What alignment are you when it comes to RPG rules?

[Evoker]

Title says it all, really. When playing/GMing, what's your stance on the rules, as expressed by the pithy combination of L/N/C and G/N/E?

I'd like to think I'm Lawful Good: enforcing all the rules in the way they were intended to be understood in order to create the funnest game for everyone, but I might trend too much in the direction of Lawful Neutral: enforcing the rules as they were written without concern for anything else.

Assuming that good/evil translate to group fun vs personal fun at the expense of the rest of the group, and lawful/chaotic is the spectrum of how tightly the rules are enforced, how about the rest of the playground? What's your ideal, and your actual, allingment as it respects to RPG rules?

[ImNotTrevor]

Neutral Good, probably?

I'm here for the players to have fun. The rules are important but fundamentally serve a purpose: to generate a fun, engaging experience. So I'll follow and use them just fine. But if the rules are actively preventing fun or aren't accomplishing something meaningful, then I don't engage them, or will bend them into a more reasonable shape.

I prefer systems that give me that flex room naturally over ones I have to break across my shoulders to get to where I want it.

[FaerieGodfather]

Neutral Goodish... I am all about the players having fun, and I'll bend over backwards to help them have fun... I'll put their fun above both the rules and my own fun... but if I start tripping over the rules and I start getting frustrated, well, I've got a real short fuse and it doesn't take much to make me flip the table.

It's why my current Spelljammer group is on hiatus-- between difficulty with the AD&D rules (after twenty years) and difficulty with the roll20 character sheets, the game came grinding to a halt a couple of weeks ago, and I'm not going to run it again until I'm reasonably assured it isn't going to happen again.

I'm doing some very bad things to the lovely Old School Essentials to make this happen.

[Vahnavoi]

Chaotic Neutral - the rules exist to define a space of possible moves for the players, it's up to each and every player to choose those moves they find meaningfull. Everyone is absolutely responsible for their own choices and fun. If they find a situation unbearable, they can always kill themselves ... errr, their characters.

[Eldan]

Screw the rules, I write my own rules. Chaotic Good, I suppose? By now, I have binders and google docs full of third edition house rules that are considerably longer than the core books.

[King of Nowhere]

chaotic good. we are all at the table to have fun, the rules define the playing space. if the rules go against fun, if they forbid a good character concept, if they have unfun interactions, if they make no sense in context, they are promptly ignored/houseruled away.
if there is an interesting character concept someone would like to play that does not fit well with the main classes, i'd rather houserule/homebrew something appropriate than looking for an obscure combination that would achieve roughly the same effect.

[Keltest]

Neutral Good. Everybody is supposed to have fun, and the rules exist to help make it run smoothly and without interruption. Most of the time they do that, but when they dont, ignore them and dont look back.

[Kaptin Keen]

Alignments are nonsense. I'm going to simply claim that the term has no real application, not even in game.

To answer the question, I'm strictly utalitarian, using the rules I have a use for, discarding the rest. I don't extensively house rule, I just excise parts of games, paring them down to just the stuff I like. Then I fill any holes with fluff, which is what I'm good at.

If an attempt was made to reduce me to an alignment, it would be some sort of chaotic-lawful neutral-good mishmash.

[Zarrgon]

Chaotic Evil.

I play the game I want and the way I want to have my own personal fun.

I manipulate the players to have fun in the game, or do anything else i want, for me. Sure they get a benefit from that, but it's not like I care.

[Quertus]

Lawful Neutral.

These are the rules. It's your job to find a way to have fun within the framework of the rules, so that everyone can enjoy a shared game.

But… if you can't have fun with these rules, then why not?

If it's just because you're being dumb (ie, you want to stick the chess pieces up your nose without understanding their intended purpose), then I'll move to Lawful Evil.

If it's a legitimate issue, I'll move to Chaotic Good - at least long enough to rewrite the rules / build house rules, before switching back to Lawful Neutral.

[Fiery Diamond]

Chaotic Good.

Rules are subservient to the fun of the table. The rules exist to serve the game; they are there to provide framework, not to be kowtowed to. Nothing is subservient to the rules.

[Esprit15]

Neutral Good with a Lawful bent. The rules are the rules, but there are plenty of areas that are vague or unclear, and some of the rules are just badly written. At the end of the day, what makes for the best or most interesting story is the best rule.

[Pex]

Lawful Neutral. I cannot help myself. The rules must be obeyed. I will remind everyone of the rules when it helps the party and when it hurts the party. So far the DMs have been appreciative of it. Players too, but I know I can go too far. Every once in a while I just let it go. The player is in his or her moment. This usually involves using a bonus action to do something that's not a bonus action or doing multiple Use An Object. As long as it's not two leveled spells I'll keep quiet.

