Drawbacks to Chaotic Good

One source of tension for chaotic good characters is to let their chaotic nature impede their ability to be good. Have them eagerly jump at the first possible solution they see to a problem, and have that blow up in their face.

Being CG is more exhausting for the person. Suppose that someone's shoulder devil pops up and suggests that they steal. A LG person could just go, "No, that's against the rules," and keep going. A CG person would need to think their argument through more, and that saps energy.

I think people would also distrust a CG hero more because they can't see why exactly they're doing things. C Gs are foreign, and that makes them scary and unpredictable. If a Lawful stranger suddenly starts eating babies, there *might* be some sort of chain of command or social context that could be used to stop them. C Gs don't even have that possibility.

It's a paranoid way of thinking, but I think it shows realistically why Farmer Bob and Tailor Alice wouldn't be totally happy about a new sheriff coming to town...even if that sheriff only uses his gun for good reasons.

Bumping this up.

I think in this era of !@#$ the police, trying to find flaws in Chaotic Good may be harder.

People are going to more naturally side with someone who flaunts authority as a whole.

I'm still curious to see more ideas however.

Well, chaotic good tends to increase the amount of chaos, which is often quite bad for people.

A different and minor example from fiction might be Frankie from Grace and Frankie. I believe it's season 3 where she has an extensive conflict with Briana about something where she's arguably morally correct, but her attempts to resolve it are absolutely ineffective and counter-productive due to her chaotic nature.

More generally, the more chaos, the less trust and stability. A person who will prioritize their own ethics over completing a mission is a massive risk in most risky situations, it's just that authors tend to give their characters an out, so it's not really the case that by breaking cover to save the poor little orphan you totally fucked the team whose back you were supposed to be watching.

But let's take a step back. As I understand your argument, it's that real world 'lawful' authorities actions have increased the sympathy felt towards chaotic characters? I think that only really works if you, like me, have minimal actual experience with truly chaotic societies/situations.

For more on this, see here. Chaos can be really, really bad. It just tends to be idealized because modern American society is extremely law-bound and ordered. In a chaotic situation anything can happen. The situation can greatly improve in a short time, or a society can collapse in an orgy of bloodshed. For an optimist, there's certainly a 'we need more chaos' argument. For a pessimist, not so much.

You can get Freetown or you can get CHAZ.

It's a lot easier in a rich, modern, law-bound society to see the problems of law than the problems of chaos, but that's a matter of perspective, not because those problems don't exist.

Hmm. A Chaotic Good type in, say, an adventuring group might clash with their more regimented or lawful-oriented teammates and disagree on what course of action to take (despite being in overall agreement morally), which could possibly escalate and form a schism, depending on how far you want to take that.

Bump

General shortsightedness and a kind of childish outlook would be pretty big drawbacks, in a least most examples of Chaotic good characters I’ve seen.

Sera and the Red Jennies in Dragon Age Inquisition is an example that comes to mind.

Sera is undoubtedly a good person, and a lot of the nobles she goes after kinda have it coming. But, besides that they don’t really do anything meaningful to help the plight of the downtrodden people they supposedly look out for, and Sera herself is too inflexible in her worldview and her approach to societal problems, and it’s something that she doesn’t really start overcoming until around the events of Trespasser, which is set two years after Inquisition.

By obvious comparison, the Inquisitor, even if they’re played as something of a Chaotic Good themselves, will generally have had a far more beneficial, profound, and much more far reaching effect over all of Thedas, especially the elves, by the time they save the world by well and truly destroying Corypheus.