character who wanders the gameworld, unattached to any community, indiscriminately killing and looting. In this style of play, the PCs are not connected to the world and casually kill those who oppose them. |
| Narrativist | A player who plays primarily in order to explore story or narrative properties generated by the game, rather than to prioritize winning or optimization. |
| Natural 1 | The result of the actual dice roll, before any modifications are made. In this case, it indicates an automatic failure. |
| Natural 20 | The raw score of a d20 roll, indicating an automatic hit or success. |
| NPC | Non-Player Character. Any creature in a game that is not controlled exclusively by a player. Most often run by the GM, in certain cases a player may determine actions of an NPC. |
| OSR | Old School Renaissance. The “R” of the abbreviation has different word choices, depending on the source; regardless, this is a style of game that hearkens back to the early days of role-playing and seeks to capture what was best about those games. |
| OOC | Out of Character. Often declared to make a comment the player wants to say which the character most definitely would not say or do. |
| Optional Rules | Rules but used at the discretion of the GM. These are not part of the base rules, but can be used, (often by experienced players), to alter game play. |
| PC | The Player Character in the game. See Character. |
| Party Charter | In-character document establishing the adventuring company, its shares, inheritance and dissolution procedures. |
| PBF | Play-by-Forum. Actions and role-playing that occurs on a forum. |
| Player | The physical person playing the game, not the character(s) he or she play. |
| PnP | Pen and Paper. |
| Point-Based | Having characters that are 'constructed' with a budget of points for attributes, skills, abilities, etc; generally as opposed to being determined randomly at character creation. |
| Progression Tree | A list of skills, powers, or anything else designed in a linear advancement tree. Advanced abilities are unlocked by earning/buying prerequisites lower on the tree. |
| Psionics | Powerful abilities of the mind. |
| PvP | Player vs Player. The ability or allowance for players to attack each other directly. |
| Race | A legacy term for what Enchanted Realms calls Species, the biological being the player chooses to play. In typical fantasy role playing games, this can be human, elf, dwarf, gnome etc. The choice of race typically affects the basic traits of the character. |
| Railroading | Referring to a game's story being forced in a particular direction most often by the GM, usually by the environment being constructed or manipulated to make only one action viable. Commonly perceived as bad form. |
| RAI | Rules as Intended. This is the interpretation of a rule or rules as the GM and/or players believe it was intended to despite who the literal reading indicates. |
| RAW | The literal meaning of the published rules. See BTB. |
| Ranged | Ranged combat or an attack/effect that takes place over a distance. |
| Redshirt | An NPC that has little purpose other than to die. Derives from the classic Star Trek television show in which a security detail wearing red uniform shirts accompanied the bridge crew on adventures, almost always to their regret. |
| Roll-Play | Instead of role-play. Often derogatory, used to imply that manipulation of the game system has replaced imagination or a desire to roll dice instead of acting out character interactions. |
| Role-play | The act of taking on the role of a character. May be done in any of several modes, including 1st-person dialog, 3rd person narration of action, or even 1st person improvisational acting. |
| Round | See Combat Round. |
| RPG | Role-Playing Game, which is a game defined set of rules that allows the player to take on the role of a character and offers a strong measure of free will to choose what the character does. |
| Rules Lawyer | A person known for arguing GM rules calls by recourse to quoting the rules from the rulebooks, often disrupting the game with excessive references to rules |
| Sandbox | A style of gaming where the GM purposely avoids providing much or any overt plot or guidance to the players as to what they should be doing. The GM provides a situation, and the players interact with that location as they see fit. |
| Save | An attempt to avoid a detrimental effect, or success at such an attempt. Often phrased as “making a save” (though this can still refer either to the attempt or to success). |
| Skills | Area of proficiency. In a typical role playing game, a character will have a number of ‘skills’, namely things they are especially good (or especially not good) at. For example “hide”, “discover hidden things”, “hit with a sword”, etc. Skills are often trainable so they may improve during the course of the game. |
| Skill-Based | Having characters that are defined by narrowly-defined skills. |
| Stats | A bit broader that attribute, as the numerical value could refer to character abilities, attack or weapon damage, or details of an object, like the movement rate of a steed. |
| Target Number | The number a player is required to roll on a dice for an action to be successful. |
| To-Hit | Portion of die rolls to see if the PC successfully hit their enemy, or vice versa. |
| TPK | Total Party Kill. The event of an entire group of player characters in a game being wiped out by a threat or challenge. |
| Trait | A distinguishing characteristic of a character, usually tied to one’s species. |
| Verisimilitude | "Realism, if this world was real". What's usually actually meant by someone who complains that a minor rule is "unrealistic" in a game with wizards throwing explosive rainbows. |
| VTT | computer program or website/web application that enables live play online. Usually involves a randomizer for live die rolls and may also include maps, counters, character sheets and even rules references. VTs enable play through Voice over Internet, often on a global scale. |