Friday, January 9, 2015

What Does Your Game Call The GM?

I finally started reading through some of the game books I bought at GenCon this year. Yeah, I took a while to get to it...oops. Anyhow, as I am reading through the base book for Shadows of Esteron I noticed that they, like many games, have a different title for the GM. It got me to thinking, how many titles for this role are there?

In my twenty years or so of gaming, I have been called the following for the crime of GMing:


  1. Game Master
  2. Dungeon Master
  3. Dragon Master
  4. Story Teller
  5. Animator
  6. Leader
  7. Game Leader
  8. Mission Control
  9. Inquisitor
  10. Manga-ka
  11. Command
What about you? Obviously I default to GM since that is the term I use here all the time. Do you default to one in particular?

3 comments:

  1. What about Referee?

    I've been called DM and GM obviously and some terms that come from my native language. I prefer to call myself in a way that would translate to english as "Game Leader".

    Funny fact - in Polish GM = MG (Mistrz Gry, which is hard like hell to pronounce for anyone not speaking polish), so we sometimes used to use "Miś Gry", which would translate as Game Bear/Teddy-bear :D

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  2. I started out with Vampire, so I've been calling the GM Story Teller for the longest time (Erzaehler in German). These days, my groups use Spielleiter/SL = Game Leader. Or Game Master when we talk/write in English.

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  3. I stick to "GM" for the simplicity that everyone in gaming always knows what I'm talking about.

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