LogFAQs > #914443435

Paratroopa1 posted...

I think pretty much everyone has personal standards that they uphold without really thinking about it and they don't always necessarily exactly line up with society's standards, although frequently they do (but that's true of people who really specifically uphold a code too)

I think you'd be wrong. I think people like to think they have personal standards, but they're guided by other things like self-preservation, and can almost always be broken in the right situations. And breaking them doesn't make that person a hypocrite because context is king. It just means they don't have a code to begin with.

For instance, most people would say they're morally against killing. But if you need to kill an intruder who is about to kill your family, and have the immediate means to, most of those people would kill the intruder instead of trying to talk them down. You can say "well, the code wasn't actually to never kill it was to never kill someone who didn't threaten you first" but that fits more into self preservation at that point.

Paratroopa1 posted...

I think the best way to divide lawful and chaotic is people who uphold and reinforce existing power structures vs people who subvert existing power structures, but this isn't really an inherent quality to a person, it's dependent on outside influences

That's your definition and why it's not D&D's. Your definition is bad because it's not really a character trait. Your character will flip from lawful to chaotic based on what plane they're on, and in a world setting where dimensional travel is a thing, well yeah, that's going to come up.
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