Last time, we looked at GMing through a binary of ‘Lawful’ versus ‘Chaotic’, and while accepting that such a binary was an oversimplification, it was worth looking at to think about how we deliver a game.
Today, we are going to be looking at the sides of this coin, what they offer and where they have pitfalls. While you look over them, feel free to think about what you deliver as a GM and where your strengths and weaknesses lie.
Lawful Neutral
If you’re following the tenets of lawful GMing, then you’ll be doing these things:
Viewing The Whole Of Your Campaign: Every session fits in as part of a larger saga. Players can be confident there’s a plan in place and that you are following it. Each session is a piece of a puzzle that’s all going to come together. It’s likely a plot thread from early on will surface later as a vital clue.
Balanced Focus: You’re interested in providing a table where everyone gets a chance to shine. Time in the narrative is fairly distributed, and backstory is integrated into a campaign in a way that makes sense. You’ve also put a lot of time into each session being pitched correctly for the characters’ capabilities. It’s very unlikely a session will go off the rails to the point where players are having trouble coping emotionally or mentally.
Resources: It’s likely you often have exactly what the players need to visualise the story you are telling. Everything being delivered is accounted for with a resource. Each player has somewhere they are going to go and you are prepared for this. Homebrew rules and extras have been vetted and explored and you know what is going to work for you game.
Chaotic Neutral
If you’re following the tenets of Chaotic GMing, then you’ll be doing these things:
Freedom Of Play: You’re providing environments for players to explore, interact with and change. It’s about their experience and the mood, more than a roadmap. The world is going to change and move around the players as they interact with and influence things.
Things Get Wack: You keep up a list of consequences that are often all going off at once as actions bounce of each other when the players act. Often things quickly get out of hand and are explosive. There’s never a dull moment.
Collective Change: Players are going to be developing their characters in play and as a result, often you are working together in the moment to force the question, ‘what do you do?’. Exploring responses to that defines who characters are in a sort of frenzied character crucible.
Lawful Good
A lawful GMing style gives players a feeling of safety and stability. Every time you do some of these things, they reinforce the idea that you know what you are doing, which gives players the reassurance that they can trust you to make calls and be the steward of the campaign. The lawful behaviour creates a feedback loop of trust in the story and the game. Doing this can mean players feel free to explore ideas without feeling like you’re going to come at them sideways.
Chaotic Good
The tenets of chaos mean that players often feel very in charge of the story. Everything that happens is going to be because of something they did and they are often haring off in whatever direction they enjoy and making it work. And you’re following them, championing their actions and making it as close to the wire as you possibly can. It’s dynamic and they can’t wait to see where it goes next.
Lawful Evil
There’s two ways the lawful approach can really fall apart. The first is that a GM can become stuck in their ways. By having a plan they stick to and events that trigger only at certain moments, it can easily become a situation where the only actions that make progress are the ones that fit with the plot. It can make players feel like you are guiding them from one pre-prepared resource to another and they lack any agency. Make sure that in having the road mapped out, you haven’t turned it into an accidental railroad.
The other thing that can happen is that it feels boring. Waiting 45 sessions for your background to become appropriate to the narrative can often feel like a terrible waiting game. I’ve seen campaigns where GMs wait forever or just don’t get around to using stuff players are bringing to the table and nothing is guaranteed to turn a group off quicker. It then puts all the onus on you as a creator to provide hooks, when players gave you them already. Also, if it never becomes risky, then why are the players bothering planning anything. If there’s no danger, they’ll soon realise they needn’t fear anything. And that’s kind of boring.
Chaotic Evil
If it’s always chaos, players can start to lose trust. Any choice they make might bite them later down the line. There’s no good way to go and every NPC is literally a trap waiting to go off. Everything is always stress and change. There’s no status quo. Just giving players a baseline of normal seems difficult when it’s always at a million miles an hour.
When this really becomes a problem is when the lack of direction goes from something to give the agency to an actual lack of a plan. If the players are simply drifting aimlessly with no bigger plot or objective, or the campaign has changed five times without anything being resolved, it’s easy for players to lose trust that the game isn’t just one series of madness after another with no long-term goal. This makes it difficult to invest.
True Neutral
As per usual, the truth of a good GM lies somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. You’ll notice that it’s technically possible to do both things. By balancing the lawful and chaotic elements and thinking about how you can introduce parts of both styles into a game, you can introduce parts of both styles into a game, you can provide a truly fun and safe environment for your players. Go ahead and declare yourself chaotic lawful. After all, everybody knows alignment systems are horribly outdated by now.
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