Story Improvisation in Tabletop Roleplaying Games: Towards a Computational Assistant for Game Masters

Abstract

In tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs), game masters (GMs) facilitate creating an improvisational shared story, responding in real time to the actions that players take and the things that they want to see in the world. In order to examine the process by which GMs co-create such player-driven narratives, we conduct interviews with GMs about their process preparing for and running TTRPG campaigns. We qualitatively code these interviews in order to synthesize a list of techniques GMs can use to move the story forward. We also compare these interviews to other sources of advice for GMing in sourcebooks and essays. Using the GMing techniques found through this analysis, we discuss insights into the GMing process and how this can be used to inform the design of a computational assistant for GMs.