A Style for All Seasons

04 Apr, 2026

The Straight Dope

I come from the Colville tradition of opinion sharing ¹, which means I'll try to give a quick summary of the main points for the folks who don't care for the rest of my nonsense. In essence, when you start to think about your style in GMing, it's more important that you ask yourself how you do things while running the game instead of what things do you do or not do. It won't give you a neat little jungian archetype like Storyteller or Engineer, but by asking how instead of what we can more easily come to a version of style that actually helps us run better games instead of finding that one hole that is made for me like in that Junji Ito story (though it can be fun to do that... I may do that in the future, stay tuned).

In Matters of Taste and Style

When thinking about GM styles, I found myself tripping over the flowers in the carpet in trying to identify the elements that make up a given style. So I did what I usually do: find more flowers to trip over, but this time I know where they are, so I can cleverly avoid them. That's how that works... yes...

Anyway I found that when asking myself questions about running a game there was a subtle difference in the way the questions were posed. When I asked "What do I do as a GM?" I usually answered in terms of my preferences in terms of genre, tone, and game systems, while when I asked "Why do I do these things as GM?” I found myself thinking about my broader opinions about game design, narrative structure, and what kind of experience I wanted to provide for my players. When I asked "How do I do things as a GM", however, I got a different set of answers: instead of just looking at preferences and opinions on things, I was starting to look at the manner in which those preferences were expressed during play.

These different kinds of questions led me to view the practice of running the game as the complex interplay between my taste, my intent, and my style. These three things do not work in isolation, but build on each other to give me a more complete answer to the question "What kind of DM am I?" than if I just looked on a chart and found an answer that was just about good enough. As a working definition, I assign questions that ask "What do we do?" to matters of Taste and questions that ask "How do we do it?" to matters of Style. (I would also argue that we only really need to discuss that last bit, but one problem at a time.)

What we do is a matter of Taste

Taste is personal, in that it mostly matters to the individual involved whether X or why is more to their taste. This means that the differences between the games I choose to play and the kinds of mechanics I choose to change or ignore is up to my personal preference. The reason why the saying is "The customer is always right in matters of taste" is precisely because people will like what they like and you shouldn't try to control that. In reality our taste is formed by the experiences we've had and the cultures we find ourselves in ², so it's not as if our tastes cannot change, but it will always be something that concerns mostly how we, as individuals, feel about things. Other people can make us feel things, but they cannot tell us how to feel about things.
Matters of Taste cover some of the following questions:

• What game systems do I like to run? Which ones do I do not care for?
• What kind of stories do I prefer to see in my games?
• What do I like/dislike about my game?
• What do I think is a fair challenge?
• What do I want out of a game?

None of this is to say that matters of taste aren't useful, but their use is on the level of understanding why some things appeal to certain kinds of people and not to others. The point of taste is that it is your taste and no one else’s. You can respect someone else’s taste in things or you can be disgusted by it, but taste is not a measure of anything else but that some people like 5e and that they don’t need to justify their taste on æsthetic grounds.

How we do it is a matter of Style

If what we do is a matter of taste, how we go about doing it is a matter of style. There are two ways in which this is true: You do the thing according to the rules, which follow the style laid out by the game.

You do the thing according to your interpretation of the rules, which follows your own style.

The two may overlap. When there is no conflict between the rules and your reading of the rules then your style and the game’s style are more or less aligned. When there is conflict, though, is when the rubber hits the road. To be clear, a style is not something static, a persona you wear when running the game. It is a set of practices that you apply to the rules of a system to make it a game and not just a blank simulation. People run the game. They make the game more than the rules, and they do so with style. Matters of style include the following questions:

• How do we use the game to entertain our friends?
• How do we handle friction between the players, their characters, and the world?
• How do we make things easier, harder, for the players?

Some of these things interact with taste, such as in our preference for certain game systems and game mechanics, but what makes style distinct is the focus on the process rather than the content.

If I want to run Call of Cthulhu in 5e, or Lancer in Blades in the Dark ³, you’d be right to question my taste, but to judge my style you would have to see how I make these games happen. Style contains our base attitudes to the hobby and what makes a game work or not regardless of the mechanics. I’m not saying system doesn’t matter, but in the context of running the game, it matters only insomuch as you are willing to let it matter. This may mean that whatever unholy abomination I conjure up is bad, as in a bad game experience, but it is no less a marker of style.

The Elements of Style (Take that, Strunk and White!)

If Style is about how we do things at the table, then it behooves us to lay out a list of questions that should help determine a given style.

