RPG Lexica:YZ9

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Y

Yoink!
Short for "I like that idea so much I'm stealing it (for my game)". Origin: from the supposed sound of something being snatched away. Think back to saturday morning cartoons and you will know the sound.


"You all meet in a tavern..."
The "classic" (read: cliched) way to bring a party together in a fantasy game; often extended to other games as well. Very nearly as cliche as the literary equivalent, "It was a dark and stormy night..."

Z

Z
The 26th and last letter of the Roman alphabet, derived from the Greek letter Zeta. Pronounced either "zed" (Commonwealth English) or "zee" (American English). Very seldom used as the first letter of gaming terminology.


Zerg
As a verb, to defeat an enemy by force of numbers. Taken from the name of the Zerg alien race in StarCraft who typically employ this strategy.
In a similar vein, Zerg Rush: To overwhelm an enemy with a mass of relatively weak attackers.

Numbers & Symbols

101, the
Slang for the basic information about some subject of interest. Usually used to refer to imparting this information to another: "I'll give him the 101 on the Agency while we're staying here in the safe house." From the traditional course number for introductory courses in American colleges and high schools (from "MemoryBeast", on the RPGnet Fora). It is not a reference to George Orwell's book 1984, where 101 was the room prisoners were exiled to in order to face "the most horrible thing in the world." Sometimes called "the 411" (411 in American phone systems is the three-digit "x11" code for Directory Assistance, also called "Information").


20-4 theory
"RPGs are twenty minutes of fun packed into four hours." An observation from a designer's blog hotly contested in the forum, but subject to some sympathy from a surprising number of players.


404
Brain not found. A player (more rarely, a GM) caught daydreaming at an inopportune moment. Derived from the HTML 1.0-1.1 code returned when one attempts to load a web page which is not present on a given server.


80-20 rule
The top 20% of people (by whatever measure) get 80% of the goodness. An observable trend in many real-life situations. In an RPG context the 80:20 rule is usually cited as the reason for avoiding basing anything on a player's real-life skill level in a game that is distributed across a large number of people (as in a tournament or online RPG) since it will quickly become the case that anyone outside the top 20% of skill will be completely dominated and have no motivation to continue participating.


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