Various tabletop role-play and tabletop role-playing game design communities use a variety of arcane terms to describe what are usually, ultimately, fairly straightforward concepts. These definitions are non-exhaustive, explicitly intended to boil the terms down to their most basic forms. This glossary is mostly for myself, so I don’t have to keep looking things up every time I forget what they mean. This glossary will be updated as I encounter terms that irritate me. If you want to suggest an addition to the glossary, reach out to me on social media.
- Exploding Encounter Die: A random encounter die whose die type fluctuates based on the fictional threat level posed to the PCs, such that the greatest threats on the corresponding encounter table are only reachable once the threat level has escalated.
- Jaquays (verb): Non-linear design, applied almost exclusively to the scope of dungeon design. The term refers to influential module designer Jennell Jaquays.
- Overloaded Encounter Die: A random encounter die corresponding to a table with more than just traditional monster or NPC encounters (e.g., resource depletion, events, clock ticks, etc.).