For me it was “Hollyhock God” from Nobilis.
Why do game designers do this? Does anybody, anywhere, actually use these weird terms while actually playing?
Hasbro ™ © has copyright to Dungeon Master ™ © ©
Always remember that a parasite is trying to wriggle into your hobby and replace your tongue so it’s can steal life from your mouth.
Alien uses Mother
In Paranoia the GM essentially roleplays as the Computer of Alpha Complex. Rule 1 is “The computer is infallible”
Yes, Friend Computer only has our best interests in mind. Trust Friend Computer.
What I love in Paranoia is that the players start as Troubleshooters. As in their job is to find trouble and shoot it. As an IT professional who’s usually the go-to for the hard problems, I appreciate that.
I was never a paranoia GM, but let me tell you, that session our GM handed out folders and one of us had been upgraded to red , blood was spilled.
Bunnies and Burrows: ‘Warrenmaster’ but we never used it as we were going by the G.U.R.P.S. edition so we just used the generic ‘GM’.
In John Wick’s Wilderness of Mirrors, the GM is called CONTROL, if I am not misremembering.
World of Darkness and other Storyteller/Storytelling system games call their GM the Storyteller, which I think is a good title for it.
As for why designers make up their own, the term Game Master is pretty generic, and kinda boring, and they want to create something unique and/or more flavorful to their games. The term “Dungeon Master” is also owned by Hasbro and also only really makes sense in more Tolkien inspired fantasy games where heroes are crawling their way through dungeons.
…TSR’s marvel RPG used judge, but i prefer referee from the original D+D little white books…
…invisible sun uses gamemaster but its players are called vislae…
