Pulling this back into game speak a little bit for a minute, I’ll describe (briefly) how I handle alignments in my own games. It’s not really standard, but I think it works well enough to describe characters with accuracy.

I focus mainly on the four poles, and leave neutral alignments meaning “ambiguous”, which I think still allows this to work well. I usually say that:

Lawful Good means you do the right thing (Lawful) for the right reasons (Good).

Chaotic Good means you do the wrong thing (Chaotic) for the right reasons (Good).

Lawful Evil means you do the right thing (Lawful) for the wrong reasons (Evil).

Chaotic Evil means you do the wrong thing (Chaotic) for the wrong reasons (Evil).

Now I know plenty of people are going to think this is an oversimplification, but it’s worked very well for me in practice and has survived multiple moral dilemmas in games. What ends up happening is that most characters end up gravitating toward one of the poles on one axis and then remain ambiguous on the other axis, which I think is actually a remarkably realistic outcome. Again, that’s just IMHO. As always, YMMV.

So, with respect to the MIX, I think they’re most often Chaotic Good under this perspective, with some smattering of Chaotic Neutral when they get into hijinks. They tend to fuck up, or do nasty chaotic things, but more often then not their goals are definitely good.

When Matt says they’re “bad people”, I think (again, according to my idiosyncratic alignment interpretation) he means they do bad things but they are usually doing it for the right reasons.

That’s just my take though. If anyone thinks that’s ridiculous, I understand and that’s fine. It is just a game, after all.