Comments

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  TheMazeController

  Posts: 115 January 2012 edited January 2012

  I will chime in here.
  
  As someone who has been witness to true "evil" in this world in particular to some of the acts you describe in you post on some, "business trips" (I was an active duty US Marine for many years.) to places around the world (forex: Kosovo) I would argue for caution.
  
  I think that at the game table there should be some lines one doesn't cross. You can be pretty evil and petty without making people at the table uncomfortable. I would tend to shy away from descriptions of some of the actions you describe, it's your fun and your table though so its up to you. Dont mistake me for being all preachy, I just want to be helpful and participate.
  
  On to the topic of evil - in the past I have played characters who have:
  
  Trampled children with horses, stolen babies, murdered, blackmailed, intimidated, poisoned, assassinated and more...
  
  As I have grown older (I will never grow up) I have learned the art of being oblique -I tend to be descriptive and imaginative while trying to maintain tact however, I try damned hard to never implicitly state things in a way that might make other folks at the table uncomfortable. I can be a bastard without making others uncomfortable or mad at me personally. Sometimes saying less is actually saying more...
  
  That's not so easy to do however and it's a slippery slope. Everybody comes to the table to have fun and I find that if I mess up as a player and my fun spoils yours then that is the one time I can safely say that I am "doing it wrong".
  
  So with that said have fun but be careful!

  Post edited by TheMazeController on January 2012
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  DarkMagus

  Posts: 425 January 2012

  I'd say we have developed a distinction of "hard" evil vs "soft" evil in the tables I've played at, though we never used those exact terms. Hard evil, the evil I think you are describing - but I could be wrong you might not be,based on a pure kill/rape/steal/torture for my own amusement or because I hate everyone and everything is very difficult to maintain in a group, even a group of all hard evil characters. Soft evil, the selfish greedy don't mind killing innocents it it means I get a head kind of thing, which is still pretty evil, is a little easier for groups. One of the last games I played in was a brief series of adventures where my buddy and I played soft evil characters, and interestingly the DM put us up against both the forces of good and a hard-evil Cthulhu type of threat and it was interesting to play out the way we drew the lines.
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  HurstGM

  Posts: 205 January 2012

  Well i think this counts. I had a player that systematically organized the players to kill one another so he ended up with all the loot. Not only did the guy do this masterfully organizing each players death in a particular order he played up each of the characters eccentric behaviors. it worked like a charm convincing one he was guilty of a death he did not commit. Getting another to murder a different player and the murder was killed by the guards. And healing another and sending him into combat and well he got killed thinking the mastermind was coving his back. The first question this player asked in the first session was "Does anyone have a problem kidnapping children and selling them into slavery?"
  
  Now while that particular character was evil as all get out his current cyber knight is what i would consider as lawful stupid as you can get and still survive.
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  GamingMegaverse

  Posts: 3,001 January 2012

  With playing an evil campaign, to me the true question is have the players all agreed on the guidelines? This is all supposed to be fun, and if the players and gm are not on the same page in an evil campaign, someone will get upset- which is not fun.
  killervp
  "A God...Rebuilt":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/a-god-rebuilt
  Duskreign's "COTM for November 2011":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/wyrmshadow/wiki_pages/112011

  Just trying to help out.

  
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  Baalshamon

  Posts: 585 January 2012

  Alot of players think that evil is just screwing over the party. Using Dungeons and Dragons as an example. I would expect that kind of erratic behavior from a chaotic evil person but then again I think the only truely choatic evil person in the world would have to be seriously deranged. I think most people that are evil fall into the lawful evil catagory. They have honor of some sort, they can justify their actions and feel that even though they are evil they are doing it for the right reasons.
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  HurstGM

  Posts: 205 January 2012

  My personal favorite "Evil" Character was a cyber knight. He would butcher and kill anyone he deemed unlawful or evil. He would use the weapons of the enemy against the enemy. his punishments and measures were absolutely swift and brutal but always within his view of the universe. In rifts we call this aberrant evil. Someone who lives by a moral twisted code. It was a great character killed by a bad roll of someone firing into melee.
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  ednoria

  Posts: 17 January 2012

  I agree with making sure you and your players are on the same page. But sometimes it's unavoidable -- you hit these big psychological land mines that the player (or you) didn't know were there. Maybe the player had the same thing happen to him/her, or a friend or family member, and suddenly things become less fun. So it's tricky.
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  Baalshamon

  Posts: 585 January 2012

  ednoria, that is so true. We had a campaign back in the late eighties where the players were all barbarians going from town to town sacking, pillaging, and all the stuff that goes along with it. A new girl joined our group and flipped out on one of the players for stuff we had been seeing in the campaign for months. Turns out she had been abused by someone pretty badly and it all came back on her that night.
  
  'tis the reason I prefer to play with the same old farts I have been with for 25 years. I know what lines exist and we dont cross them
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  KenSee

  Posts: 93 January 2012

  I have had new players at the table whenever I DM so I haven't had the chance to really explore some deep concepts of evil. I would like to one day have a group that is comfortable enough with each other to really explore those concepts and have a game that asks questions like "What is evil?" and "Where does evil come from?" of course until then we will stick to killing demons, necromancers, and orcs.
  
  Ken See
  
  P.S. The Philosophy major in me begs for a game like this haha
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  twiggyleaf

  Posts: 2,011 January 2012

  I very rarely play evil characters but even if I do, I don't go around killing, slaying, raping, stealing and cheating, because that is also self destructive, and being evil doesn't necessarily mean that you have to constantly enact such things. I have a Chaotic Evil Drow Priestess who some might not even think of as evil because she is quite loyal to her party (this is more self preservation than alignment) and doesn't really go out of her way to be cruel or destructive (because it does not suit her agenda to be seen in that way by others) but she would have no qualms about letting a prisoner die if she was sure there would be no consequences that would negatively affect her standing among her peers.
  
  The thing is that most role playing games are designed for us to be the good guys. It just works better that way. I remember many years ago in AD&D 2nd Edition, we had a party of mainly lawful good characters that worked well as a unit. When we had finished the campaign we all decided to take a group of similar characters that were all evil. We had quite a bit of fun at first, going into villages, killing, slaying, raping, pillaging and generally being unreasonable. As the atrocities increased so too did the level of interest drop. It was fun for a few games, but in the end not really very fulfilling and that campaign soon ended with not nearly as much sense of pride and achievement as we had attained with the former group.
  
  In my more recent gaming (D&D 3.5 mainly) I generally find that evil characters tend to be obstructive, especially when players playing CHAOTIC evil think they just have to run around acting like madmen. If they are evil, and subject their alignment tendencies to party rule it's not so bad, but when you get someone who makes co-operation and trust impossible, then it just becomes irritating.
  
  I totally agree with Endoria's point of view that you have to be quite careful in assessing things in a group when evil acts escalate to the point of bleeding out of the characters and affecting the players negatively. As she says, it can be tricky and I think we as players have to be very careful.
  
  twiggyleaf
  "Shimring - The Faces of Divinity":http://www.obsidianportal.com/campaigns/shimring
  (a multiplanar 3.5 D&D campaign)

  "I met a traveller from an antique land....."

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  Previous CotM Aug 2012: Shimring: High Level Multiplanar Campaign

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