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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xenolith234" data-source="post: 9826442" data-attributes="member: 7026644">DMing now is an act of creativity, collaboration, and although some do it for pay, most don’t. I don’t give up hours and hours of my time, preparing a game for 4-6 players, to be bludgeoned by the same amount of entitled players telling me how I need to cater to their each and every whim. It’d be extraordinarily selfish on their part.I guarantee you that Critical Role has a tremendous amount of collaboration going on behind the scenes for session zero, the months leading up to it, etc., that doesn’t get revealed to viewers at all and they just see “ooh weird concept I’m gonna play that in my next D&D game” without any understanding of what happened behind the scenes to bring it to fruition.I’m so far from an antagonistic/adversarial DM (perhaps because I only grew up in the very tail end of that era) though I’ll play the heel, but I also want the tools (beyond just monsters) to challenge both the players and the characters.For instance, although the Dark Powers checks may be silly, I recently played The Count, The Castle, & The Curse. The way it evokes dread, fear, and stress in the players is through what’s called the stress die, which modifies the DCs based on what it’s currently set to, which goes up and down based on the players’ actions. I’ve never seen any other fear/frightened mechanic in D&D evoke so much stress in my players, and they all loved it.</blockquote>

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