Summary
Play any RPG from the past 40 years and you’ll come across XP. It’s the universal abbreviation of experience points that has become so ingrained in the gaming lexicon that it even broke the barrier and became widely understood beyond the medium. As it turns out, we haveBaldur’s Gate 3principal narrative designer Lawrence Schick to thank.
45 years ago, Schick was hired to work on aDungeons & Dragonsmodule called White Plume Mountain alongside co-creator Gary Gygax. In a spur-of-the-moment decision on a random afternoon, he coined one of the most iconic terms in gaming.
It was just like 20 minutes on a Thursday afternoon.
“We couldn’t use EP because Gary had added electrum pieces to the currency […] And so I had the problem of trying to figure out an abbreviation for experience points, so I came up with XP and used that, and it stuck,” Shtick toldEurogamer.
Dungeons & Dragons' Impact On RPGs
RPGs are only 50 years old. For comparison,Spider-Man,Doctor Who, and even slasher movies are older. It’s a young genre in a young medium, which means it’s still constantly evolving and finding its footing.
Dungeons & Dragons played an instrumental role in its foundation, introducing basic ideas that we take for granted likelevelling upand even just the concept of character progression.
As Shick said, a lot of fundamental gaming ideas and terms are “rooted in a few years in the ’70s when they were all worked out for the first time”.
Over four decades later Shick is still working in the RPG space. He started as a contractor for Larian Studios but quickly decided that “this is the real stuff”, joining full-time in 2021 as the principal narrative designer on Baldur’s Gate 3, which is even set in the world of Dungeons & Dragons. In particular, he helped buildActs 2 and 3, fleshing out the remaining two-thirds of the game.
It has been another in a long line of recent phenomenon to catapult D&D into the mainstream, and for Shick, it has been a treat to watch.
“It has surprised all of us,” Shick said. “It struck a chord. It’s hit a nerve thatwehave always understood, but now it’s become clear that if it’s presented in an accessible way, and a way that really engages people in their own stories with the powerful stories of characters, that it’s a thing there’s been an unsuspected market for.”
Baldur’s Gate 3
WHERE TO PLAY
Baldur’s Gate 3 is the long-awaited next chapter in the Dungeons & Dragons-based series of RPGs. Developed by Divinity creator Larian Studios, it puts you in the middle of a mind flayer invasion of Faerûn, over a century after the events of its predecessor.
