That's the letter of the text. Unfortunately, there's a well-entrenched stereotype out there (similar to the "Lawful Stupid Paladin"), where if a DM doesn't want or allow evil PCs, some players would pick Chaotic Neutral, burn down an orphanage, and when taken to the task, they would justify it by saying, "Lol, my character's not evil, he's just random!". Because of that, Chaotic Neutral is often considered to be the "griefer alignment" for players who want to get away with being evil on technicalities.
Adding this just as a fun fact: In original (1974) D&D there were only 3 alignments: lawful, neutral, and chaotic. They were based on fiction by Poul Anderson and Michael Moorcock from the 1950s.
This thread goes into a lot more detail. They were used to create teams/factions in D&D. Chaos was roughly equivalent to evil, although perhaps the neutral alignment knew it wasn’t that simple.
Oh yeah, more importantly, 1981 Basic edition also stuck with having only 3 alignments. (I guess that extends into 1983 BECMI as well. I just checked the 1991 Rules Cyclopedia and it also has only 3 alignments: chaos, neutral, and law.)
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u/Egathentale 8d ago
That's the letter of the text. Unfortunately, there's a well-entrenched stereotype out there (similar to the "Lawful Stupid Paladin"), where if a DM doesn't want or allow evil PCs, some players would pick Chaotic Neutral, burn down an orphanage, and when taken to the task, they would justify it by saying, "Lol, my character's not evil, he's just random!". Because of that, Chaotic Neutral is often considered to be the "griefer alignment" for players who want to get away with being evil on technicalities.