Monday, February 11, 2013

Chaotic Neutral

The most loathsome character you will ever have to deal with is not any form of evil, but Chaotic Neutral. These people are agents of chaos. They do things neither for benevolence nor for greed. They break the law for shits and giggles. These people are worse than evil; they're clinically insane.

In terms of roleplaying games, what makes Chaotic Neutral so awful is how common players choose it for their characters. For whatever reason, people love being psychopathic miscreants. They may go through the story to acquire treasure and power, but every city they leave will be burning to the ground.

All the characteristics that make Chaotic Neutral protagonists frustrating also work to make Chaotic Neutral antagonists horrifying. Consider The Joker from The Dark Knight - he is the living embodiment of Chaotic Neutral. And the saying used to describe him, "Some men just want to watch the world burn", holds true. These antagonists are totally unpredictable and their motivations are unreachable. Their only downfall is that they are emphatic in their desire to cause trouble, so a cunning protagonist could set a smart enough trap to foil them.

These characters are masters of indiscriminate destruction. They make any serious story more complicated, but they are pretty decent at making situations more comical. Because they tend to not take anything seriously, their antics can break tensions and make for pretty amusing stories. The only catch is that those stories are in the "I can't believe anybody would actually do this" column.

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