Baldur's Gate 3 Narrative Designer Coined The Term XP In "Like 20 Minutes" Decades Ago
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 have Baldur's Gate 3 principal narrative designer Lawrence Schick to thank.
45 years ago, Schick was hired to work on a Dungeons & Dragons module 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 told Eurogamer.
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 like levelling up and 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 build Acts 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,"
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