General Glossary

  • ABC: Always Be Casting. It’s generally better for your combat units to be doing something - moving to a new location, casting a spell, reloading, etc. - rather than just standing around doing nothing. Doing nothing is a waste of time.
  • double KO: A possible outcome of simultaneous resolution where two opposing combat units can kill or incapicate each other in the same round.
  • combat unit: Any of the combat participants, controlled by a human or AI, that can take orders and act independantly.
  • player: A game participant responsible for deciding the overall strategy and tactics to bring about victory. Can be either human or mechanical (AI).
  • nuke: Any spell, effect, or consumable that deals a relative large amount of damage in a short amount of time (compared to conventional melee or ranged weapons), especially one that has an “explosive” theme. In DnD the prototypical nuke is the fireball spell, in a future- or space-themed setting it could be a literal nuclear weapon.
  • wall time: The time experienced by the player in the Real World. It never pauses and never changes speed.

Actor Terminology

  • actor: any entity which interacts with a time model
    • player: an actor that has the goal of winning the game and is ultimately responsible for decisions (strategy and tactics) and issuing commands
      • human: a player that is… actually a human
      • cpu: a computer-controlled player, typically pitted against the human in a single-“player” game. Also known as the AI.
    • character: an actor that carries out the commands issued to them by a controller

95% of the time player refers to both human and cpu players, but context should make it clear when human is the correct interpretation.

In many games the player has only one character to control, and the distinction between player and character may blur. At the risk of committing model abuse, we should maintain the separation between decision making and performing actions for our mechanics.

Controller Terminology

  • controller : an entity that selects commands to issue to a character. Players can be controllers, but many other types exist:
    • An AI controller configured and assigned to the character by a human player in lieu of direct control, aimed at automating most of the character’s activities in a specific party role
    • An AI controller intrinsic to the character that the player has minimal input on, such as a summoned pet or NPC companion
    • An AI controller temporarily assigned to a character to implement a crowd control effect like fear

Effects like charm can change the controller of a character to another player.