Chaotic Good

I don't really intend to use alignment again in my games. Fortunately, 5e makes it really easy just to drop it, as the game gives alignment absolutely no mechanical weight (while also offering a different method to set up a character with some sort of code - Ideals, Flaws, and Bonds). So, unless I happen to go back to 3e, I doubt this will be anything more than a theoretical discussion again.

That said, alignment is still such a big (and divisive) part of D&D's history that discussions about what the alignments mean persist. On Wednesday we found ourselves having one such discussion, specifically about the Chaotic Good alignment, which one player characterised as a "Robin Hood"-type, and also as "you're good, but you can do whatever you want".

Well...

The first misconception there is "you can do whatever you want". While that's true, it's also true of all the alignments - it's important to note that alignment is not a straightjacket. Though, of course, if your stated alignment doesn't match your actions, your stated alignment should really be changed...

The other issue, and it's a common one, lies in the roles of Lawful and Chaotic alignments. Here, the names are rather unfortunate - this isn't about obeying the law or not. Rather, it's about the entire concept of laws (and systems, heirarchies, and all that stuff). The Lawful character believes that such structures are, in general, a beneficial thing (in the case of an LG person, because he feels they're a social good; in the case of an LE person, because he feels they're useful to him).

Conversely, the Chaotic character believes that such structures are a harmful thing and should be removed (again, in the case of a CG person, because he feels that such things actively harm others; in the case of a CE person, because they get in his way).

Consider, for example, a badly-written law - one that doesn't do what it was intended to do or one that applies unfairly. In that situation, it's entirely reasonable that the Lawful person will reject that law but, crucially, he will work to replace it with a better one. The Chaotic person, on the other hand, will work to remove the law entirely.

But it's also important to remember that the nine alignments are all, necessarily, very broad. That's inevitable, really - if you're going to categorise the entirety of human action into nine buckets, those buckets have to be pretty huge (or maybe everyone's just Neutral...).

So a 'mild' Chaotic person might seek to reduce the impact of laws (and heirarchies, and the like) on people's lives, while an extreme Chaotic person may seek to remove every instance of laws, no matter how benign. Conversely, a 'mild' Lawful person may seek to tighten the laws to improve matters, while an extreme Lawful person may seek to codify every possible situation.

Naturally, sanity lies somewhere in the middle.

(It of course didn't help that BECMI D&D only had Lawful and Chaotic alignments, and didn't codify Good and Evil. In practice, this had the effect that Lawful = Good, while Chaotic = Evil.)

Oh, and the other other thing is that we've all pretty much been doing alignments wrong ever since D&D was published. Forget everything that is written about behaviours and values, because that's dross. Alignment, as originally intended, was nothing more (or less) than a set of team shirts. By which token, Lawful Good = "America! Fuck Yeah!". Which presumably makes Chaotic Good "Oh Canada"...