D&D General How do YOU flesh out a chaotic society?

[Charlaquin]

This is an interesting comment. From the legends of King Arthur to the realities of the U. S. of A., there is a goal of "a nation of Laws, not Men," that is, a Lawful society regardless of the people. So the concept of Lawful society exists.

You’re conflating the English word “lawful” with the D&D term “Lawful.” Yes, you can have a society of laws, which is lawful by the English definition of the word. No, societies are not Lawful, the D&D term, because in D&D alignments apply to individuals, not to groups.

The opposite is not what I'd call a Chaotic society, but rather a Lawless society, which is not a society at all in the human sense. The question is can a group of people be united with a Chaos philosophy: dubious in reality, but I gave my proposal for how Chaotic Good elves might manage it.

The society you describe elves living in is just direct democracy. I don’t disagree that this is the sort of society a group of Chaotic individuals (again, going by the D&D meaning of the term here) would form.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

This is an interesting comment. From the legends of King Arthur to the realities of the U. S. of A., there is a goal of "a nation of Laws, not Men," that is, a Lawful society regardless of the people. So the concept of Lawful society exists. The opposite is not what I'd call a Chaotic society, but rather a Lawless society, which is not a society at all in the human sense. The question is can a group of people be united with a Chaos philosophy: dubious in reality, but I gave my proposal for how Chaotic Good elves might manage it.

Following on the previous post: "Law" and "Chaos" (and "Good" and "Evil") are values. Societies can ascribe to values. Surely, then, we can speak of a society that, on the balance, supports one particular set of values more than others. E.g., a society that expects absolute deference to government officials is (in at least that respect) clearly more Lawful than Chaotic. A society that prefers to employ magistrates who can render situational justice and sway the scales in response to particulars, rather than a comprehensive code of laws that precisely lay out the consequences without deviation, sounds pretty clearly more Chaotic in bent by comparison.

Now, I could see one arguing that such comparisons are (a) difficult (what if the two statements above describe the same society?) and (b) relative (to our own society or to other societies in the specific world in question). But I don't think either of those arguments is fatal to the notion that we can make such comparisons; we just have to recognize that they are likely to be fraught and context-dependent, e.g. the Tau come across as a Neutral society on the Law/Chaos axis even though they resort to literal mind control to keep the populace in line, because the Empire (and every other alternative) is SO MUCH WORSE.

 

[Kurotowa]

Following on the previous post: "Law" and "Chaos" (and "Good" and "Evil") are values.

They really aren't. Alignment was never meant to be a viable philosophical framework. Good and Evil are meaninglessly subjective moral judgments where everyone has their own definitions of what falls under each heading. Law and Chaos kind of work in the original Moorecock context of being abstract cosmic forces, not constructs of human society, but quickly fall apart when you try to apply them to mortal works. And the pairing of the two axis just magnifies how little sense the combination makes.

You know what alignment is good at? Meme charts. Those 3x3 grids are a quick and clever little personality breakdown that are easily understood. Though even those are pretty arbitrary, as the "All Batman" type ones show. What alignment isn't good at is a realistic social analysis of any depth.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

They really aren't. Alignment was never meant to be a viable philosophical framework.

I certainly don't mean to declare them as anything of the kind.

But I don't think it can really be argued that the alignments don't contain bundles of value-judgments. It's just that--well, they're rather arbitrary bundles thereof. They sound superficially nice to the ear, but become incredibly fraught if you take more than a moment to consider them. Hence why, as I said in part of the post you clipped, these things lead to difficult questions, because "Law" isn't one singular belief, it's a set of beliefs, and a person might hold a subset of beliefs from both Lawful and Chaotic, or from both Good and Evil, or whatever.

I mean, just look at the description of Good vs Evil from the d20srd:

Good characters and creatures protect innocent life. Evil characters and creatures debase or destroy innocent life, whether for fun or profit.
"Good" implies altruism, respect for life, and a concern for the dignity of sentient beings. Good characters make personal sacrifices to help others.
"Evil" implies hurting, oppressing, and killing others. Some evil creatures simply have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient. Others actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some evil deity or master.
People who are neutral with respect to good and evil have compunctions against killing the innocent but lack the commitment to make sacrifices to protect or help others. Neutral people are committed to others by personal relationships.

These are values-statements. "Altruism," "respect for life," "the dignity of sentient beings," all values, as is a willingness to "make personal sacrifices to help others." Having "no compassion" is another statement about the values a particular being expresses.

