Chaotic Neutral is the way to go, you’re told. When you roll up your first D&D character, all of your gaming friends and vets tell you that CN is the perfect alignment because “you can do whatever the hell you want to.” There’s a lot of free range in Chaotic Neutral; you can decide to help the old lady get her change purse back and then charge her an exorbitant “getting-change-purse-back-reacquisition” fee. No altruistic or beneficent morality getting in the way, and no true desire to eviscerate the old lady at the same time boiling in your psyche.
Complete gaming freedom it seems.
That is, except for the obvious conundrum of having too much freedom. Chaotic Neutral (or the new “Unaligned” from D&D 4.0) may seem like an appropriate starting alignment for your characters; however, I think Chaotic Good is a better (well, at least more morally ambiguous) alignment for the first-timers.
(It should be noted that I purposefully am omitting any discussion of evil-aligned characters because I find that it’s difficult to run a campaign with them. Essentially, everyone who’s not a seasoned veteran thinks any evil alignment means Chaotic Evil. That is, everyone acts like The Joker, and the chaos is just overwhelming and dismantling to any hope of a compelling story.)
