D&D General Slaads are failures as exemplars of Chaotic NEUTRAL

[Son of the Serpent]

If you write a set of laws for the universe, with no intents on changing those laws, then the fluff of "at any time they could change, it is just an unusally long time of stability from our perspective, but only a blink from the perspective of eternity".... doesn't actually matter. Because the laws will never actually change.

Wont they though? A period of time can be largely stable and also can have many changes to aspects of the whole but not complete change to the cosmic whole. Just like gene mutations change a tiny little thing and leave an organism for the most part the same. You can have a similar effect with any object or pattern or force.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Wont they though? A period of time can be largely stable and also can have many changes to aspects of the whole but not complete change to the cosmic whole. Just like gene mutations change a tiny little thing and leave an organism for the most part the same. You can have a similar effect with any object or pattern or force.

No, they won't. You keep missing that I'm talking about the meta.

Here, let's do this. To really drive my point. I'm going to right a sentence and exclude all the vowels. I could at any point in time, go back and add vowels to this sentence. But, I declare right now, that I have zero intention of doing so. I might talk about doing so in the future, but at no time will I ever go and alter this sentence.

Ds tht mk mr sns, sng drct xmpl?

So, over an eternity of time, will this sentence ever change? I do not intend for it to ever change, so unless something else acts upon this, it won't change. It was written with the intent of never changing. So, aren't any claims I make about changing it just me deluding people? My intentions and my actions, which control the state of the sentence are both in leaving it exactly as it is in this post. No matter the philosophy we might put into this, nothing is actually going to change. And it was written with the intention of never changing.

So, is that sentence an example of an everchanging sentence that has no static form? No. It is static, written and intended to be static.

 

[Bohandas]

Of relevance to the order from chaos/chaos from order thing

 

[Chaosmancer]

Of relevance to the order from chaos/chaos from order thing

I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to show with this.

It is fun math, but some of the results (from the "Chaos Game") also seem a bit... I hate to say obvious, but once I saw them I can understand exactly why following the rules led to that result.

But, following a set of rules throughout Trillions of iterations is not Chaos. The reason you get the triangle "shadows" is because you will never head towards the hypotenuse of the triangle. You are always heading to a vertex.

I'd actually be interested to see how these formula work out in 3d. I might see if someone was able to model it, but I would expect quite similar results.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Honestly, more and more I want to just remove Chaos from the axis.

Chaos is just doing what you want, when you want, following whims, urges and desires... and doesn't that sound a lot like an animal? Do you think animals do anything except follow their whims, urges and desires, doing what they want to do?

But animals are listed as neutral. Because they aren't smart enough to be chaotic? So, chaos is only a thing if you are smart enough to not be an animal, but choose to act like one anyways? But elves are chaotic, and they are just people with funny ears and a penchant for art, poetry, and self-expression.

It all just ends up devolving into a mess of value judgements.

The problem comes from using the term Chaotic, while meaning “a being who values freedom over stability, and/or who doesn’t have any inclination to respect or follow rules unless they make sense, and views traditions as something that are only to be followed for a compelling reason.“

Trying to define Chaotic characters as driven by whim and instinct is just stupid.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I despise traditionalism, don’t see the value of nostalgia, and view rules as only legitimate if they continue to make sense in the context of making people’s lives better without enslaving individuals to their social order. I’m Chaotic. I like to think Chaotic Good.

My best friend votes no on new laws if he doesn’t care about or understand them. Literally, “if in doubt, vote status quo”. Rules exist to be followed unless there is a compelling reason. Social or academic progress is often more important than individuals or even subgroups. He is Lawful.

 

[Bohandas]

It occurs to me that if the Slaadi were tweaked to look exactly the same then they could represent the idea that anonymity brings freedom and lack of accountability

 

[Bohandas]

It occurs to me that the purest expresions of law and chaos perhaps ought to be completely mindless; behaving randomly in the case of chaos, or being automata that never deviate from a fixed pattern in the case of law

 

[Fenris-77]

Some fey are, historically described, pretty good exemplars of CN as whim driven. They essentially do what they like when they like with no particular reference to any human notion of good or bad.

I don't like N as a stand in for instinctual though, which is how it feels like they arrived at CN for Slaad.

 

[Bohandas]

4e got it right, every other edition igored Slaadi behavior, which as depicted is 100% Chaotic Evil in every depiction of them. They are always shown as predatory and even some demons appear to do Chaotic Neutral in action better then them.

See the problem is Slaads as depicted are too homocidal, more then simply chaotic, they hunt humaniods for breeding, and there appears to be no facet of them that counter balances this blatant evil.

Slaads should be as likely to be kind as cruel or even indifferent, but when have the Slaad ever been depicted as something other then predatory. They are the equivilant of the Magog who with exceptions like Rev Bem, are seen as Chaotic Evil. Both species rape and murder as way of life (implanting victims is argueable a form of rape, and TV show Andromeda refers to it that way). Where is the neutrality.

D&D needs way better exemplars of Chaotic Neutrality. It has great exemplars of every alignment except Chaotic Neutral.

Or reform Slaads so they are as helpful as they are dangerous, creative as they destructive.

It recently occurred to me that Formians have the same problem. They seem to be all about conquest and slavery.