Key Terms
- A player is a participant who controls a fixed number of characters within the setting. In Last Odyssey, each player controls one of the story’s protagonists.
- Any agent that can act during battles, exploration, or the narrative at large is called a character.
- A player character, or PC for short, is a character controlled by one of the players. In Last Odyssey, each player character also has a set of statistics unique to that character that determine (along with narrative context) the consequences of the actions they take during play.
- The party is the group of player characters, and their players. They are, usually, the protagonists of the narrative.
- A non-player character, or NPC for short, is any character in the narrative who is not controlled by a player. Not all NPCs have statistics, only those who are capable of standing up to the players in a fight.
- The Game Master, or GM for short, is the person or people responsible for describing the world that the PCs inhabit and the behavior of any NPCs. In Last Odyssey, one person is designated as the GM at a time.
- The facilitator is the person, group, or organization responsible for coordinating the logistics of an FRP. In at-home games, this role is often taken on by the GM or one of the players, and is sometimes shared among the entire group. Other times, the facilitator might be a game store, a convention, a parent or guardian, a forum administrator, or a volunteer tabletop gaming society. All FRPs require a facilitator.
- A session is a continuous length of time in which Last Odyssey is played. When a session ends is up to the needs of the group, but a typical session of Last Odyssey will last at least an hour and a half, and usually will take longer. In contemporary terms, each session of an FRP is like a single episode of television, with a distinct beginning, middle, and end.
- An adventure is one or more sessions that are tied together by an overarching narrative. An adventure is also the smallest unit of playtime that Last Odyssey is built to handle.
- A campaign is a string of adventures featuring a shared set of PCs, a shared world, and an overarching narrative of some kind. Last Odyssey is at its best when used as a way to run campaigns.
- When the rules call for a decision to be made by fiat, it means that it will be decided based on what makes sense for their story, rather than referring to the rules.
- A discrete instance of combat in Last Odyssey is called a battle.
Last Odyssey-Specific Terms
- An attribute is a number from one to ten that represents how strong a character is in a general domain of aptitudes.
- A statistic is a number from one to ten that represents a specific capability in combat.
- An action is a single, discrete thing that a character does during play. Depending on what phase of gameplay you are in, characters are allowed to take different actions.
- Abilities are discrete actions that characters can take during combat that supplement the actions that all characters can take.
Throughout these rules you will sometimes see numbers such as damage or statistics as well as properties such as a character’s elemental type be referred to as base numbers. A number that is base has not been modified by any situation-specific bonuses or penalties. For example, the base damage of an attack is the damage that it would do to its target if there were no elemental or type modifiers involved, while the base Evasion of a character is what their Evasion is without any applied buffs, debuffs, status effects, or other situational modifiers. See the Combat Rules for more details.
Many elements of Last Odyssey require its participants to roll polyhedral dice. This book uses a shorthand common in FRP to refer to which die or dice ought to be rolled. A group of dice is represented by the number of dice rolled, and then the letter “d,” and then the number of sides that the dice being rolled have. For example, “2d6” means “two six-sided dice,” “1d20” means “one twenty-sided die,” and so on. To “roll 3d4,” then, is to pick up and roll three four-sided dice. The most important dice in Last Odyssey are the d10, the d6, and the d4, although each type is used at one point or another.