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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chrisling" data-source="post: 403126" data-attributes="member: 6816">What I'm looking for, I suppose, is discussion on what actually constitutes a lawful or chaotic government.  I'm not so interested in the good-evil axis, but the law-chaos axis.What got this started for me is, recently, I had a player leave a game because he disagreed with a GM decision I made.  Allow me to explain.  I was playing a Planescape game and he was playing a lawful good dwarven monk from a material plane.  Well, since I wasn't going to do the work inventing a material plane that was irrelevant to my game -- which is about Great Old Ones invading the Great Wheel -- I told him that he had a fair bit of leeway to tell me what his world is.  I also told him, clearly and repeatedly, that he can tell me what his character percieves, not what truly is.Anyway, we play a bit, and the player writes me a good twenty pages or so of background mateiral on his C's home -- including answering specific questions about the culture.  As chance would have it, there was several years of down-time.  During this time, I told the player that, if his character was honest with himself, he would realize that dwarven society as he described it to me was not really lawful.The reason?  As described to me, dwarves had a clannish system of government.  I did my best to explain that in the view of this humble GM, a clan system of government was not lawful because it was both decentralized and non-universal in conception.  He said the fact that dwarvish society was "traditional" didn't mean that much, because what's important is what they traditions are: some cultures have profound traditions of peeing on authority in a variety of ways, for instance.  Long before the discussion was done, the player just decided he "didn't have time" for the game.What bothered me the most, in retrospect, is the notion I might have been wrong.  The exchange of ideas was short.  Literally two letters from me and one letter from him -- not precisely a length discussion.  I also offered to talk to the player, face to face, and that didn't happen.  I'm glad he's gone from my game; if he quit over something this small, it's good he's out regardless whether I'm right or wrong.  But I don't like to be wrong when I have the option of being right.So, I'm wondering what other people think are the attributes of a lawful government or society, and it's opposites.</blockquote>

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