What Does “game master (GM)” Mean?

A game master is the person who runs a role-playing game: setting the story, applying the rules and playing the world around the players.

Part of speech

noun

Category

LARP terminology

Meaning in context

The job is three jobs under one hat. A game master decides what the world contains and what is true inside it, owns the rules and settles them when two people read the same rule two different ways, and keeps the whole thing moving for as long as it is booked to run. Reference works reach for host, referee and arbiter at once, which is about right.

At a table that includes speaking for every inhabitant of the setting personally. Live, a GM gives most of that away. The people players meet in the woods are crew, and the GM’s weekend goes on briefing those crew about plot the players are not allowed to know, ruling on disputes, and steering the event back when it drifts. The venue booking and the money may be theirs too, or somebody else’s, because a LARP is an event before it is a story.

Expect the title to change under you. Systems rename the role deliberately, and the name hints at how the game wants to be run: called a storyteller you are told plot matters most, called a referee fairness does. One British club’s glossary calls its organizers a ref team, with refs specialising in monsters, characters or story, and never uses “GM” anywhere. So what you learn at a new event is who to go to, and whether the person talking to you is holding a player character of their own.

Where it comes from

The compound explains itself; the record behind it does not. One reference work credits the first use of “gamemaster” to Dave Arneson, working on an early fantasy campaign in 1971, and in the same breath allows that the earliest appearance in print may have been a rulebook by other authors. Repeat it as the hedged attribution it is, not as a date to quote.

The role reached live play already built. Tabletop role-playing had a referee running everything the players did not, the non-player characters included, well before anyone was organising a weekend in a field, and live games kept the word. When they started keeping it, nobody wrote down. That fits a hobby assembled independently by groups in North America, Europe and Australia: there was no single room in which the title got settled.

Examples

• Our game master wrote the entire weekend out in advance and then refused to tell the crew how it ended, on the grounds that they would play it too tidily.
• Both of us were certain we had struck first, so we stopped, found a GM, and she listened for about a minute before ruling against the pair of us.
• She has been game master for six events now and still says the hard part is the venue paperwork rather than the plot.

How it connects to larpmaxxing

This is the role larpmaxxing does not have. At an event a game master sets what is allowed before anyone is in costume and is standing there to stop it when something goes wrong; a persona running on a feed has nobody in that chair, so every call belongs to whoever is posting. A fictional balance in Cryptomaxx is made for viewers who are meant to catch on. Held up to a landlord as evidence that money exists, it is fraud, and there is no referee to blow a whistle.

More from the dictionary

This entry is part of the LARP dictionary, which covers the vocabulary of live-action role-play and the internet slang that grew up around it. The two pillar pages are what LARP is and what larpmaxxing means.