Friend or Foe? The End of Adversarial Game Mastery

Image from Zero Charisma, Tribeca Films

Winning and Losing

If you have spend enough time on tabletop web sites or fan communities, you will probably hear stories about 'killer DMs.' There are a number of memes and jokes that get passed around about DMs who wipe out the party, introduce themselves with an air of doom, or launch impossible encounters against the players when angered. But honestly, this is a simplistic and flawed interpretation of the DMs role that is now being more widely challenged and dismissed as the modern community re-evaluates how these games are meant to be played. 

The idea of the DM as a force in opposition to the players is just another variant to the notion that a game needs direct competition between competitors to be fun. Tabletop RPGs by their very nature have no 'winners' or 'losers' but a shared experience and series of challenges to overcome. If you view the DM as actively working against the players, trying deliberately to defeat and destroy them, you now have a game that can be won by one side or the other. The DM wins by destroying them, the players win by frustrating the DM's efforts.  

When did this happen? During a discussion on the tabletop podcast Potelbat from the Mad Adventurers' Society, they posited that idea of the adversarial DM really caught on with the advent of the DM screen. The screen is a looming sinister wall that can easily create the psychological effect of cutting off players and DM, concealing who knows what and drawing a line between the two sides. 

But this is all a misconception based on a premise that makes no sense if you think about it. The DM is technically unrestricted by any rules or parameters. They can build their own adventure, and create their own encounters. They call for the rolls and ajudicate any penalties and modifiers. If their goal is destroy or defeat the players, they have already won. They can do that at any time because it is within their power to drop an unstoppable lich upon their party or simply declare "rocks fall, everyone dies."

The Role of the Dungeon Master

This is why game mastering should be cooperative rather than adversarial. This is not to say that the game runner should cowtow to the players' every whim, but their goal should be to entertain and challenge, not simply to defeat. If you are attempting to find ways to undermine and prevent the players from succeeding every time they take an action, you're playing out an anti-social fantasy of wielding power over others rather than running the game properly.  

You are not there to fight your players. You are not there to play a spiteful god in a world of your own creation. In fact, a DM is never a "god." They are the chairman, the director, the tour guide to the world of the players' adventure. Of course they have to be strict some times. They can't pander to the players, and sometimes they may challenge the PCs to the point of their defeat and demise. But that's because the challenge is part of their players' enjoyment. It isn't a victory for the game master when the players fail, nor is it when the players succeed. It's a victory if your players enjoy a campaign. 

Think of designers of puzzles and video games. They don't build their games to be impossible to win, nor do they hope the games are too hard to overcome. They build the games to have a satisfying balance of difficulty. They build it to be fun, so why shouldn't it be the same on the game board?

A good DM doesn't worry about what other players think of them personally, but should still attempt to cultivate a positive connection with their players. This means not singling out players for special treatment, for good or ill. This means not working against your players to undermine the success of their actions. The good game runner is happy when things become suspenseful or challenging for the players.

There is plenty of fun to be had in a game situation where life and death hangs in the balance, where defeat is a potential outcome. But don't put yourself in the situation where the person behind the screen actually wants and prefers the players to fail. A good DM has that 'DMpathy' that we always come back to, the instinct to share the kind of game that they would enjoy playing themselves. They want the players to have a good time, because that's what they would want if they were playing. That's why in this new generation of gamers, I am glad we are finally seeing an end to the idea of the Adversarial dungeon master.