I was once talking to someone who had never played a tabletop RPG, and when I explained how tabletop RPGs work, he expressed that the idea of a Game Master(GM) was scary to him. Everything that he wanted to do in the game was up to another person that could ruin his fun. When he mentioned this, it reminded me of how I was called "the evil GM" when I was running a campaign of Dungeons and Dragons. This title was given in jest because I always ran dark adventures where consequences were heavy. But at the heart of this, the rules system for Dungeons and Dragons also created an adversarial relationship between the players and the GM. This is something that I knew needed to be addressed, since Nightmares of the Dead Dreamers is a survival horror game, and in survival horror games, terrible things befall your character. If there were an adversarial relationship between the players and the GM in this type of game, then anything terrible that happens to your character is likely going to be blamed on the GM, either consciously or subconsciously. In most RPGs, most challenges that characters comes across are typically overcome with a dice roll. This dice roll is entirely random and only affected by whether or not a character had any skills to increase the probability of success. In the case of survival horror video games, you can move your character out of the way, and your character's survival depends on your ability to do that quickly and accurately enough. In a tabletop RPG, the only thing you can do is roll dice to dodge out of the way and hope for the best. Your only input in the game was whether or not you designed your character to be good at dodging or not. So the problem for an adversarial GM-player relationship can be seen, from a design perspective, at this basic level of the game. If the GM places a "challenge" that a character cannot succeed at, then that GM is being unfair. However, the problem here is not necessarily the GM, I would argue that it is the game. The GM needs to be able to place challenges in front of the player, but the player needs to have more input options to overcome the challenges that the GM presents. In the core mechanic for the Strain system(the title of the game rules), players have control over their character's ability to overcome challenges. The game utilizes a risk-reward system that allows players to choose to increase their chance of success, but with a risk associated with that choice. When rolling dice, players are trying to roll higher than their character's Stress score in order to avoid Disaster. The players are able to increase their dice probability by rolling more dice, but at the risk of rolling a 1 and gaining Stress points. So with the Strain system, the GM is allowed to present any sort of challenge to the characters, and the players will always have a chance to overcome it. And when things go terribly wrong for the characters, it is not entirely because of unlucky dice rolls or an evil GM.