I've always found the alignment system to be pretty silly, though I know why it exists. It's there as a measuring tool for players to help them stay in character. IMO it's much better to create a complex / complex character; how are you going to judge alignment on someone (like the demon chick) who has diffiferent personalities in and out of combat? Or someone who is extremely racist to a typically peaceful race because they were enslaved and abused by one bad subset of it?
That's a really good point. People (and therefore believable characters) are much more complicated than some simple pigeon-holing would indicate and their reactions even on simple good/evil and lawful/random axes are going to be highly dependent on the situation. I'm not "what I'm supposed to be" for narrow values of "supposed" IRL so my character shouldn't be either. I mean, to take something really basic like my current FO4 character as an example, she's the one who's snarky and rude in conversation but a bit of a do-gooder in her actions, which creates a bit of an incongruity on the D&D alignment scale. I'm not saying FO4 handles it especially well, but it would be worse if I felt some real obligation to always act in a certain way.
