In creative roleplaying games, game masters take on many roles, including keeping track of the game’s story, remembering past actions, and improvising new content based on player choices and desires. This dynamic storytelling can be quite difficult, particularly in real-time play, and this paper explores how digital tools might be able to assist GMs with elements of this process. In particular, we explore issues that game masters experience in running the GUMSHOE One-2-One system by analyzing posts from the online role playing game community, and discuss the design of a digital tool that helps to address common problems. The resulting tool, Shoelace, helps game masters keep track of story events with a graph-based game world visualization, while also providing creative suggestions using Prolog queries over a database of game information.

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.

Tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) and procedural content generators can both be understood as systems of rules for producing content. In this paper, we argue that TTRPG design can usefully be viewed as procedural content generator design. We present several case studies linking key concepts from PCG research – including possibility spaces, expressive range analysis, and generative pipelines – to key concepts in TTRPG design. We then discuss the implications of these relationships and suggest directions for future work uniting research in TTRPGs and PCG.

This paper presents a preliminary exploration of games as sites of collaborative game world creation. By this, we mean the processes in games by which players take on a dual role as player within the game world and maker of the game world, sharing authorship of the world and its design with the game's designers and other players. We explore several examples of games featuring game world co-creation at the core of their gameplay, and use this to create a model for understanding the commonalities across these various games and how they facilitate this collaborative process. By examining similar structures in the design and play of these games, we can better understand how to identify this process in existing games and how to better create games that allow for this in the future.

This paper presents a case study in the experience-first prototyping of a generative game. Our goal in this process was to create a PCG-based mystery story construction game ncentered on a social simulation of characters and their motivations, and driven by a set of core themes and experiences we wanted players to encounter. In pursuit of this goal, we created a series of prototypes to test how a variety of generative and AI-based techniques---including character generation, character action suggestion based on game state, story sifting, and social simulation---may be used in support of collaborative storytelling. In this paper we catalogue these prototypes and what we have learned by creating them, detailing design elements we found to be successful in supporting player creativity and that may be useful to the developers of similar games and experiences going forward.