World of Darkness and other Storyteller/Storytelling system games call their GM the Storyteller, which I think is a good title for it.
As for why designers make up their own, the term Game Master is pretty generic, and kinda boring, and they want to create something unique and/or more flavorful to their games. The term "Dungeon Master" is also owned by Hasbro and also only really makes sense in more Tolkien inspired fantasy games where heroes are crawling their way through dungeons.
Because certain systems have different focuses.
The core game focus of DnD is pretty heavily directed toward combat. Most of the spells and skills your character has are for combat or for getting into combat or for between combat encounters. It's a combat centric game, with some RP rules added on top for in-between combat encounters.
Compare that to World of Darkness's Storyteller system, which is much more heavily focused on the social interactiom and narrative drama. Combat in that game is quick and usually quite lethal, and even in the 5th Edition games Paradox is releasing, calls for combat to be 3 turns before resolving the interaction.
It takes a lot of time and effort to add on your own rules to make these systems handle what they weren't really designed for.
I wouldn't really want to run a game of complex political intrigue in DnD just as I wouldn't want to run a monster slaying dungeon crawl in World of Darkness.
Yeah, gender being a social construct doesn't mean everyone everywhere just suddenly becomes genderless androgynous blobs, we still express our gender in the ways we want to express them.
For example High heels, sheer leggings, long curly hair, and a flowy skirt and poofy blouse adorned with shiny bits. Am I describing the style dress of women today or the style of dress of 17th century French kings?
Certainly coffee houses do have historic basis in our own reality but the highly commercialized omnipresent franchises with extensive supply chains like IRL Starbucks would definitely be a bit more anachronistic, especially in an adveture friendly world where monsters and bandits are waiting outside the walls of the city waiting to ambush cargo shipments.
Something like that probably wouldn't have been even remotely possible until the age of Mercantilism well after the medieval period gave way to the Renaissance and eventually the age of exploration.
Less about specifically hating Roll20, than the blatant engagement in anti-competetive practices and the monopolization of the industry in a push toward a vertically integrated monopoly.
Sort of like if Hasbro bought out the main book printer used by a bunch of TTRPGs so they have a vertical integration and can basically force all those other games to either deal with a hostile competitor to get books printed at unsustainable prices or completely upend a huge section of their development pipelines, try to find another printer, build that relationship, rework the pipeline and formatting guides so the printer actually can print the books. That's a process that could take multiple years and millions of dollars to do. Both of which options would kill even large rpg studios.
As a DM dice are there to make noise behind the screen and raise tension. They're a psychological tool as much as they are a randomizer.
Personally I play a lot of World of Darkness games, which runs on dice pools, so if I can just keep obviously adding more and more dice to a pool, recount once or twice and roll to really sell the illusion that they may be in for something a lot bigger and scarier than they are. Or just roll a handful of dice as moments are going on, give a facial reaction and let that simmer under the surface for a while.
This sounds a lot like Star Lord's situation with Ego in Guardians of the Galaxy 2.
Do my eyes decieve me? An honest to god Mage the Ascension meme???
Did... did I get hit by the Mandela effect? Like I can hear the interaction between Omega and Doc in my head playing out.
Point taken, but they also still had the resources and people to make that many charts.
Well Rollmaster has multiple authors/designers and the benefit of 43 years of accumulated writing and knowledge.
It goes you, the dirt, the worms inside the dirt, popo's stool, kami, and popo. Any questions maggots?
I was more intending Mage the Ascension but Ars Magica works too. They were both initially created by the same company
When the Order of Hermes takes design cues from the Society of Ether.
That's a huge portion of game design. Testing new ideas to see if they hold merit. If they do, keep it around, if not, get rid of it. And while it didn't end up working for their design philosophy it might work for another's.
I think the writers of Mage the Ascension got it best when referring to DnD as a wargame with role-playing tacked on top.
So much of DnD the dnd rulebook and printed material is focused around combat and getting from one combat encounter to the next one.
We save our carcasses and use them for a stock that goes into the gravy for the next time we do a turkey dinner. We'll usually do a big turkey dinner 2 or 3 times each year including Thanksgiving.
Odd, everything I'm coming across is saying broths are made from meat where stocks are primarily made from bones. Both use vegetables as part of the aromatics.