When it comes to skill use I often speak up to say there doesn't have to be a roll when the DM is trying to think of one. It depends on the thing. Sometimes something does require a roll in my opinion, but when it doesn't . . . This doesn't always work and there's a roll which of course is different depending on who is DM, but I digress with a sigh.

[Xervous]

Lawful neutral, the rules are structure and should be delivered by an impartial arbitrator if that's the system you're dealing with. It is generally my case that when I am running or playing an RPG the degree of rules weight (rules light or rules heavy) is in fact in line with what the players desire. We signed up for this and that's what we're using. Consistency is essential to allow for player buy in.

On the plot? Chaotic Good. What do the players want? I'll maybe give it to them on a whim, construct hoops of their own imagination (stay puft marshmallowmen!) or imply just heavily enough they can't reach it but are free to Try Jumping anyways. What do I want? It Shall Happen. Or it might happen. Or it's getting thrown out because the players said that's not their favorite flavor of RPG-Os. If it makes the group happy in the long run, great, goal more than methods here.

[ExLibrisMortis]

I'm with Quertus on this one, a big LN.

A role-playing game is the intersection of playing a character and playing a game. It's not one or the other, it's both. And while you can lean into one or the other, the best RPGaming is about the interplay between roleplaying and rules, using the mechanics to evoke a particular character, or coming up with a convincing narrative for a mechanical combo. Without fairly strict rules, the fluff-crunch correspondence becomes too "loose", trivial almost, and that makes it less interesting, less challenging, less fulfilling to find a good match. And what should a game be if not interesting, challenging, and fulfulling?

To be clear: You can totally modify the rules, as long as you stick to them once they're set.
To be clear some more: The definition above is why I'm LN in the context of this thread. It's not a denunciation of those who fail to follow the One True Proper Way to Game.

[Nifft]

Lawful Good.

It's my opinion that rules can and should be written in order to enhance the fun of the players; once written, the rules must be applied fairly and uniformly.

[HouseRules]

Chaotic Neutral, but people perceive me as Lawful Good.

Public Relation and Public's perception of alignment does not match true alignment.

[yellowrocket]

As a player, i tend to true neutral. The games Ive played in are so frequently house ruled both from the start and on a whim that any lawful bent has to be reined in to stay on the neutral side of selfish fun.

As a dm I'm lawful neutral. But my players kniw and understand the framework they will be working in. They know that their abilities will always work as defined and they kniw they wont get a sudden shift in rulings. They also know I won't screw them over, but the encounter will be run within the rules. Bad guys taking enough losses and leaving or not focus firing quite the way they should on battle 3 between short rests has happened.

The rules are the natural laws of the world I create. The players are free to write what ever story they want in that world, but even the NPCs of my world follow the same rules.

[D&D_Fan]

Chaotic good.

I do what I do so everyone has fun, but I am not against bending the rules, introducing stuff from other games and other things. I might throw in something from goodman games or esper genesis stuff.

For homebrew I mostly go for stuff that was at least made by the official D&D creators, or gold dragon stuff on Dmsguild. I feel they have more experience with writing.

My writing style is realistic to a point until it is something like Hitchhiker's Guide but turned up to 11, and really just weird.

[Xapi]

Chaotic Good.

The rules are there to make the game fun. The players know the rules as much as they want to, but I kind like them not knowing them more than me, so I can fudge them in favor of the plot/fun.

I have also overtly fudged rolls (you can't do it covertly on Roll20!) to favor them, especially to avoid killing a party member on the first one or two rounds of combat.

[patchyman]

Screw the rules, I write my own rules. Chaotic Good, I suppose? By now, I have binders and google docs full of third edition house rules that are considerably longer than the core books.

Pshaw! That sounds waaaay too Neutral Good to me. I consider my playstyle to be Chaotic Good, so I don’t have binders full of rules, just principles. 😀

[Rynael]

CG in theory, LG by nature, NG in practice. I believe in the rule of fun and try to uphold that belief, but I have a strong grasp of RAW and mediocre improvisational skills, so it all evens out.

[SunderedWorldDM]

Chaotic Evil.

I play the game I want and the way I want to have my own personal fun.

I manipulate the players to have fun in the game, or do anything else i want, for me. Sure they get a benefit from that, but it's not like I care.

...really? It's not blue, so...

[Mastikator]

I think enforcing rules as intended comes down to the intentions of the rules, intentions that align with my values will be upheld, intentions that conflict with my values will be thrown out. My only limitation is that going against the rules has to be consistent and fair, it needs to be done in a case-law-esq way.

Neutral good when designing a setting and preparing a session.
Lawful neutral when DMing.
Neutral good when playing.

[Quertus]

I suppose it falls to me to explain the value of Evil.

