This paper uses Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic approach to examine the way that the tabletop RPG Game Master (GM) is depicted in a number of different TRPG fan discourse sites distributed over time. The result of the analysis is a "rhetoric of the GM" comprising a fourfold typology of understandings of the referee role, labeled as "Fan," "Challenger," "Grown-Up," and "Demiurge," based on contingencies of dialogic versus monologic and adversarial versus non-adversarial orientations to the player-GM relationship.