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Record W4414205203 · doi:10.33063/ijrp.vi16.642

Uninformed Consent in TTRPGs: Communicating Expectations to Avoid Nightmare Game Master Horror Stories

2025· article· en· W4414205203 on OpenAlexaff
Guiseppe Femia

Bibliographic record

VenueInternational Journal of Role-Playing · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicInformation and Cyber Security
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Waterloo
Fundersnot available
KeywordsPower (physics)Qualitative researchOrder (exchange)NightmareSocial mediaQualitative analysisNarrative

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

This article offers a qualitative analysis of social media such as Reddit, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube regarding the abuse of power by a dungeonmaster (DM) in tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) gameplay. It uses NVivo to analyze stories documenting “nightmare dungeonmasters” (NDMs) in order to better understand what players mean by that term. The data is coded for themes such as power, abuse, boundaries, and consent. The first half of the article deploys critical discourse analysis regarding passive/informed consent and the violation/maintenance of social boundaries at the TTRPG table. The second half of the article aligns the stories related in the first half with safety tools that are seen as applicable for avoiding NDM behaviors and their correspondingly negative gaming experiences. Tools are sourced both from this primary research and also from a literature review. The spirit of ethical research within the gaming community serves its reader by supplying them with a better understanding of NDM phenomena, as well as safety tools that can be employed on behalf of player boundaries.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Qualitative · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.448
Threshold uncertainty score0.431

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0020.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.025
GPT teacher head0.308
Teacher spread0.283 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designQualitative
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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