I've been thinking lately about what to call the GM in my games, as you can guess from the prior sentence I've always tended to use GM. But I'm wondering what term is 'best', or indeed if it really makes any diference at all.

Here's a few random thought on a few terms:

Game Master: I like GM it's simple and concise, but it is a 'master' position with all the implications that has.

Dungeon Master: Rather too focused for my liking. Oh, so I'll be running a dungeon then, huh?

Story Teller: Impossible thing before breakfast, methinks.

Storyguide: This I like. It does kind of fit with the role I take as GM. But then it also implies Story Is The Important Thing, which I don't think I agree with.

Referee: Referee's are only supposed to apply and enforce the rules given to them already. I think that is rather less than what a GM does.

What do you think? Does it matter? What is your favourite? And why?

My preferred term is GM standing for Genius Mundi (spirit of the world).

I think it neatly sums up the role of the GM in conventional RPG's: the Players play a single character, the GM plays everyone and everything else, including physics.

edit: Of course, it's up there with Hollyhock God as a signal to call me pretentious right NOW!

Other than that, I'm just hitting the thesaurus now...

Chair (man/woman/person/just damn CHAIR!)
administrator
captain (oh, I'd like that!)
official
counsellor
Mediator
Big Brother
President
Organizer
Director
The Authority...

edit: Organizer.... growing on me....

For the TV game, I'm circling around "Producer," though the job's more like the Exec Producer or Script Editor on most TV series.

Or, we could go into DeGaulle mode... "Je suis le Jou! Le Jou, c'est moi!"

From Over the Edge, Game Moderator. It's not "Master," but it has the familiar RPG "GM" sound to it, and it's neither pretentious nor goofy. I think it would make a good standard.

-Wayne

IMO, Game Moderator is probably the best one I've heard so far, but I'm biased, having grown up on Cyberpunk, so Referee (or just Ref) is still common parlance.

-- Ben

Somewhere there is a huge thread of all the various names that have been used in games for GMs etc.

But it must not be named convieniently since I couldn't find it in a quick search.

I seem to recall the subject being phrased as a question.
What you you call the fifth wall? or something like that.

I stuck with Gamemaster in my own book. It's a good term and has history on its side.

DM and Ref are far too narrowly focused to describe the job and Storytellers have no use for players to muck things up so it's an innappropriate title.

Game Moderator is not bad at all - if you don't want the usual GM, I'd go with it over the the others you mention.

Consider Game Manager also - it gets at the authority somewhat like Master, but not as strongly.

Game Director is a term I've considered, drawing on a movie director's control over everything but the actors, who often improv (always improv in the case of RPGs). I know of one game that called him GOD (Game Operations Director).

I don't want to derail the thread... but why does everyone seek to redefine the GM's name, but almost every game is happy to use the term players for the other folks?

Good point on the players. We've started saying 'participants' when we're not specifically refering to players (i.e. "The participants should discuss this before the game starts.")

I'm partial to Game Master, myself but Moderator or Manager is fine too.

-Marco

don't want to derail the thread... but why does everyone seek to redefine the GM's name, but almost every game is happy to use the term players for the other folks?

The previous thread was What "that guy" is called

HTH

Does anyone think that different terms are appropriate for different games? That perhaps Dunjon, for example, could use DM? Or that a Wild West game maybe use Sheriff?

Mr Jack wrote: Does anyone think that different terms are appropriate for different games? That perhaps Dunjon, for example, could use DM? Or that a Wild West game maybe use Sheriff?

Call of Cthulhu uses Keeper, which I've always liked in conjunction with it.

Many games based on TV shows, movies, or on ideas from them use Director. I kind of like that one... note in particular that the Director is not the Scriptwriter. :-)

The original poster mentions liking StoryGuide, but not the Story part of it -- so why not just Guide?

--Travis

Mr Jack wrote: Does anyone think that different terms are appropriate for different games? That perhaps Dunjon, for example, could use DM? Or that a Wild West game maybe use Sheriff?

