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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6195083" data-attributes="member: 17106">If anything, there's really three goals that are at odds. One, directly controlling and roleplaying antagonists, two, crowd-pleasing, creating a positive experience for the players, and three, being a neutral adjudicator of the game reality by adjudicating the rules. All of those are generally goals of DMing.It is possible to abrogate those endeavors under certain circumstances. For example, it is possible to be purely antagonistic to the players and make no explicit effort to create enjoyment on their part (which can in itself be rewarding). It's possible to take a detached view of antagonists; to not roleplay them so much as to use them arbitrarily to create challenges, or to not create any true antagonists and to engage the players in other ways. It's possible to ignore any notion of in-game reality or consistent and logical rules and simply make decisions about what happens on a detached narrative level. All of these are explicit deviations from the full range of possible goals, but they happen.And of course, while those are discrete goals, they won't always be in direct conflict. Only sometimes.Trying to design a game where those aren't all potentially in conflict though, is pretty hard to imagine when you have an all-powerful DM.</blockquote>