» Fri Oct 05, 2012 10:50 am
This is one of the problems that coexists within any of the threads discussing lawful good characters' roleplay woes. Specifically, there is this tendency to think everyone that plays this game, or Elder Scrolls games, or role-playing games in general are all Dungeons and Dragons literate, possibly having played it, but knows about the same things people who have do. This is not the case. I don't have a link for you to some site where they are all explained (I'm sure someone may know a good one and provide it). The basic trick is to understand that there are two spectrums and they do NOT measure the same thing.
The dimension of lawful to chaotic nature does not have a thing to do with morality or ethics. Or at least not directly. It is whether a person follows a set of rules strictly or acts on impulse. And it isn't a boolean two-state quality either as you can fall anywhere between the extreme ends of lawful to chaotic. Mind you those rules, in spite of the term 'lawful' suggesting laws, may not be laws, but a personal code of rules. Chaotic people don't follow either. But a lawful individual is the type who even if a sociopath, may adhere stringintly to certain behaviours. They may be a serial killer who never touches women or children, only hunts on a certain night of the week, and give their victim a chance to escape. Jigsaw comes immediately to mind as an example of someone who was no doubt evil, but not chaotic in that he never deviated from his rule of giving his victims a chance.
It is good to evil, the other seperate dimension that is taken as the characters 'moral' stance. Most people who think of themselves as good people if offered only the most polar opposite of the four possible crosses to describe themselves would probably pick chaotic good. This is someone who is more than willing to break a law or personal code of conduct if their sense of right and wrong dictates that it is 'the right thing to do'. Chaotic evil is more like the joker, a pure psycopath. No structure, a self styled 'agent of chaos', that cannot even be predicted or trusted by other evil people. Lawful good in extreme would be someone that refuses to break a law just because of moral repugnance. They are the people who would as police draw their weapon and do the job of defending a child killer on the way to a court trial from vengeful family members and then do the same as they escort them to the gas chamber or to a prison, whichever sentence they were given.
Pure chaotic good are vigilantes. Pure lawful evil is like for example the Nazis. Rigid structure and ideology of ridding the world of what they saw as imperfect or pure races of people as a matter of system norm. Any evil, such as mass execution is justifiable towards that end. This of course could also cover a manipulative sociopath that uses the law to cover their own personal evils, such as a racist cop that uses their position to be given authority to use force and seeks out opportunities to abuse that power against those they dislike.
To the OP, I would say a guild like the Dark Brotherhood would offer quests in line with that alignment, though the extremest of such would probably feel disdain if not outright disgust with the members who have abandoned the old way, and thus naturally side with Cicero and his view that the sanctuary was no true Dark Brotherhood outfit. They may not join the Thieve's Guild simply because of how much more like a 'loose association' of lone backstabbers they resemble than out of any aversion to theft (indeed engaging in it freely but on their own terms).
