Warning - incoming rant.
I feel like Chaotic Neutral gets a bad rap from players that either misunderstand it or intentionally abuse it.
Yes, Chaotic *can* be a being of pure Chaos, but that's the farthest end of the spectrum that mere mortals can scarcely imagine.
For typical player races, Chaotic doesn't mean "acts completely at random" unless perhaps you are playing someone insane. Even the Joker from Batman does not act completely at random - he has motivations.
Yes, you think for yourself and don't let others tell you what to do, but you are still capable of working in groups and living in society at large, with all the expectations that brings.
Just like any other alignment, you need to use your character's values and motivations to decide whether to go along with the group/social consensus even if you disagree with it; if you decide to go off on your own path, it should be because to do otherwise would violate a deeply held value of your character with the understanding that there will be social consequences.
Sometimes those social consequences are enough to make a character, even a Chaotic one, conform. You still thought for yourself, and when weighing all the outcomes decided it was better to sacrifice your ideals *this time* rather than face the potential consequences, such as going to jail, losing your job, or even just wasting time rehashing a tired argument.
Similarly, Neutral does not typically mean that you swing wildly back and forth between the extremes of Good and Evil (or Law and Chaos) depending on your mood. No, usually it means that you are just an average person, not willing to give up everything to do what is right, and also not intentionally harming others. You do the best you can with the least effort required because you probably do not actually feel that strongly about whatever moral beliefs you hold.
You may lean Good towards certain groups or individuals, you may lean Evil towards others, and with enough incentive you might lean even farther one way or the other - but that's also true for every alignment.
Now, none of that is to say that you can't play a character devoted to the ideas of Chaos and Neutrality, but even such a character will have motivations that guide their decisions.
So yeah, you can play CN as "do whatever the hell I want because Chaos! and Neutral!" - but then it doesn't really matter what you write in the alignment box because you're not role-playing your character anyway - how can you when your character has no motivations?
Anyway, rant over.
