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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7814750" data-attributes="member: 4937">In my opinion, the core of the Chaotic Neutral philosophy can be summed up as "Harm no one; do as you will".It's easy to distinguish Chaotic Neutral play from Chaotic Evil play. If the character is truly CN, he feels no obligation to help others, but tries to avoid profiting from harming others and like his Chaotic Good companion, feels he needs some sort of reason before he could legitimately harm others. A Chaotic Neutral character for example, doesn't have a job as a professional thief, or if he does, then he only targets individuals that he thinks deserve it in some fashion to give himself some moral cover for harming others. He differs from Chaotic Good play then only in that, first, he feels no compulsion to help others, and in fact may consider helping others at the expense of your own interests to be an actual moral wrong. And second, he considers himself less responsible for harm he has caused indirectly, or as a result of a bargain that he tricked or induced someone else to enter into. He's probably a strong believer that is in "caveat emptor" and as a "seller" feels no conviction that he needs to take any active role in disclosing things that would work against his own interest.By contrast, Chaotic Evil play prioritizes harming others as the means by which the player profits from his actions. At the core of Chaotic Evil philosophy is the belief that all profit is only made at the expense of others, and therefore the only way to succeed in life is to take from others and that because everyone must do this, that a Chaotic Evil person is doing no wrong in doing not only what must be done but what everyone else does as well. Chaotic Evil play is characterized by actively harming others for pure profit motive - theft, murder, etc.In my experience, most players that write Chaotic Neutral on their character sheets really want to play Chaotic Evil and generally do. It's almost invariable that they'll end up there and after a long time getting tired of table arguments with these players as to whether their characters have actually been evil enough to change to evil despite consistently always doing what is profitable to them despite whatever harm it causes to others, I hit upon a method that has proven pretty darn sure fire in resolving the problem - I bribe them. What I do is when the character has in my opinion hit a threshold where they are sure now firmly in the Chaotic Evil camp, I make the following offer, "I'll give you a 200XP bonus for good roleplaying, if as a result of this scene you change your alignment to Chaotic Evil."Since the player is playing with a pure profit motive, they almost invariably take this offer, and it eliminates any argument over whether I'm punishing them or playing their character for them.   It's a very small cost to play to get them to line their character sheet up with reality.</blockquote>

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