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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 1164378" data-attributes="member: 3146">Absolutely. However, if you were to make that statement, you would be operating on two different definitions of law and chaos--one for society and one for individuals. Saying that chaotic people can make a lawful society doesn't mean much when the chaoticness of the people has nothing to do with the lawfulness of the society. It also disregards what D&D normally means by giving a society an alignment--it's the alignment of the largest plurality of individuals in the society.I could buy that WRT individuals and societies if we were discussing occasional chaotic acts. However, when you can see the best examples of the supposedly lawful traditionalist tendencies in societies without strong institutions and the best examples of the supposedly lawful strong institutions in the supposedly chaotic societies, it's time to rethink the idea that weak institutions and individualism both belong in the same category (Chaos).Except that I'm maintaining that societies don't REALLY have any tendencies WRT Law and Chaos. And that nobody thinks in those terms. They're an arbitrary and misleading description of individual and societal tendencies because they lead people to connect concepts which are not and never have been connected.Individual/community orientation, formal/informal power structures, stable/unstable governments and institutions, mental discipline/inconsistency, etc are all recognizable societal and psychological traits but any correlation they actually have to each other is actually opposite what the Law/Chaos D&Dism would lead one to believe.You misunderstand what I'm saying. The idea of good and evil is fundamentally different from the idea of law and chaos for quite a few reasons (some of which I briefly outlined in the previous message). As long as you don't expect a good/evil alignment to tell you everything about a character (since Sir Galahad and Saint Francis are both reputedly good, there's clearly a lot more information you need to know about your cleric/paladin than that he's "good") or society (using the standard D&D meaning that the alignment of a society is the alignment of the largest plurality of its members (and that this may be different from the alignment of its power centers)), ideas of good and evil are coherent enough that they can be helpful to players and DMs. More importantly, good and evil are the actual terms that at least westerners tend to think in when confronted with moral dilemmas. Unlike Law/Chaos, I think it's quite possible to run a realistic game using good and evil spells etc straight from the book. One can run a simplistic campaign using the good and evil alignments but using good and evil alignments won't make a game simplistic unless the DM and players have a simplistic treatment of good and evil. If you ask me, abandoning ideas of good and evil in-game is likely to lead to games which, while not simplistic comapred to the worst of good/evil games are simplistic compared to either the real world or a well done game dealing with good and evil. For instance, while I think that the ideas expressed in Sepulchrave's story hour are mostly rank nonsense (but the quality of the storytelling and the characters as well as the fact that it's exploring interesting ideas at all still make it worth reading), it's certainly not simplistic.</blockquote>

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