That's what I'm getting at. We can consider, at a societal level, whether a culture does things like (to skip down to the L/C section), things like "respect[ing] authority" and "judg[ing] those who fall short of their duties." I freely recognize that it is possible to, frex, have a culture where it is normal to "judge those who fall short of their duties" while also being normal to "resent being told what to do," because those are distinct values within each bundle, revealing the rather weak foundations upon which D&D alignment is traditionally built. I still think it is meaningful to ask questions about what a society or culture places importance on. Just as we can talk about us Unitedstatesians being "prudish" or "hard-working" or whatever one might like to discuss, we can talk about whether the values or promoted virtues/vices of a particular D&D society lean it toward the bundle-of-values-called-Law, the bundle-of-values-called-Chaos, neither, or (as noted) perhaps both in different ways.

 

[AtomicPope]

Chaotic societies are ruled by decree, and overt displays of force. The "laws" would be the whims of the powerful. The easiest way to envision a chaotic society in DnD is by cracking open Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes and reading all of the fluff on Demons. They are chaos manifest. Mortals would operate along similar veins, as others have mentioned. Something others have not mentioned is a chaotic society would inevitably be low trust. Here is an unordered list:

• Democracy - mob rule, the whims of the mob determines everyone's fate
• Barbarians - might makes right
• Warbands - fractured warbands do what they want whenever they can
• Fallen City - whether by plague or war, the old order is gone and nothing has taken its place
• Commune - people live together out of necessity and became a tribe. No rules other than family first.
• Rovers - nomads who live hand to mouth, always in search of the next catch
• Sorcerous - innate magic gives individuals great power. The magic is fickle and no true families have ever established a dynasty.

The thing to remember about a chaotic society is they don't make plans as a society, but that doesn't mean there are no individuals with power and ambition directing them. I worked in community development years ago and it wasn't uncommon for long projects to be inherited by others. Some plans take years. It only makes sense that it gets passed along. The more efficient the bureaucracy, the better long term plans come to pass. That's a 1st world country in motion. A chaotic society would rely entirely on the individuals pushing those plans, much more so than an even moderately ordered society. The demands of the powerful would be met. The only balance against them would be the limits of reality or the might of their opposition. In DnD, those limits are determined by the DM.

 

[Umbran]

I think there's a fundamental issue with the idea of a "chaotic society", in that a "society" is a long-term, large scale structuring of people. So, we are asking "what does a chaotic structure" look like, and that's hard.

There's two different forms we can consider - in one, the structure of society is chaotic, and in the other the behaviors of society are chaotic.

When a society is chaotic in structure, that means that whatever definable bits it has (families, clans, towns, guilds, etc) change and re-align rapidly and frequently. If it is a Chaotic Good society, they do this because that gets stuff done quickly and efficiently for everyone's benefit - they agree upon goals, and they each pitch in as is most effective, without having to be told by authority or tradition how it has to happen. In a Chaotic Evil society, this happens because everyone's trying to claw to the top the best they can, taking each and every opportunity as it comes up.

When a society's behavior is chaotic, the response of that society to events cannot be predicted. It can have a very structured process for making decisions, but for whatever reason, those decisions vary wildly from one moment to the next.

 

[cavalier973]

My opinion is that beings in the D&D world that are “Law” aligned believe that life, the universe, and everything has an inherent structure and purpose, and act accordingly. Those who are “Chaos” aligned believe that LU&E have no purpose or design, and so anything goes, because everything’s a crapshoot.

It is conceivable that a “Law society” has but few legislated laws, since its members already willingly adhere to a code, while a “Chaos society” has a multitude of laws, which most members ignore or openly flout.

Poul Anderson, in “Three Hearts and Three Lions”:

“...under Law all men would live in peace and order and that liberty which only Law could give meaning.”

 

[Sithlord]

You’re conflating the English word “lawful” with the D&D term “Lawful.” Yes, you can have a society of laws, which is lawful by the English definition of the word. No, societies are not Lawful, the D&D term, because in D&D alignments apply to individuals, not to groups.

The society you describe elves living in is just direct democracy. I don’t disagree that this is the sort of society a group of Chaotic individuals (again, going by the D&D meaning of the term here) would form.

Not in the earlier PHB’s. Cities and nations had alignment and it told you what these cities would be like. And entire planes had alignments.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't think being Chaotic prevent societies having rules/laws, even complex ones.

I think it prevents them from being enforced consistently and fairly, and suggests that people are unlikely to even understand them consistently. A society with a ton of little, conflicting laws that were essentially enforced on the whim of the enforcer and where penalties were likewise variable could be chaotic. Or a society where laws were enforced secretively. If justice isn't both done and seen to be done, you're not going to get very "lawful" results. A totally non-hierarchical society with serious customs about how people behave could be chaotic, if, in practice, people frequently don't obey or feel bound by those customs.

 

[NotAYakk]

Personal over organizational loyalty.

Concrete loyalty over abstract.

"I got your back", not codified obligations.