D&D General What is adversarial DMing?

[GungHo]

To clarify do we mean "adversary" as "providing opposition" or "adversary" as "enemy"?

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

That is as succinct as could be put, and I totally agree. It's when a DM seriously thinks of the monsters' victory and the PCs' failure as their win condition, not that the players enjoyed themselves and had fun (which, granted, can involve challenging them with difficult encounters and puzzles, or even meatgrinder dungeons).

I think fundamentally an adversarial DM is one who views player losses as some sort of victory for themself.

 

[BookTenTiger]

In my view, an adversarial DM is one who defines their own fun by making the game less fun for others.

Long, long ago, a user named Piratecat once said he had written on the inside of his DM Screen "What would be fun for the players?" I really try to live by that creed.

 

[Desdichado]

I disagree. It's not adversarial to have a world that exists independent of the PCs. That's strong worldbuilding. If it's a party of all squishy wizards that doesn't mean they'll never face a well-armed and armored melee combatant. You don't give out extra healing potions because no one wants to play a cleric. To me, that's a player-side problem. They can generally be assumed to know what to expect, if they choose not to prepare for that, it's on them. They can easily pick up a hireling or two to cover their deficiencies. But if they choose not to...that's on them. A world that's always shifting to perfectly suit whatever the PCs have in tow is way, way too video gamey for my tastes.

I recognize that my EXTREMELY strong feelings on this regard are unusual, so I don't try to harp on it too much. I'm a very strong believer in the ideas of GM sovereignty and player sovereignty. Building the characters that you want to is one of the hard and fast rules of player sovereignty that I have, and if I GM is going to "punish" them by not bringing a game that works for the players that he has, as opposed to some platonic ideal of a party, then to me that's adversarial and passive-aggressive.

Of course, I also have EXTREMELY strong feelings with regards to pre-prepared games. In reality, if a party creates a party of all wizards or something, then they OBVIOUSLY shouldn't be doing standard dungeon-crawling, and that shouldn't be assumed to be what the game is about. It's the GM's job to recognize that and adjust his game accordingly. Otherwise, he's messing up one of the cardinal rules of good GMing, which is that he needs to read the group and present a game that's fun for them, not some game that has nothing to do with the group.

But I don't want to derail your thread to talk too much about what is clearly little more than a personal affectation of mine, since I recognize that I've never really seen anyone else talk about this, or even very many people agree with it when I state it.

 

[loverdrive]

I see being adversarial as, well, being adversarial. Like, someone whose goal is to defeat the players by any means. Whether they do it with all the subtlety of 1st Tarasque cavalry regiment of archilich army or they play with their food, it doesn't really matter that much. It's determined by intent, not by the results.

I don't think that can be effectively diagnosed from outside, be it by a player at the table or a third party doing forum psychoanalysis, but it doesn't really matter that much. If someone at the table feels like the other party is out to get them, then there's some serious talking needed.

 

[Malmuria]

Mysteries and Investigation: A dm can be perceived as adversarial when the things the players try are shut down. It's complicated, because the dm might just be trying to play the world in an accurate way, but the result is that the players find that they can't do anything. Or the players come up with a plan, and to the dm it is not a great plan, and doesn't take into account a lot of information, but the players don't realize that. Mystery/investigative scenarios falter for this reason: the dm thinks they they are giving plenty of clues, and the clues are obvious, while the players are totally stumped because they actually have very limited information. I think the way to address this is 1) be a fan of the PCs and 2) be very generous with information.

Traps: Gygaxian traps are notorious for being gotchas, where there is no or very limited ability to notice the danger you are walking in to. He exacerbated the problem by getting annoyed at players for being overly cautious. 5e traps are more like a perfunctory skill check combined with a slight annoying hp/resource tax. I'm not even sure the osr has solved this problem, for all the talk of "player skill." Either the traps are deadly enough to really put the "crawl" in dungeon crawl, or they are a resource tax (though, that's maybe more significant when resources (e.g. HP) are more scarce). Chris McDowall has some good thoughts on this.

Combat: Is combat-as-war, with unbalanced encounters, unfair? There are some that might say that even combat-as-sport, where the dm plays the adversaries in a tactical mini-game, is overly adversarial, and that a dm must balance their encounters and adjust on the fly to make sure the PCs don't die. Then we get into what someone on another thread called combat-as-performance: the dm plays out the encounter for maximum drama and so that the players feel like heroes, but in reality there was no danger to their characters. I've presented players with balanced encounters that they defeated, but to them it felt adversarial because it wasn't easy, and because I was rolling in the open and playing tactically rather than merely narrating their successes. I'll be honest I have no idea what to do when players want combat-as-performance, often because admitting that that is the desired playstyle breaks the illusion of combat being any sort of game challenge (whether as sport or as war).

 

[Malmuria]

I'll add that there is such a thing as adversarial players. One problem I've had recently in playing story-oriented games are players who still feel the need to "win," even as I try to explain that the purpose of the game is collaborate on a story.

 

[payn]

Another important element to bring up is sometimes players train or force a GM to become adversarial. Charop-ers, rules lawyers, tournament minded players can really push the challenge level required of a GM. The arms race isn't always started by a GM alone. All I know is, once you tune up to an arms race mentality as GM, it can be very difficult to tune down to a more casual pace. Thus taking us back to the misalign expectations of the table.

 

[TheSword]

Sure. I think that might be a player empowerment thing. 5E has shifted so drastically to the non-challenging side of assuming the players must always win that it's pointless and boring unless the difficulty is cranked way up. The game went from "zero to hero" under TSR to "superhero to superer superhero" under WotC. The players just assume they're badasses and will easily win everything all the time. That's dull. Still, no reason to mock them and cackle. Maybe play an older edition or talk about house rules to tone the characters down.

5e difficulty is entirely down to the DM and the table. Difficulty is within the control of both players and DM. If players want to play on hard mode they just don’t select healing word. All of a sudden 5e is hard as any edition since 2nd.

Also difficulty is a simple a case of turning up the dials on what an encounters foes can withstand and up on what they can dish out. There are so many ways to do that within the game.

When players use the internet to research killer builds, find optimum spell choices etc then it isn’t the game system that’s powerful, it’s the players approach.

A first level character in 5e has the same number of hp as a character in 3e. Less in a lot of cases.

 

[payn]

To clarify do we mean "adversary" as "providing opposition" or "adversary" as "enemy"?

An important distinction because I expect my GM to provide opposition, I dont expect them to want to defeat me in RPG terms.