RPG General News - Lawrence Schick - The Inventor of the Term XP

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From creating D&D to making Baldur's Gate 3: meet the man who coined the term XP

"We were inventing a whole art form at the time."

A photograph of a white man with a pointed, Van Dyke white beard, and long white hair neatly swept back over his head, holding a magnifying glass up to some ancient document or other in the background.

"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.

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