At the Head of the Table

The TRPG Game Master as Dramatistic Agent

Abstract

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.