#i love forte but whoo boy he's not who i envisioned

[the-faultofdaedalus]

I so get the feeling with writing the chaotic neutral. Basically I go around being like “what they are not allowed to be made out of marshmallow and love at their core? This is BULLSHIT”

im not neccecarily saying that all characters -- even chaotic neutral ones -- have to be secretly soft! sometimes it’s fun to write Absolute Assholes (for example: theseus), my problem is mostly that

i create a character, in my head, he’s a asshole kid who’s got a shine in his eye for treasure hunting but has never actually done the deed, has a VASTLY incomplete and incorrect view on what that kind of work actually entails, is very much a kind of.... selfish cowardly asshole. i WANT him to work well with the rest of the PCS, but i also want him to not be a good person, or someone who is brave and defensive.

session one, the party discusses making booze out of forbidden apples, cheers eachother on as we leap over a trap pit, and fight large rats together. my character steals a kill from another by doing a badass jump-stab, promises to give that character the next kill, does so.

i dont think my problem is writing these characters that are dicks, i think it’s that i, at my core, am not someone who could approach a team-based game and be a problem, in any way. i need to be Helpful and that translates into my characters.

solo writing? sure, everyone’s a dick. a game like DND? i am.... not going to be that.

(there’s also the way i see the alignment grid, where being “evil” doesn’t neccecarily make someone a bad person. for me, the lawful-chaotic line is how much a character trusts/follows society’s rules, unspoken or otherwise, where good-evil is just selfless-selfish. if you’re evil, you put yourself first. if you’re good, you put everyone else first. hence, chaotic neutral rogues, who put themselves first because no one else will, who do not follow society’s rules because they do not trust that society will protect them. you could make a lawful good character a BBEG, just because they are so hung-up on the Rules, on following them, on punishing those who break them, who would hurt other people for the sake of Rules, because they believe that Rules is the way to help everyone else. very much a “dispicable acts for your own good” person. i’ve played in a campaign where one chaotic neutral character was basically my favorite character in the game, with a really really good complex characterization, not selfless but still good, and a different chaotic neutral was the textbook def of “murderhobo.” people see the alignment grid different, and that’s fine.)