RPG as Discovery

In a roleplaying game, the players take on the roles of people in a fictional world. Each player creates a character to portray, and together, the players create a story. In their imagination, the players experience the same challenges and rewards that their characters experience. To facilitate this, the rules of the game govern whether characters succeed or fail at what they try to do. This book sometimes refers to the player characters as PCs. In addition to the players who are the charact...

 Judge (DM) as Multiple Roles

So, what is a Judge? A Judge is the stage-setter, the tale-teller, the mediator, and the narrator. The Judge fills in the background, describes what the player characters see, and operates the non-player characters, ranging from ultimate menaces to the universe to small-time crooks to innocent bystanders to other heroes and forces of the law. The Judge decides if a character's action is successful or if a villain escapes. The Judge provides the challenges for the heroes and the information th...

 DM as Collaborator with Players

Most games have a winner and a loser, but the Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game is fundamentally a cooperative game. The Dungeon Master (DM) plays the roles of the antagonists in the adventure, but the DM isn’t playing against the player characters (PCs). Although the DM represents all the PCs’ opponents and adversaries—monsters, nonplayer characters (NPCs), traps, and the like—he or she doesn’t want the player characters to fail any more than the other players do. The players...