UC Santa Cruz

In tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs), game masters (GMs) facilitate shared story creation using improvisational techniques that let them anticipate and respond to what players 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 use to move the story forward even when players behave unexpectedly. We then perform a second round of interviews, looking at how GMs would run a specific scenario (\textit{Lost Mine of Phandelver}) and using this as a common baseline for understanding GMing techniques. We also provide GMs with a limited prototype of a digital tool for GMs and use this in our interviews to evaluate what GMs might want to see in a computational assistant. We compare our interview findings to online advice for running \textit{Lost Mine} in order to see if these techniques were shared across a wider sample of GMs. Based on these interviews and analysis, we provide some speculative directions for further designs of computational tools for GMs, such as creating better tools for information visualization and generative content.