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https://www.eurogamer.net/from-creating-dd-to-making-baldurs-gate-3-meet-the-man-who-coined-the-term-xp>
'"Role-playing games are only 50 years old. We're still inventing them every
day. That's what's really exciting about it. We haven't found the boundaries of
it yet, if there are any. We're still pushing out. That's what keeps me doing
this stuff, years after most of my peers have retired or passed on."
Do you believe in fate, that there's an invisible force steering us through our
lives and that we end up in certain places for certain reasons? Perhaps after
hearing Lawrence Schick's story, you will.
It's not a name I expect you'll recognise, but you'll know some of the things
he's responsible for. Take the term XP, for example. It's ubiquitous in gaming
and possibly beyond it, and Lawrence Schick created it. It's primarily the
reason I set out to track him down, to hear how that came to be, because it
fascinates me to think of a gaming landscape where there's no established term
for experience points, and possibly no such thing as experience points at all.
I find it really hard to even conceive of that, given where we are now.
But it's not all I learn from Lawrence Schick when I do track him down. I
discover a passion within him that has helped shape role-playing games in the
past, and a passion that continues to shape role-playing games into the future.
To understand how the term XP came to be, we need to go back to 1979 when
Lawrence Schick was writing a module for
Dungeons & Dragons called
White
Plume Mountain. Even now, it's considered one of the greats. Wizards of the
Coast apparently thought it so important it updated it for the fifth edition of
the game, for the
Tales from the Yawning Portal compendium, released in 2017.
It's a dungeon run campaign set in the White Plume Mountain, but what makes it
special is its use of creative puzzle challenges rather than brute-force
combat. That and a trio of sentient weapons you need to find and free."
45 years ago when Lawrence Schick wrote it, he had no idea of its future
significance. All he intended
White Plume Mountain to do was get him a job at
TSR, the company making
D&D. It was a game he'd been besotted with ever since
his college friends brought back photocopies of the original white box edition
in the mid 70s. Now, he wanted to work on it.
White Plume Mountain was his
audition piece and, to his delight, it worked. Schick found himself the very
first person hired in a design role by TSR to work on the now legendary
role-playing game, directly alongside the game's co-creator, Gary Gygax.'
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
