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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ferghis" data-source="post: 3287545" data-attributes="member: 40483">This, to me just seems intelligent behavior, independent of alignment. I think a CG could be just as "cooperative" as a LE character.Strictly speaking, of all these, (c) and (d) seem lawful behavior. The others are either just smart, irrelevant to alignment, or honorable, which seems more a personality trait than anything else. I really think intelligence and personality are distinct descriptors. Alignment is a very fuzzy thing, so personality might make work into it somehow, but it's still fundamentally different. Here's my take, and anyone, obviously, should feel free to disagree. We are talking about alignment after all.The Good - Evil axis is how much trust a character has in the folks she or he meets and deals with. It's very interpersonal, but takes the circumstances into greater consideration. This probably dictates how the character would react to some strangers encountered on the road. If the character is evil, they're only as interesting as they could be useful to the character. If the character is good, they might need assistance, and who knows if they'll be able to return the aid, or if they in turn will help someone else some other day.The Law-Chaos axis represents the degree of trust that the character has in the larger, impersonal social institutions she or he knows. This could be the government, the church, the thieves' guild, or the forum that the character visits on the internet. This determines how the character reacts to common social situations without examining the circumstances. It will determine how the character reacts to characters formally imbued with authority, like the notary that asks for a fee to register the purchase of a license to carry a weapon in the city. A lawful character will have a reaction that is more akin to that of the institution that is close to him or her:  a LE member of the thieves guild might try to bribe his way into a couple of spare documents, passing them on to the guild to copy. A CG character will question the necessity of the license out of basic mistrust, and might refuse to pay if she or he thinks he can get away with it.This is how I make sense of it. Other solutions I've thought of blur the two axis too much, like the Particle_Man's teamwork example. And I can't say the alignment system makes utter sense to me, but I had the opposite problem that you were having: I kept thinking that chaotic characters had to be played as random-acting lunatics. But that doesn't make any sense.So pick a few institutions that makes sense for your lawful character, and, when confronted with some behavior that might have a "standard" reply, make a note of how the institutions would want you to react. "My uncle says that whenever someone takes something, he should get a one part in ten" is just as good as "The king's men are a bunch of good for nothings, but if they don't keep the order we won't be able to sleep through the night without someone stealing our beds from under us" or even "You're a nice lady, but I wouldn't be doing the right thing by accepting your kind welcome tonight. Would you be like to come with me to Wazzio's on Thursday? I'm told there's a fiddler who sold his soul to a demon." You can't stray from the lawful alignment once you know that the situation warrants a different reaction, because lawful behavior only really guides your gut reaction to a situation. The long term reactions to the same person should be guided more by the good-evil alignment.That's my 2 coppers.</blockquote>

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