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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8039039" data-attributes="member: 6801228">Ah, I see you have added to the listed alignment and put forth your own interpretation. Nothing in LN says that the personal code must be pre-written or a ruleset. It is a personal code, you don't need to write it out, it is the rules you follow, because you decided on those rules. And if you are Chaotic Good, and your consience does not align with your own personal rules... you've got a serious problem. Why did you make rules that go against your conscience? And, nothing in a personal code says that it cannot have by-laws or be changed going forward. You could completely have a character who has "Rule #2: Never trust a Dwarf" and follow it with "Rule #3: Rule #2 is superseded if the Dwarf is telling you the best place to get Booze."  And could further be changed by adding "Rule #1,457: Despite being a Dwarf, you should trust Bob. Except with booze, he has naughty word taste" So what rules need to exist and how heavily must the be enforced to go from Chaotic to neutral, and then neutral to Lawful? Also, what do States have to do with this? State's are not required. You could have a stateless group of people, perhaps following a religion, that nomadically wander and have highly stringent codes and laws they follow. A nation state or city-state has nothing to do with how lawful you are.Skipping most of your post, let us look at this. Last point, useless. Doesn't matter.After all, we are talking about WoTC changing the rules of the system on a meta-level, the fact that two tables that have never interacted have never affected each other is as true as it is meaningless. Which, also brings us to your third point. Which, since we are talking about WoTC changing the rules, while it is nice that your personal experience has not led to your own decisions contradicting, I would have to wonder how you are defining a chaotic society. As I mentioned with [USER=6879661]@TheSword[/USER] , many times when people are putting forth a society as "chaotic" it really isn't, it is instead just working under different laws. In fact, I have noticed a lot of people like Sword and Maxperson putting forth ideas that are not in the book, making leaps of inference if you will, and making connections that are not there. Like there being a concept of property rights, or a nation state, which makes me wonder, do people think that a nation is more lawful if they have an Emperor instead of a King instead of a Great Chieftain? It could be that people are placing a lot of emphasis on aspects that have nothing to do with how lawful a society is, and instead worrying more about how familiar those laws are. Which brings us to points 2 and 1. Putting "Order and Society" on the sliding scale that is Law and Chaos, and knowing that Chaos is anti-order, we have two options. Either Society is the opposite end from Order, and therefore society is chaotic and order is lawfulorSociety and Order are meant to be seen as a single unit, placing them firmly in the Law side of the spectrum and the opposite of Chaos. And, since if we look to find the most chaotic places, we see no societies (and in fact in the most purely chaotic places we see nothing much of anything except endless energy and matter) I propose that yes, Chaos is anti-society. And despite the book claiming a society might be chaotic, by their own definitions, I don't know if I am convinced that is really the case. And since I've found so many mis-labelings already, I have to wonder if these examples are also mis-labeled.Now, I fully admit that some societies can be "more chaotic" than others. That is obviously true, but I do not think we have any solid evidence of something that is truly chaotic, because by the very definition of society, it is about a set of rules that people follow. And if we look to the most chaotic of beings, demons (without demon lords for a moment) and Slaad, we see that they do not have societies. That already exist. that seems to be the point being missed with what I am trying to say. I'm not saying we need to add a half page of lore for every monster, I'm saying all monsters already have a half page of lore that does a better job of telling us what they are about and their general attitudes and preferences than alignment does. So, if we already have "long combersome descriptions" which are cutting our product lengths down because they are taking up space... why don't we use them?Grey Cloak? checks bookHuh, I forgot about that. Guess since they all do the exact same thing and color is a purely aesthetic choice, I just never bothered to care about the alignment of people wearing those robes.And yet, alignment as a tool for controlling player behavior, is not really all that great of a thing. And, if a player is really going to be stopped from being disruptive from not having an E written on their sheet, then you could probably also just apply the Wheaton rule and be done with it.Just because you no longer have an axis of cosmic Law and Cosmic Chaos doesn't mean devils are suddenly hippies. Heck, your thing about the the Ruby Rod? That's the first time I've ever heard it. Usually I'm told the Blood War is because Law and Chaos hate each other, so they are fighting. Fighting over a resource is much much more interesting. Heck, it almost makes me want to change my lore about the war against Demons to include it.Honestly, this is a perfect example of what I am talking about. I see the Knorr as lawful. Heavily lawful. Their disregard for contracts and formal law systems makes sense, but I don't see that as making them Chaotic. After all, we've established that at least in 5e Lawful Neutral fits them perfectly, with an adherence to tradition and a personal code.Hmm, that is an interesting one. I'll have to look at it and think about it more.</blockquote>

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