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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xeviat" data-source="post: 9884325" data-attributes="member: 57494">I've been reading a lot of Planescape lately, so I'd like to look at your "a CE critter doesn't think of itself as CE" in the context of Tanar'ri Demons. As exemplars, they do think of themselves as Chaotic Evil, and they think of that as the best way to be. What your saying does reflect on a difference between soft alignment and hard alignment. Some beings just happen to be their alignment, while other beings know and actively support their alignment, and I think that's a useful realization to make the alignment system both firmer and softer at the same time.As for my answer to the OP, the way I conceptualize alignment I call "the warm fuzzies" model. Your personal alignment reflects what actions make you feel good about yourself and what actions make you feel bad about yourself. If X action is good, and doing it makes you feel good about yourself, then you're Good. As a Good person, doing evil would make you feel bad. If circumstances pressure a Good person into doing evil, they feel bad about it and seek to atone. If circumstances continually make a Good person do evil, then they could grow numb to it, representing their player changing their alignment to Neutral; worse, they could hard switch to Evil and suddenly like doing evil.A Lawful person feels good when they follow the rules and feels bad when they break the rules, while a Chaotic person enjoys breaking rules and doesn't like following rules or patterns.I'm purposefully avoiding defining what actions are what alignment, as that's where the actual debate happens.So, to me, a smart chaotic evil person is someone who enjoys being chaotic and doing evil, and they do that smartly. Since chaotic and evil things are often, or definitionally, against the law, then they're smart about concealing their actions. Where as a Lawful Evil person often uses the law to do evil lawfully, a chaotic evil person would prefer to simply not get caught and might even be compelled to find a way to do it flagrantly while not pinning it on them (or better yet, pinning it on someone else). A neutral evil person probably just seeks to not get caught, where as the chaotic evil person likes to cause chaos in the process.Another idea I had was also inspired by something in Planescape saying that every outer plane is a utopia to somebody. That made me think about alignment from the perspective of "what kind of world do you think is best?" That lead me to make this chart about what each alignment sees as the best guiding principal for society. I'm still working on it, it's subject to change, but it's been helping me to reconsider alignment.<table style='width: 100%'><tr><td style='width: 25.0000%'>Alignment </td><td style='width: 25.0000%'>Law </td><td style='width: 25.0000%'>Neutral </td><td>Chaos </td></tr><tr><td style='width: 25.0000%'>Good </td><td style='width: 25.0000%'>Justice </td><td style='width: 25.0000%'>Charity </td><td style='width: 25.0000%'>Liberty </td></tr><tr><td style='width: 25.0000%'>Neutral </td><td style='width: 25.0000%'>Order </td><td style='width: 25.0000%'>Peace </td><td style='width: 25.0000%'>Freedom </td></tr><tr><td style='width: 25.0000%'>Evil </td><td style='width: 25.0000%'>Control </td><td style='width: 25.0000%'>Selfishness </td><td style='width: 25.0000%'>Anarchy </td></tr></table></blockquote>

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