By the late 1990s, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was a creature built from thirty years of accumulated mechanical debt. Attack tables, saving throw matrices, non-weapon proficiency slots, THAC0—each subsystem spoke its own language. The game worked because millions of players had memorized the contradictions.

Wizards of the Coast selected three designers to tear it down and rebuild. Jonathan Tweet led the design and pushed the core insight: one die, one mechanic, everything resolved the same way. Roll a d20, add your modifier, beat a target number. That’s it. Combat, skills, saves, ability checks—one engine. Cook was selected for his “understanding of the broader field of RPG design” and his “willingness to come up with radical ideas.” He wrote the Dungeon Master’s Guide—the book Gary Gygax himself sent a complimentary email about.

The unified d20 resolution wasn’t born from nothing. Steve Perrin’s Basic Role-Playing system had unified resolution through percentile rolls back in 1978. But D&D 3e did it at a scale nobody had attempted—retrofitting the most popular RPG in the world with a single coherent engine while keeping it recognizably D&D. Tweet gets primary credit as lead designer. Cook’s score sits one notch below, as co-architect rather than lead. But make no mistake: this was a three-person job, and the third edition remade the entire industry.

“I am a rugged glaive who controls gravity.”

Three words in a sentence. Three mechanical packages on a character sheet. The descriptor (adjective) gives you stat modifications and minor abilities. The type (noun) is your backbone—closest thing to a class. The focus (verb phrase) gives you your signature power. Each component is chosen independently. Fifty-plus descriptors times four types times seventy-plus foci, just in the core book. The combinatorial space is enormous.

No predecessor found. This isn’t GURPS templates, or D&D’s class-plus-race, or FATE’s aspects. Those are all lists of mechanical elements. Cook turned character creation into a grammatical act—you build a sentence, and the sentence builds a character. It’s concept-first by design: you start with who your character is in plain English, and the mechanics follow.

The Character Sentence won eight ENnies for Numenera in 2013 and spawned a whole system family—The Strange, Invisible Sun, the Old Gods of Appalachia RPG, the Magnus Archives RPG, and more. But here’s the catch: nobody outside Monte Cook Games has adopted it. It remains a signature mechanic of one company’s ecosystem, brilliant and self-contained. A garden with high walls.

The GM introduces a complication. Your rope frays. The guard recognizes your face. The artifact misfires. When this happens, you receive two XP—one for you, one to give to another player. If you don’t want the complication, you can refuse it, but it costs you one XP. Later, Player Intrusions reversed the flow: spend one XP, and you get to declare that something fortunate happens.

The genius is in the currency. XP in the Cypher System is both narrative fuel and advancement resource. Every complication you accept brings you closer to leveling up. Every complication you refuse costs you progress. The GM isn’t punishing you—she’s offering you a deal. Players welcome plot twists instead of resisting them.

But this concept has a predecessor. FATE’s compel mechanic, designed by Fred Hicks and Rob Donoho and published in 2003, works on nearly the same structure: the GM invokes a character aspect to create a complication, awards a fate point, and the player can refuse by spending one. Cook’s version is cleaner—it removes the aspect-trigger requirement and lets XP pull double duty—but the structural DNA is FATE’s. A refinement, not an invention. Scored accordingly.