Can You Guys Help Me Get My Head Around Chaotic Neutral? Now with Bonus Material!

[Imp]

You know, from the description, it looks like the khayal are a lot more honorable and law-abiding among their own kind. They're probably an overclass within the City of Onyx that makes sport of the non-natives, to an extent. There are other parts of the description that bear this out ("the khayal always assumes a leadership role") so perhaps play them more as a class of spoiled, whimsical nobles who live off the work of foreign races in their city, rather than hard-bitten Moon Is A Harsh Mistress libertarians.

That they have a king isn't very chaotic neutral of them, but I'd probably play the Malik a bit like a fey monarch, given to making up arbitrary rules and rescinding them if their implementation gets frustrating. Other khayal would replicate this dynamic in small scale over their underlings, the foreign workers of the city.

The City of Onyx is probably a total urban zoo, grand mismanaged projects overlapping each other, roads going nowhere, etc. Again, sort of like a fey kingdom, come to think of it.

 

[tzor]

So, what makes a society such as the City of Onyx work if the predominant alignment is chaotic neutral? Is there any sane way of playing, planning and organising this effectively?

You want to know what? You want me to tell you how a chaotic neutral society functions? I’m sorry but I just don’t have the time. I have more important things to do like … well, even if I did have the time, frankly I couldn’t care less. I mean why should I care? I do what I do to get by. If I do anything more someone’s going to take it from me. If I do any less, then I don’t get by, if you know what I mean, so I just do what I do to get by. No more and no less, and I’ve already wasted too much of my time telling you this.

If we want to look at a society, instead of an individual, we need to use broad strokes. CN is, after all, an average and people will drift from that average, even on a strongly aligned plane. The first thing we need to understand is what does the “C” mean on the average, and then what does the “N” mean.

Chaos is the opposite of law, but this is extremely misleading because the term “law” is misnamed. A better statement is that chaos is the opposite of cosmos, or order. It is the complete lack of discipline. It is entropic laziness. It has often been described as the “You should do what feels right at the time” attitude. It is not “random” because technically a strict following of a random result is in fact a disciplined behavior.

Don’t expect to see the streets cleaned, or the lamps lit on the same time every night. (In fact don’t expect to see the lamps lit at all, unless someone really needs them lit.) Don’t expect to see an officer of the law around every corner, or around any corner for that matter. You might see a tax collector, but only when he feels like being seen.

Neutral means neither evil nor good. One is not really concerned with the needs of others, but on the other hand, one is also not really concerned with the needs of self. Trying to advance the needs of ones self might just as easily get one into trouble with someone more powerful than you, like that tax collector who keeps forgetting you already paid him the tax, four times already! A neutral character in a chaotic mindset does what he needs to do to get by. He might associate with a few close friends, or he might not. He might change friends as often as he changes his clothes. (Or probably more so, as cleaning clothes is a whole lot of unnecessary work.)

But does it “function?” Probably not, but no one cares!

 

[pawsplay]

Chaotics tend to base their sense of right and wrong based on relationships. Hence, friendships and kinships actually tend to be rather strong, far stronger, actually, than would be warranted by actual similarities.

And there will likely be police, perhaps lots of them, assuming the society has been around a long time. Old West gunslingers point to the need for police in a chaotic society. But they don't cite the manual. They tend to say, "So, what seems to be the problem here?" And the judges tend to say things like, "We have only three laws around here. What's yours is yours, what's mine is mine, and what's nobody's business isn't."

Power is likely very distributed. But where it does concentrate, that person has great latitude. Most 20th century dictatorships tend to be CN in nature, based as they are on the will of one individual, right or wrong. A lawful society is a land of "laws, not men." Chaos is the opposite, a land of men, not laws.

Wild capitalism often exists in such a society, but at any time, a dissatisfied segment might rebel and socialize, distribute, or simply ransack a given source of wealth.

 

[Wolfwood2]

I agree with all of your other points, but am not so sure on this one. I'd think a CN would be deeply distrustful of government authorities and would angrily resent intrusions on personal liberty. Indeed, in a CN society I wouldn't be surprised if there are no police officers at all - if a citizen feels a wrong has been committed against him, it's up to him to mete out his own brand of justice (of course, he is welcome to enlist help from anyone willing to help him). YMMV, of course.

My mileage varies. I find the idea of "chaotic people don't like answering to authority" to be inherently invalid. Chaotic people have no more or less of a problem answering to authority than anyone else. What they don't like is having things pre-decided by tradition and precedent.

 

[pawsplay]

My mileage varies. I find the idea of "chaotic people don't like answering to authority" to be inherently invalid. Chaotic people have no more or less of a problem answering to authority than anyone else. What they don't like is having things pre-decided by tradition and precedent.

Chaotics LOVE authority... provided it does what they want it to.

 

[Celebrim]

[Neutral means neither evil nor good. One is not really concerned with the needs of others, but on the other hand, one is also not really concerned with the needs of self.

There is no more pernicious confusion in 3rd edition alignment than the notion that evil represents 'selfishness' and good represents 'selflessness'.

First edition put it more clearly when it said that good is 'weal' and evil is 'woe'. Good is the alignment that heals and protects and nourishes and grows, and evil is its opposite. Whether the destructiveness or beneficialness is happening for selfless or selfish reasons is not something necessarily addressed. The reason that this confusion is so confusing, is that as you begin to look at law and good, you see that they are defined in much the same way. A lawful evil type is destructive for largely selfless reasons (the good of the community, for example), and a chaotic good type is nuturing for largely selfish reasons ('what goes around comes around').

