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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 8398627" data-attributes="member: 6799660">Adversarial/permissive, railroad/sandbox, gamist/simulationist/narrative, old school/new school. All of these things are (relatively) clear in extreme cases and hypotheticals but rarely if ever would exist in their purist form out in the wild (at least in a gaming experience that most gamers would regularly tolerate). Reality is almost always going to be a measure of degree or even just a leaning or preference.With that in mind, I would say that an Adversarial DM would be one who (completely regardless of the reasonableness of the position, there can people who are completely right in this regard, and those who are completely wrong, plus a huge middle ground) think that the players need someone keeping them on the back foot in some way for there to be a sufficient game challenge, worry overly that the players are trying to get away with something (again in a way that is detrimental to the game actually being enjoyable), or otherwise feel that they need to make sure that player or character actions are met with significant pushback or consequence at a rigorous number of junctures. The motivation can be anything from duty ('look, you asked me to be the DM, so this is my job'), to paranoia ('I knew you were trying to cheat!'), to competitive ('got you this time. Same time next week?'), to quasi- or really sadistic ('haha, you died!'). Once again, this is going to be something measured in degree, and just like every school principle, police officer and DMV employee don't fall into the category of either pushover or jerk-obstacle, most DMs aren't either explicitly adversarial or not-adversarial, so much as being adversarial some of the time (and some of the time it being justified, and sometimes not).</blockquote>

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