• Adjudication: How do you make rulings in a situation the rules does not cover?
• Grounding: How do you ground your games? In the World, the Characters, the Players?
• Information: How often do you give information about the setting? Diegetically? Non-diegetically? How often do you give information?

There may be more categories to this, but these cover the basic tasks of a GM, no matter the system.

Grounding

Grounding refers to how the game is grounded as a play experience. Matt Colville calls this the Fiction vs. Fantasy dichotomy, where Fiction focuses on the external pressures the world exerts on the characters and Fantasy focuses on the external representation of the characters inner lives. I would like to extend this further to include the engagement of the players in the lived experience of the game. This is where questions of metagaming, immersion, backstory, and worldbuilding take place. Grounding concerns the base layer of your game, and how you expect your friends to interact with it.

Information

Information refers to the amount, frequency, and fidelity of the information you give out to your friends about the game and the game world. Any setting on these dials changes the way in which your players will interact with knowledge in your game, which will impact the way in which they will treat the world in your game. For example I run a mid-amount, high frequency, low-fidelity game most of the time. I give what information is necessary to establish the scene and to answer whatever questions the players may have. I often offer information even on bad rolls to gain information and give up information with no roll if the character has a good reason to know this information. I also give a lot of diegetic information, which is coloured by the perspective of whichever NPC/author the characters are interacting with. If there is an objective answer to the mysteries of the world, no one player has access to it.

Adjudication

Adjudication is perhaps the most straightforward element in this list. All games that have something like a GM require the resolution of a situation not covered in the rules. Within this broad definition, however, is a whole spectrum of practices that do not agree on the basis for a given judgment: the reality of the secondary world, Rules as written, Rules as intended, how the players are doing so far in the session, etc. This is where questions of fudging dice, open rolls, fairness (or even worse, balance) are hashed out. This is where the notion of the GM as a Judge, Director, General Menace or Referee comes from (the fact that I believe a GM is none of those things is a matter for another day).

Through these three elements, we can see some of the main roles the GM occupies while running the game. A GM must ground the game and lay down expectations for how to approach the world; give out information about the world so the players can make decisions; adjudicate situations according to the decisions made by the GM and the players over the course of play. It is clear, then that style is not taste, or rather it is not merely taste. It is the application of taste onto the rules of a game in order to produce the game at a table. It is inseparable from the actual practice of running the game. In other words, Style is not psychology, it’s ethics.

Ethics, not Psychology

Glenn Blacow’s list of player archetypes, divided into two axes of Ego Tripper/Power gamer―Storyteller and Role-player―Wargamer, focuses on player desire: What does the player want out of a game? This is useful insofar as knowing what players want makes it easier (in theory) for the GM to give them what they want. In other words we’re talking about player psychology: What motivates the player to play the game?

This attempt to understand why people play the game eventually led to a plethora of lists trying to codify the different archetypes of player that people could identify within their own groups. They come with catchy names like the Engineer, the Butt-kicker, the Scientist, and they all do the same thing as that original Blacow list: they’re about player psychology.

I propose that, unlike player archetypes, we think of Gm Styles as an exercise in ethics, not psychology.

Ethos stands in for the collected mores and folkways of a given culture. In other words, it lumps all the weird stuff that you like and do into a neat little package that we can unpack later. In this case, the game has an ethos, which is a reflection of how the designers thought the game would be played, the GM has an ethos, which is how the GM runs the game, and the table has an ethos, which is how the game is actually being played. Table ethos is a separate topic, for another time, but it is just as important to sort out as GM ethos (if not more important).

GM ethos, being what and how we do things, is therefore a question of ethics: it is a matter of what we do, how we do it, who we do it to or with. Why we do things is more or less irrelevant in this framing, because the things we want and the things we do are not automatically aligned.

Style is a part of our practice as GMs. It lives where system design and personal taste meet. It means that your nonsense and your friends’ nonsense join with the designers’ nonsense in a great big soup called a game. All of this nonsense is called ethos and it is the subject of ethics. This means that asking questions of GM style will not produce neat little archetypes that we can slot ourselves into, either partially or completely. If it is to be a somewhat useful exercise, it has to make us think about how we do things, how we treat the rules and our friends, and that has to be thought complexly.

Special thanks to Cass, who makes me laugh and makes me think, and the folks in the Hellhole who helped me sort my thoughts out, particularly Bennoni, Joel, Shane, Alec, Inge, Wicked, Justice, and Alpac