Good believes that one ought to be nourishing and protective. Evil believes the opposite. It believes that one ought to be destructive even when that destructiveness doesn't obviously and directly benefit you. In the same way that we wouldn't say that someone is being good merely because they did good only when it helped them, we can't say that someone is being evil only if they are tempted to evil by its obvious gain. The alignment that does either good or evil depending on the circumstance is moral neutrality. Evil, like good, is an alignment of activity.

With this in mind, we can rewrite the above idea as:

"[The Chaotic Neutral] is not really concerned with the needs of others, but on the other hand, neither is [the Chaotic Neutral] actively seeking to do harm to others. One will only do acts of weal or woe to another when there is an obvious and strong benefit in doing so, but there is no prefererance for either harm or healing, betrayal or forging friendships."

Alot of people take that description to be Chaotic Evil, and they are logically close, but the CE would have a strong preference for actively seeking to do harm to others for some philosophical reason (to display his might, to instill fear, to punish the weak, to prove himself, whatever), while having a strong distaste for doing the opposite (forming friendships, being charitable, etc.).

With the rest of your post, I'm in agreement.

 

[LostSoul]

Can you imagine a Chaotic Good society?

Just make them a little less Good.

 

[phindar]

On the one hand, a chaotic society sounds a lot like Vegas. You can do pretty much whatever you want, everything's always going on, its food and games and spectacle and all manner of earthly delights. On the other hand, its hard not to think of the powers of Vegas as strongly LE-style organizations, and the CN-appearance of the city is just a facade for the tourists.

An old DM of mine had an interesting take on drow politics (going back to 1e, when we were pretty much making it up as we went along). Drow were typically CE, but their society looked a lot like an LE one. His rationale was that the laws of the drow society were so rigid and restrictive was that the only way to get anything done was to circumvent them. Drow laws were like a web, but followers of the spider goddess didn't stick to them.

PotC 3's pirate council

Spoiler

looked pretty chaotic, but they followed the pirate code to the letter, even if it was more like guidelines. They guy who suggested not following the book was shot.

Plus, ships tend to have one captain who is in a position of nigh-unquestioned authority, not exactly a model of lawlessness. Tortuga from PotC1 though looked pretty lawless. Any town where Mayor-dipping is its own sport can probably lay claim to CN (at least one type of it).

The line about the city being cosmopolitan makes me think of the movie Tombstone (probably because I just watched it). Even though Doc used the term ironically, that town was pretty lawless. The sheriff was a businessman and the marshal only really intervened when someone shot someone.

Also, there's Bartertown. On the one hand, they had a pretty strict rule about no violence. On the other hand, their method of deciding punishment was a big wheel. That seemed like a pretty chaotic method of enforcing the law.

 

[Set]

Exteme libertarianism, to the point of someone who argues that a person's rights are more important than the person's life, would be one example of Chaotic Neutral. The *concept* of freedom would often be important enough to this sort of person that they would be willing (if not always comfortable with) to pursue freedom at the expense of more practical matters.

Political content removed. Do NOT post political opinions on EN World, please, even as part of a D&D thread. It's not appropriate or permissable. ~ Piratecat

In a CN city, I'd expect most everyone to travel armed, since no central authority would be tolerated to infringe the citizens rights to carry weapons, and, due to the lack of strong police / guard activity, they would *need* to carry such weaponry (or be threatening enough without it to discourage attack), since unchecked aggression, and the strong preying on the weak, whether by force or threat of force, would be the rule. Fights would be commonplace, and the central authority would not be so much an 'authority' as the toughest hombre on the block, able to put a stop to anything that is destroying too much property or otherwise disrupting the flow of commerce by the expediment of overwhelming force. Technically, the 'mayor' wouldn't be able to order you to do anything, but if you don't do what he says, there's no law preventing him from Meteor Storm-ing your butt.

It would be much like being a mouse, living in a bear's cave. Do what you want, the bear doesn't care, until you do something to piss off the bear, in which case, you're screwed...

 

[Celebrim]

On the one hand, a chaotic society sounds a lot like Vegas. You can do pretty much whatever you want, everything's always going on, its food and games and spectacle and all manner of earthly delights. On the other hand, its hard not to think of the powers of Vegas as strongly LE-style organizations, and the CN-appearance of the city is just a facade for the tourists.

It's not at all unusual in a society for it to break along an axis where the 'powers that be' have one alignment, and the society as a whole has another. For example, most 20th and 21st centuries tyrannies are societies lead by a strongly chaotic evil ruler who encourages strong lawfulness in the society by masquerading as a great champion of society when what is really desired is simply personal power and comfort. Little is more pleasing to a chaotic evil individual, than to have a great number of people debasing themselves on your behalf but the only way to really obtain this is to have alot of lawful subjects whose loyalty lies with you.

In the case of the Drow, its quite true that Drow societies as they've been portrayed is more lawful than chaotic. I'd like to say that this was done in a thoughtful manner, with Lloth as the tyrant cult-of-personality figure and the Drow as her willing, loyal, and adoring slaves, but I think it just as likely that it came about do to confusion on the part of the authors as to what chaos actually meant. All to often, people think 'chaotic evil' simply means 'really evil' or 'more evil', just as thier is a strong tendancy in older editions to think of 'lawful good' simply as 'more good'. In any event, however it came about, it really bothers me because while a chaotic ruler ruling a lawful society works quite well if the ruler is mortal, it always bothered me at a cosmological level if the ruler was a diety and not a mere mortal. If we assume as is common that D&D type dieties derive some benefit from thier followers, it is a terrible danger to a diety to develop followers philosophically at odds with thier own nature.