RAW? What's RAW?

[jmucchiello]

But can I really guess better than the accumulated experience of the players of this game, as encoded in the RAW? The RAW are a product of thousands of campaigns. I have 20 years gaming experience. The RAW represent hundreds of thousands of times that.

Okay, I'm feeling dumb. I've been around here for 3 years, played RPGs for nearly 25. What the heck does RAW mean in this quote? I've seen the term in many meta-game discussions and nothing parses for me. Did I miss a memo or what?

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

I beleive it stands for Rules As Written.

 

[Psion]

Rules As Written

 

[Desdichado]

Yep. I hadn't seen it until now, suddenly, it's popping up all over the place.

 

[jmucchiello]

Yep. I hadn't seen it until now, suddenly, it's popping up all over the place.

Yeah, where'd it come from that people feel so free to just throw it around?

 

[Ambrus]

Yeah. Had me scratching my head for a few days until I figured it out.

These younguns these days, always making up silly slang words for stuff, like "cool", "awesome" and "linux"...

 

[reanjr]

Okay, I'm feeling dumb. I've been around here for 3 years, played RPGs for nearly 25. What the heck does RAW mean in this quote? I've seen the term in many meta-game discussions and nothing parses for me. Did I miss a memo or what?

Don't feel dumb, I spent probably 30 straight minutes scouring RPG boards for context and thinking about it before it came to me. And I'm pretty good with chat TLAs.

 

[Eosin the Red]

TLAs?

Illumination please. I hope that you are trying to be obscure I would hate to think two acronyms have snuck by me.

 

[fafhrd]

[Three letter acronyms] I believe.

 

[Deset Gled]

Personally, I'm not a big fan of the abbreviation (or term, really) "RAW", as I think it's a rather clunky way to say something. In almost every situation where someone says "RAW", I think that "SRD" works much better, as it is a reference to a specific set of documents, and works much better grammatically. In the cases where SRD doesn't work, RAW is usually pretty bad in terms of grammar. Not necessarily incorrect, but definetally not the kind of sentance structure people would use in speach or a technical writing document (which is what most rules arguements that reference the term RAW should be).