No game is worse than one where everyone is miserable, sacrificing their own fun for what they mistakenly believe everyone else will enjoy. Only you know what you enjoy; it's hubris to believe you know what's best for everyone else, and foolishness to believe that others actually *can* magically read your mind and look out for your best interests.

Everyone needs to be responsible for their own fun - defining it, creating it, and defending it. If you can communicate it to others, and they can and will help, so much the better, but that is not the default expected state, and it's just folly to make your fun continent upon the whims of the ignorant masses who are nerfing Monks, running "low-magic" or "core only, for balance", or running OP DMPCs (or anything else that the stereotypical Playgrounder would chafe / boggle at), or consider the above fine because they don't know any better, and believe that they could possibly succeed at engineering your fun without significant percussive maintenance with a clue-by-four (EDIT: a metaphoric one, of course!).

Just like it would be quite the culture shock if their fun were left in your hands

[Nifft]

Chaotic Evil.

I play the game I want and the way I want to have my own personal fun.

I manipulate the players to have fun in the game, or do anything else i want, for me. Sure they get a benefit from that, but it's not like I care.

That sounds Neutral.

Evil would be things like gaslighting your players, or bankrupting them by demanding real-life compensation in order to give them a chance at rolling for treasure (gatcha-style), and otherwise doing harm to them for your own profit or pleasure.

I suppose it falls to me to explain the value of Evil.

No game is worse than one where everyone is miserable, sacrificing their own fun for what they mistakenly believe everyone else will enjoy. Only you know what you enjoy; it's hubris to believe you know what's best for everyone else, and foolishness to believe that others actually *can* magically read your mind and look out for your best interests.

Everyone needs to be responsible for their own fun - defining it, creating it, and defending it. If you can communicate it to others, and they can and will help, so much the better, but that is not the default expected state, and it's just folly to make your fun continent upon the whims of the ignorant masses who are nerfing Monks, running "low-magic" or "core only, for balance", or running OP DMPCs (or anything else that the stereotypical Playgrounder would chafe / boggle at), or consider the above fine because they don't know any better, and believe that they could possibly succeed at engineering your fun without significant percussive maintenance with a clue-by-four.

Just like it would be quite the culture shock if their fun were left in your hands

Evil isn't about thinking of yourself first, Evil is about harming others for your own profit or pleasure.

The bold bit looks like you're advocating violence against fellow posters.

[Jay R]

Neutral good when designing a setting and preparing a session.
Lawful neutral when DMing.
Neutral good when playing.

I think that this is a crucial distinction. One doesn't approach all aspects the same way.

I can't make this fit the D&D alignment system, because nothing in the real world does. Besides, as countless internet arguments demonstrate, we don't agree on what that system means. So I'll just describe what I do in straightforward English.



When I design a scenario, I'm firmly on the players' side. I'm trying to produce encounters that they have every legitimate chance to win (and that poor play and bad decisions can still lose).

Similarly, when I teach statistics or algebra, or when I design a test, I'm firmly on the students' side. I want them to learn the material, get the questions right, and all make As. I'm trying to create test questions that they have every legitimate chance to answer correctly (and that if they haven't learned the material, they will still get wrong).

But when I am grading the test, I'm a fair and neutral judge of the answers they have written. And when running the scenario, I'm a fair and neutral judge of the PCs' actions.

[Just to avoid the red herring, I am also judging the test or the scenario. I've been known to throw out a test question, or change an encounter, if it's clear that it didn't match the level I was aiming for. But I won't do it because the students didn't learn the material, and for the same reason, I won't do it just because the players made poor decisions.]



As a player, it is clear that my approach to the rules is not the determining factor. So I try to understand the DM's approach.

There is a legal maxim: Any lawyer knows the law. A good lawyer knows the exceptions. A great lawyer knows the judge.

Similarly, any roleplayer knows the rules. A good roleplayer knows the splatbooks. A great roleplayer knows the DM.

[Altheus]

Chaotic neutral, rules are great until they don't do what I want and I abandon them.

[malloc]

Lawful consistent. I don't care if we play to the letter of the law. I can do that. I don't care if we are fast and loose. I can do that, too. Just as long as whatever we decide is applied consistently, universally, and fairly.

[Quertus]

Evil isn't about thinking of yourself first, Evil is about harming others for your own profit or pleasure.

The bold bit looks like you're advocating violence against fellow posters.

I meant a metaphoric, verbal clue-by-four, but I can see the lack of clarity. I'll edit the post.

As to alignment…

Assuming that good/evil translate to group fun vs personal fun at the expense of the rest of the group, and lawful/chaotic is the spectrum of how tightly the rules are enforced, how about the rest of the playground? What's your ideal, and your actual, allingment as it respects to RPG rules?

I was going by the OP's definitions. I think "that's what I find fun", as a parallel to "my guy", would qualify as "OP evil", no?