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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Belen" data-source="post: 9620751" data-attributes="member: 1405">Wow....you and I had very different takes on what he said. He clearly established that the type and style of the game would be set up in session 0 so every player would have already agreed to it.He never said the entire point of the game was to kill 3 characters. He said it happened because the enemy had a vorpal sword. That is chance, not intention. He said it was a great game, not because of the character deaths, but because the threat and risk and stakes of the game were pleasing to everyone at the table.He also said nothing about adversarial DMing. He said that it was the job of the DM to challenge the players through combat or story. In fact, that is the job of the DM. You create combat encounters in D&D and most TTRPGs to oppose the players and give them a fun game. There are cooperative TTRPGs but those are more rare.You can focus on semantics, but he clearly defined what his comments meant that has folks up in arms.A good DM does provide opponents, risk, and stakes for the game whether it be combat or story risks. For example, my players faces a bunch of ghouls in a pirate cave after learning about an island in the bay where people disappeared. The players chose to explore the underdark first and when they returned, a fever had infested the nearby town and people who died from it were becoming ghouls. They chose to ignore the hook and it had story consequences and a lot of townfolk died. They are now on the island facing a lot more ghouls and great undead because they had time to increase their foothold. They are enjoying the story and they all messaged me saying that they loved that their decisions were affecting the world around them.Mearls is not saying that a DM has to be a jerk to the players. He is saying that a DM should impose risk to the players in order to have a good game.</blockquote>

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