Chaotic Evil PC questions

[Reprimand]

So I have a player that wants to roll a CE pc but rather than playing say "Azod the Destroyer of Worlds" who straight up rapes and murders everything in his path, He wants to play a sociopath who knows how to blend into society as a "normal person." I thought this was an interesting spin on chaotic evil but can a chaotic evil person be patient and calculating? or is saying they can't like a stereo-type in the same sense of the lawful stupid paladin?

For anyone who has ever watched the show Dexter. It's a lot like that. He's faking being a normal person and under the surface he's squirming to kill someone.

Even if it is precisely how much cooperation can he get away with without compromising his alignment? I know that's up to me as the DM but I need a baseline here as I've never seen a concept like this.

[Red Fel]

So I have a player that wants to roll a CE pc but rather than playing say "Azod the Destroyer of Worlds" who straight up rapes and murders everything in his path, He wants to play a sociopath who knows how to blend into society as a "normal person." I thought this was an interesting spin on chaotic evil but can a chaotic evil person be patient and calculating? or is saying they can't like a stereo-type in the same sense of the lawful stupid paladin?

For anyone who has ever watched the show Dexter. It's a lot like that. He's faking being a normal person and under the surface he's squirming to kill someone.

Even if it is precisely how much cooperation can he get away with without compromising his alignment? I know that's up to me as the DM but I need a baseline here as I've never seen a concept like this.

A CE character can be as calculating as he wants. "Calculating" and "patient" are personality traits, not alignment measurements. Similarly, a Lawful character need not be patient or calculating - think of an LN/LE "judge, jury, and executioner" type character who witnesses violations and immediately terminates the perpetrators with prejudice. And violence. Especially violence.

What defines the CE character from the LE character is not the lack of patience, but the embrace of freedom. The CE character is less likely to embrace a stringent personal code, instead choosing to express himself. A CE serial killer might be one who attempts each time to outdo his last killing, in terms of scope and horror, as opposed to simply repeating the same pattern incessantly.

Nor does CE preclude the character from having basic self-preservation skills. And let's be clear: Appearing to not be a dangerous lunatic is a self-preservation skill for any dangerous lunatic. CE characters won't randomly hurl themselves in front of fireballs or into spiked pits; there's no reason one can't develop the ability to blend in with society. Heck, he could even make a game of it - how long can he dance around the investigators, how close can he come to saying "It's me, I'm the killer," without anyone catching on? How long can he go before he has to butcher someone and eat their spleen in order to keep his cover? (And you have to eat the spleen to keep your cover. It's a proven scientific fact.)

Remember that Evil is a question of actions, and Good a question of intents. A villain can open a charity with the intent of using it as a cover for his illicit activities; he's still a villain, despite taking Good actions. But a hero can't commit a genocide without a serious stain on his karma; genocide is an extremely Evil act, no matter what justification you may have. A CE character can perform Good actions, to a limited extent, without compromising his alignment, provided that he still indulges in his favorite activity. (Is it murder? It's murder.)

The thing to remember, however, is that it's not an endless buffet. After a long time of doing Good without doing Evil, you become the sort of person more inclined to do Good. That's how gradual alignment shift works. Good becomes a habit; avoiding Evil becomes a habit too. CE becomes CN, perhaps even becomes CG in time. To put it differently, if you don't at least make a sincere effort to mutilate a puppy, we're revoking your Dangerous Lunatic membership.

[Reprimand]

First post and all my questions are answered, wow.

My hat is off to you! New record! I'm bookmarking this!

[AvatarVecna]

I, unfortunately, have neither the time nor the insight necessary to give you any better advice than has already been given to you. The only thing I can suggest is a personal trick I use when making characters, and trying to piece together a good personality: take a couple traits you know you want to have for the character and their alignment (in this case, sociopathic, pretending to care, and Chaotic Evil) and read through their TV Tropes page, if they've got one. Find connections between traits, and use the trail of pages and their contents to develop a well-rounded character.

Just be warned: this is TV Tropes. Horror stories of people trapped in its archives are infamous; tread carefully.

[The Oni]

I'm reminded of Adachi from Persona 4, or Shogo Makishima from Psycho-Pass; polite, even charming, all about dat freedom, and secretly vicious as hell. They both have real jobs and status in society while they plot their general nefariousness. Player should be aiming for this, rather than, say, The Joker.

My Gathlain PC, Ragnvald, regularly pulls this off while maintaining his fey-ness by pretending to be shocked at human cruelty and paranoia but remaining ever-civil under the guise of being an "emissary to the human world." It helps that he can honestly tell the party his people are incapable of lying, ignoring the fact that Jeditruths are par for the course. (And never mind that he and his friends secretly are twice as brutal and five times as glib about it on a regular basis.)