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Message: <blockquote data-quote="physics_ninja" data-source="post: 2511616" data-attributes="member: 5570">Firstt the easy one: law and chaos.The above post by trickster god about consistency vs spontaneity is a good one.  In personality terms it could also be described as introvert vs extrovert.  But I also think that it goes beyond that.  Chaotic individuals aren’t into planning. The saying “out of sight, out of mind” applies a lot to them.  Chaotics will form friendships and enemies, alliances, and make plans, but only in regards to what is affecting them in the here and now.   Lawfuls, on the other hand, will take time to consider what has happened in the past and how that affects them today.  They will consider what they are doing or what is going on today and how that will affect them tomorrow. As an example, lawfuls generally will not lie.  They understand that if you do lie, sooner or later people will figure it out and stop trusting you, making everything else that much harder.  This is important if you plan on staying in one place and plan on investing your time, energy and resources towards building a future (be it a good or evil future).  Chaotics that do lie (and not all of them do) either don’t understand that they are making things harder for themselves, or don’t care.  Often it doesn’t matter because they don’t plan on being around much longer.Lawfuls have excellent credit scores.  Chaotics have maxed out credit cards.(sigh)I was going to go on about good and evil, but I think that as D&D players, and the general pevalance of good vs evil in stories like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, we actually have a pretty good handle on that.  It’s the specifics that get us into trouble.And that is the problem with alignment.  As a system it is way too simple to properly describe the range of necessary human behavior.  Note that I said necessary.  Willful behavior is easy to describe. Killing an orc and stealing his pie just because I hate orcs and like pies can be described as evil.  Doing the same because my family is starving to death is more complicated.Alignment is a great shorthand for those NPCs and monsters that appear on the screen for a short time and/or have simple motivations.  The more complicated the situation, the more rapidly it breaks down.As an aside, that is why the Book of Exalted Deeds (and to a lesser extant, the Book of Vile Darkness) tend to be viewed as failures – all they do is give tools for the reinforcement of simple alignment.</blockquote>

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