I dunno. I like genre-specific terms for added flavor, and I even like Hollyhock God. (I mean, what's not to like about being a God, eh?) Ordinarily, I use the term GM without really thinking about what it stands for. It's just common parlance understood as default. Genius Mundi is a pretty cool term, if you ask me.

Best,

Blake

I nearly stove my head in trying to think of alternative names for the non-GM players in PTA, especially as the "GM" role has less specific areas of control. I went with Producer for "that guy's" job, but the rest of the players are actors and camera crew and screenwriter and director and key grip all rolled into one. Not really a handy term for that lying around.

Matt Wilson wrote: I nearly stove my head in trying to think of alternative names for the non-GM players in PTA, especially as the "GM" role has less specific areas of control. I went with Producer for "that guy's" job, but the rest of the players are actors and camera crew and screenwriter and director and key grip all rolled into one. Not really a handy term for that lying around.

Jack, you said that referee seemed too limited in its description of the role. I understand that objection. We used referee in Multiverser because we felt it was the best term for the job in terms of accessibility to everyone: people who know nothing of role playing understand that games sometimes have one person who is the referee, whose functions in the game are different from those of the players. Perhaps part of that is reaction to those silly anti-D&D statements about how players are trying to work their way up to being Dungeon Masters (it's incredible how opinionated uninformed people can be), so we wanted something that would be clear. Obviously, basketball players are not in the main trying to work their way up to one day become basketball referees.

We also felt that the ideas of neutral arbiter and facilitator of the game were carried in the term, which did, in our view, cover the scope of what we wanted. That may be odd, since Multiverser probably requires more creative efforts from its referees than most games, but we just saw that as facilitating play.

I think the term you choose matters in a number of ways; but you have to give a lot of thought to whether you want to step outside the familiar. First, if you do call it something else, unless there's an inherently good reason for that, people will ignore it. In my groups, I had something of an advantage: we didn't have a generic name. I don't believe either Metamorphosis Alpha, Star Frontiers, or Gamma World (the games we picked up after D&D in the early days) had any special names for the referee, and we wound up calling Bob "Mutant Master" and Jan "Space Queen", but always as a bit of a joke about the title "Dungeon Master" which fell to me. Thus my gaming group didn't really have "GM" in common use, and naturally fell to "referee" when it was suggested. Even in D&D, we usually refer to the DM as the referee now, because it's a word that already contains the necessary meaning, and not some term we have to use that no one outside the hobby would understand.

If you're going to use a particular uncommon title, you need to have it mean something that differentiates it from the similar role in other games. Storyteller, as bad as it is, caught on because

• it had meaning already and• the meaning fit with the intended notion of facilitating story creation.

I won't argue whether the game succeeded in doing that; the players adopted the name as a way of creating that sort of expectation. If you can make the title fit the image of the game somehow, in a meaningful way that expresses how the job or the game differs from others, it will work. Otherwise, the players will just call that guy what they've always called him, sometimes with an, "Oh yeah, the (insert meaningless title here)" tagged on.

--M. J. Young

I just use g.o.d. for Game Operations Director. It always just seemed to fit just right in describing all the work a person running game has to do. As far as players go I always just found out who was playing and then just call them my Friends.

Bob McNamee wrote:
I seem to recall the subject being phrased as a question.
What you you call the fifth wall? or something like that.

Organizer, which someone mentioned as growing on them, is used fairly often in Live-Action circles here in Edmonton, especially once one steps outside of the White Wolf games line.

It seems to fit quite well, though I do enjoy Castle Falkenstein's "Host" as a neat title as well.

For tabletop, I have seen Guide used, which was mentioned, as well as Director, in at least one movie-themed system.

For the original poster, if you would change titles, I'd go with Guide.

[Edit- for the Original poster in the Alternative Names for "Game Master" thread.  Sorry, jumped a thread-to thread link there.]