Too many people identify with the idea that rewards for the character equate to rewards for the player. Instead, a good play experience (and having fun), is the player's reward. And it behooves the gamemaster to try and ensure everyone at the table (including themselves) is having a good time. [My measure of complete success is when a lynch mob of player(s) are physically chasing me and I'm laughing too hard to run away very effectively. It's happened four times. Fun!]
One of the things I like about the stage analogy is that you can bring in terms like limelight and blocking. Also as director of our little drama, the gamemaster can bring little noticed characters to the front of stage. And a trick with large groups is that you can give the spotlight to characters that want it by giving them the audience of other players. Your time resource as a gamemaster is too critical to be an audience for them, which is the case where the gamemaster is active.
At the tabletop it is actually more often the case with modern games that the gamemaster is seen as the antagonist who must be beaten for the players to win. And in accepting that role the gamemaster loses out on a whole bag of tricks that can be used to help the game along. So having a referee who is not an antagonist is good, but that doesn't mean that the referee should be unbiased. They should be biased in terms of a good story and the players having a good time. This means, in a LARP throwing wrenches into the plans of people being too successful and reducing the difficulty for people who are not. [In one LARP I was in, the normally factious Sartarites where being swayed by a demagogue to unite against the hated invaders, so one of the gamemasters (it was a large LARP (130 players) with 7 of them), threw in a comment from the crowd "But who will be King?" and it all collapsed in a screaming, but fun, heap.]
As for "storyteller," it was the name originally given to the system, not the gamemaster, and was designed very much to allow the players to tell the story of their characters. It's why there is such a massive difference between the first edition and later editions of Vampire. The first edition concentrated on the angst of being a blood-sucking leech. By third edition it was definitely all about being a super-cool and dark character with lots of powers. They had adopted the traditional gamer paradigm that success is measured by your character's abilities, rather than the experience of role-playing that character, and if that is your idea of success then the only way to show you are successful is to use them, which goes against the whole original idea that there is in fact a Masquerade. And because of that the gamemaster became the storyteller, the author of the piece, in order to give the players something to rail against. [First edition was broken under this paradigm, which is why the storyteller system evolved from very simple roots. Like RQ, it worked best in the sweet spot of mid-range abilities and broke once people started min-maxing and having very high (and very low) abilities. The original rule mechanics themselves were never meant to be the arbiters of the story. You were.]
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[continued]
Too many people identify with the idea that rewards for the character equate to rewards for the player. Instead, a good play experience (and having fun), is the player's reward. And it behooves the gamemaster to try and ensure everyone at the table (including themselves) is having a good time. [My measure of complete success is when a lynch mob of player(s) are physically chasing me and I'm laughing too hard to run away very effectively. It's happened four times. Fun!]
One of the things I like about the stage analogy is that you can bring in terms like limelight and blocking. Also as director of our little drama, the gamemaster can bring little noticed characters to the front of stage. And a trick with large groups is that you can give the spotlight to characters that want it by giving them the audience of other players. Your time resource as a gamemaster is too critical to be an audience for them, which is the case where the gamemaster is active.
At the tabletop it is actually more often the case with modern games that the gamemaster is seen as the antagonist who must be beaten for the players to win. And in accepting that role the gamemaster loses out on a whole bag of tricks that can be used to help the game along. So having a referee who is not an antagonist is good, but that doesn't mean that the referee should be unbiased. They should be biased in terms of a good story and the players having a good time. This means, in a LARP throwing wrenches into the plans of people being too successful and reducing the difficulty for people who are not. [In one LARP I was in, the normally factious Sartarites where being swayed by a demagogue to unite against the hated invaders, so one of the gamemasters (it was a large LARP (130 players) with 7 of them), threw in a comment from the crowd "But who will be King?" and it all collapsed in a screaming, but fun, heap.]
As for "storyteller," it was the name originally given to the system, not the gamemaster, and was designed very much to allow the players to tell the story of their characters. It's why there is such a massive difference between the first edition and later editions of Vampire. The first edition concentrated on the angst of being a blood-sucking leech. By third edition it was definitely all about being a super-cool and dark character with lots of powers. They had adopted the traditional gamer paradigm that success is measured by your character's abilities, rather than the experience of role-playing that character, and if that is your idea of success then the only way to show you are successful is to use them, which goes against the whole original idea that there is in fact a Masquerade. And because of that the gamemaster became the storyteller, the author of the piece, in order to give the players something to rail against. [First edition was broken under this paradigm, which is why the storyteller system evolved from very simple roots. Like RQ, it worked best in the sweet spot of mid-range abilities and broke once people started min-maxing and having very high (and very low) abilities. The original rule mechanics themselves were never meant to be the arbiters of the story. You were.]