User:Mvill6/Tabletop role-playing game

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Specific tabletop RPGs may have a unique name for the GM role, such as Dungeon Master (DM) in Dungeons & Dragons, Referee in all Game Designers' Workshop games, or Storyteller for the Storytelling System.

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The changes in this setting over time, especially those involving "the Fifth Frontier War" as depicted in the Journal of the Travellers Aid Society, arguably constitute the first use of metaplot in a role-playing game.^{[citation needed]}

The player characters collectively are known as a "party".^{[citation needed]}

Some games, such as Polaris and Primetime Adventures, have distributed the authority of the GM to different players and to different degrees. This technique is often used to ensure that all players are involved in producing a situation that is interesting and that conflicts of interest suffered by the GM are avoided on a systemic level.^[]

Still others, such as GURPS, allow the player to create their own character concepts by freely assigning statistics.^{[citation needed]}

Market research conducted at Wizards of the Coast in 1999-2000 indicated that more than 1.5 million people played D&D on a monthly basis, and about 2 million people played all tabletop RPGs combined on a monthly basis. The success of the 3rd Edition of Dungeons & Dragons likely resulted in an increase in those totals.^{[citation needed]} These figures for play are substantially larger than the figures for sales. In 2006, non-Dungeons & Dragons tabletop RPGs in the upper echelons of sales typically generated between five and ten thousand unit sales. Most commercially published RPGs are small press products, having less than a thousand units sold. The technology of print on demand is strongly used in RPGs, since it reduces run costs for the typical small print runs.

Research done by Wizards of the Coast in 2017 found that approximately 9.5 million people played the 5th edition of Dungeons and Dragons actively.