There's a 'deceptive' disposition, which is the same thing as being dishonest.
Selective disinformation.
Individualism versus collectivism and nature versus civilization are neatly equivalent to order versus chaos? Hmm… Is a small peaceful collectivist structured village living in harmony with nature orderly or chaotic? Is a big empire ruled by psychotic selfish individualist nobility that despoils nature orderly or chaotic?
Druids are associated with neutral alignment because they were created in the supplements for original Dungeons & Dragons to fill the gap between lawful clerics and chaotic anti-clerics. In OD&D's single-axis alignment system, lawful & chaotic were nearly indistinguishable from good & evil. Gygax decided that the association of druids with nature was a fitting concept for a cleric subclass restricted to neutral alignment, since nature in itself is neither good nor evil, having no morality.
Mercenaries? Bandits? Raiders?
Mercs = You pay me money, I kill your enemies. Contracts are legal documents.
Only if you choose to follow them
If you don't your reputation will eventually catch up to you and the contracts will cease. Even if mercs only do the bare minimum to get by that usually becomes a known thing after some time and becomes what is to be expected when contracting them.
Sure, as long as contracts are followed. However, just because you're hired won't make you lawful. Is a bandit who got hired to be a bodyguard a lawful person? Are mercenaries any less chaotic, because they... well, profit from war and chaos and are willing to fight for any side that pays more? I guess we have different definitions of "chaotic" here.
So raiding as such isn't a chaotic act in your eyes?
That's very optimistic of you (and a very strange hill to die on), to assume that a common bandit is capable of "building a castle" and "putting down roots".
A bandit who gets hired as a bodyguard is no longer a bandit, but does he become lawful? No, it just shows what he actually is, which is neutral (neutral evil). He's just as comfortable with either job as long as he's profiting.
Raiding is usually to achieve some other goal so no. Maybe I need to take a bunch of prisoners to get intel, so I raid an enemy base. Maybe I'm just raiding an enemy to accrue wealth for my own civilization. I suppose if I was raiding because I enjoyed it that would be chaotic. The act of raiding would not necessarily make a character lawful or chaotic.
That's the way it tends to turn out in RPGs. I just raided a giant bandit fortress not three weeks ago. Regardless, bandits are out for coin, if there's an easier way to get it and they're capable of achieving it they'll go for it as per your bodyguard hypothetical.
You would have a point if most people who play D&D chose to role-play as peasants. But they obviously don't. They role-play as adventurers and creatures who occupy different positions on the law-chaos spectrum. Some classes, like a thief, are inherently chaotic, since their basic skill set involves burglary, vandalism and breaking and entering. Even animals recognize concepts like property and territory. A succubus who disguises as an attractive woman to seduce mortal men is participating in society, but she's obviously acting chaotically, not lawfully.
I dunno that dude definitely had enough STR to qualify for frontline fighting.
Isn't a bodyguard-turned-bandit chaotic though? My point is: if a person is willing to resort to robbing people in order to earn a living, then he's chaotic regardless of his actual occupation. This would be different with a bodyguard who becomes a soldier sworn to obey his superiors' orders. Similarly to how a knight who serves his liege lord. You could argue that a guy who joins a mercenary company is no different, but mercenaries uphold no law or order as such: they are there to fight wars, meaning they are more likely to be agents of chaos and discord. Especially if it pays more to do so.
Hm... My definition of chaos would be to follow whims and own desires at expense of anyone and anything else (law and order in particular) - if you decide to work to whomever pays more, then you're doing it for your own desire of enrichment. Otherwise you'd be fighting for the side that "rightful" (for one reason or another).
But by this logic Goblin or Orc raiders are lawful too, because they also have their own hierarchy and goals... With this approach this kind of alignment has no purpose as you can attribute some form of hierarchy/order/organization to everyone and their mother. Except people are not lawful just because there is hierarchy/order/organization in place. Similarly to how people break the established rules when driving when they're on the road.
I am not so certain. Aren't people's decisions what defines them in the end?
Aside from RaggleFraggle, no-one is proposing a higher-dimensional alignment system; the goal is to create a better lawful-chaotic axis than the one that exists in AD&D, to satisfy three criteria:
I wouldn't mind a morality compass, like the one proposed in Broken Roads:
Gary Gygax had noted in the 1979 Dungeon Masters Guide that it was important "to keep track of player character behavior with respect to their professed alignment. Actions do speak far more eloquently than professions, and each activity of a player character should reflect his or her alignment. If a professed lawful evil character is consistently seeking to be helpful and is respecting the lesser creatures, he or she is certainly tending towards good, while if he or she ignores regulations and consistent behavior the trend is towards chaotic alignment (see PLAYERS HANDBOOK, APPENDIX III, CHARACTER ALIGNMENT GRAPH). Such drift should be noted by you, and when it takes the individual into a new alignment area, you should then inform the player that his or her character has changed alignment (see CHANGING ALIGNMENT)". Though the "character alignment graph" was really a diagram that didn't quite make sense; I think it wasn't until the 1987 Dragonlance Adventures campaign setting book that something akin to a proper graph with discrete spaces was presented for tracking alignment, except it was one-dimensional for the good-evil axis (obviously, combining this with the same thing for the lawful-chaotic axis would permit two-dimensional alignment tracking).I wouldn't mind a morality compass, like the one proposed in Broken Roads:
But this is likely too complex to keep track of in tabletop.
