The difficult question is if a chaotic evil character would follow a law that is in their self interest.
I don’t think they would. I think they’d break the law anyway, even if it went against their own interests, because their nature is pure lawlessness.
Chaos, to me, implies an inherent lawlessness that is itself the character’s goal. They break the law for its own sake, because they want laws to be broken (i.e. for the lulz)
I gota disagree. Breaking every law would basically make them anti-lawful. You could always predict their behaviour in this case which IMO is absolutely not chaotic.
There just has to be a way to differentiate neutral from chaos, because your interpretation is that they both break or follow laws depending on the circumstances. No difference.
It’s all in the interpretation, alignment is a squishy subjective thing, but I rule the difference as the chaotic character absolutely does not care. Even if told “The punishment for doing what you’re doing is X”, and X is really bad for them and so they should try and avoid it out of self-interest, they just wouldn’t care.
A neutral character can be swayed by the legal consequences of their actions, even if the law isn’t especially important to them.
I think lawlessness isn’t the best way to think of it. But rather a resentment that someone is making them do a thing. They don’t murder people because it’s illegal they murder people because they want to and then get pissed off that there’s a law against it
Oh yes, definitely. They abhor all rules and restrictions, whether they come from society or the king or even within themselves.
Chaos is that impulse you got as a child when you were told not to do something stupid, knew it was stupid to do, and then did it anyway because fuck you I won’t do what you told me!
That’s an interesting point of view. I’ve never really seen it that way, but I can appreciate that. I see it more as a complete disregard for the law, rather than actively trying to break laws. It’d be pretty silly if a chaotic evil character, on hearing that feeding the homeless is illegal, would go around sharing his rations with homeless people “for the lulz”.
The difficult question is if a chaotic evil character would follow a law that is in their self interest.
I don’t think they would. I think they’d break the law anyway, even if it went against their own interests, because their nature is pure lawlessness.
Chaos, to me, implies an inherent lawlessness that is itself the character’s goal. They break the law for its own sake, because they want laws to be broken (i.e. for the lulz)
I gota disagree. Breaking every law would basically make them anti-lawful. You could always predict their behaviour in this case which IMO is absolutely not chaotic.
There are lots of different ways to break laws!
There just has to be a way to differentiate neutral from chaos, because your interpretation is that they both break or follow laws depending on the circumstances. No difference.
It’s all in the interpretation, alignment is a squishy subjective thing, but I rule the difference as the chaotic character absolutely does not care. Even if told “The punishment for doing what you’re doing is X”, and X is really bad for them and so they should try and avoid it out of self-interest, they just wouldn’t care.
A neutral character can be swayed by the legal consequences of their actions, even if the law isn’t especially important to them.
I think lawlessness isn’t the best way to think of it. But rather a resentment that someone is making them do a thing. They don’t murder people because it’s illegal they murder people because they want to and then get pissed off that there’s a law against it
Oh yes, definitely. They abhor all rules and restrictions, whether they come from society or the king or even within themselves.
Chaos is that impulse you got as a child when you were told not to do something stupid, knew it was stupid to do, and then did it anyway because fuck you I won’t do what you told me!
That’s an interesting point of view. I’ve never really seen it that way, but I can appreciate that. I see it more as a complete disregard for the law, rather than actively trying to break laws. It’d be pretty silly if a chaotic evil character, on hearing that feeding the homeless is illegal, would go around sharing his rations with homeless people “for the lulz”.
Neutral, to me, is a complete disregard for the law. Chaos is actually being anti-law
A chaotic evil character would feed the homeless, but also it would be poisoned or something. For the lulz