Since you posited a rational explanation, I have to ask for story time! In my experience, Lawful Neutral is a fairly rare player choice, and I've never seen it used as a cover for evil. Maybe a little authoritarian, maybe a little too much rules. I even knew an OCD gamer that played LN because, well, because. Am I missing something? Is this new?
I've been playing since the late '70s, so seen alignments done well and done badly.
With LN, the poor portrayals tend to be along the lines of, 'Oh, no! Slavery/torture/rape/theft/whatever evil thing is legal here! Oh, well, I
am lawful, so it's totally okay for me to do that stuff, but
only because it's the law!'
Really? How come your last five characters had exactly the same philosophy, where you can
act as evil as you want but claim you're not evil, only lawful?
Also, for years I've wanted CG paladins. I understand that it's good story fodder to put the paladin in a situation where he has to choose between doing the lawful thing and doing the good thing. However, this usually just results in a fall/fall scenario, or the paladin feeling he has to act lawful stupid. Neither is fun; both make a game worse.
Besides, CG paladins can choose the best solution no matter the scenario, because they are not compelled to obey laws which would turn them away from the best, 'most good', solution.
