I don’t think of old school play as adversarial, really. At least not adversarial like board games are adversarial. There’s an element of performative challenge and deviousness I suppose, but I don’t think of it as oppositional, like the dungeon master is ever working against the players’ interests.

I think some DMs do that and I think it results in shitty games – it’s too imbalanced a power relationship for a fun DM to be anything but… (seemingly) engagingly and mysteriously impartial. And while the pragmatics of the game may lead a DM to sometimes be malevolent, and sometimes be benevolent; if the DM ever deviates too much from a purely reactive stance, they lose that important sense (illusion?) of impartiality.