Game Masters

Facilitators of game worlds, and players interactions with them.

Games containing complex game worlds so complex that not all can be presented at once still need ways of letting players interact with them. This first became an issue for tabletop roleplaying games. These had evolved out of wargames and miniature games which had often dedicated game facilitators keeping track of hidden information. This role evolved into Game Masters (also called Dungeon Masters and Storytellers) responsible for improvising effects of players' actions and creating adventures, campaigns, and whole game worlds. With the appearance of computer-based roleplaying games, programs could replace people in the role of Game Masters at the expense of being able to improvise in response to player actions. To compensate for this, solutions where people and programs share the responsibility of being Game Masters have appeared.

Examples

Sleep is Death

Dungeons & Dragons was the first commercially successful tabletop roleplaying game and made use of Game Masters under the name of Dungeon Masters. This was soon quickly followed by many other systems such as Basic Roleplaying (including offspring such as Call of Cthulhu and Hârnmaster) and GURPS. The use of Game Masters have continued to be a standard design component in many of the releases which have followed since then, including Paranoia, the various games using the Storytelling System, and Fallen Reich.

Kingdoms DragonMud

Ultima Online World of Warcraft

Using the pattern

Roleplaying Randomness Dedicated Game Facilitators Challenging Gameplay Exaggerated Perception of Influence Agents Units Open Destiny Non-Player Characters Characters Stimulated Planning Enemies Fudged Results Freedom of Choice Multiplayer Games Late Arriving Players Companions Zero-Player Games Character Defining Actions Enforced Agent Behavior Single-Player Games Underlying Assumptions and Concepts Self-Facilitated Games

History

An updated version of the pattern Game Masters that was part of the original collection in the book Patterns in Game Design.

Acknowledgements

Marcus Brissman, Martin Fredriksson, Carl Heath, John-Philip Johansson, Johan Peitz, Annika Waern