Quote from: Koltar;267840The rules set was Rolemaster...we had pre-generated characters who were all 'evil' of one type or another. We suppesedly were on a mission or quest for the Prince of Darkness of that fantasy world - and our party leader was named ' Lord Chaos! '. That player would actually over-dramatically ham up pronouncing his name every time we got introduced to an NPC.

Weird! I played and "evil" Rolemaster campaign back in the early 90s. I think this happens because RM has (or had, dunno if they still do it) "evil" character classes, eg mage and evil mage, cleric and evil cleric.

I played an evil wizard called Philaboyd Causation, who specialised in the Foul Changes spells from one of the later companions, and a super-austere high warrior monk called Radical Authority. (Imagine my surprise when some cunt on rpg.net swiped the name for his handle! Doesn't post anymore, I hear.)

Anyway, I had great fun with those characters - foul changes was an absolute hoot (Tentacles, Bat Wings, Huge Bighty Mouth etc etc). We weren't very good at being evil, though. We even saved a local town from the orcs one time, but the locals weren't impressed by our evil-icious style.

Something I've often pondered, though, is that RPG campaigns are often very reactive - "you must stop Nasty McVillainface from taking over the world!" I've often wondered what it'd be like to play from the other end of the telescope - you are the one  that has to make the fooul plan of global domination and the NPC opposition is heroes trying to stop you.

A similar approach could be generated through "Good people try and change the world for the better", I guess, but in RPGs (and much of the fiction they follow) "heroism" seems to be more about maintaining the status quo. "God knows, Rick Parfitt could need the help. (Many apologies I can never resist Quo humour.)

Ned

Quote from: Drohem;267956In my experience, all 'evil campaigns' (as defined by the characters' alignments) almost always devolve into PvP action.  I've only played in a few games where the evil characters were able to form a stable equilibrium, and/or a consortium of evil.

Over the years I've had two infernal PCs in my Nobilis campaigns, a Count of Victims and a Marchessa of Rust, who occasionally went out of their way to, say, ensure that someone survives a car accident but not before suffering crippling injuries which would leave him in agony for the rest of his life. Sometimes they went about the business of the devils discreetly behind the backs of their more well-meaning comrades, partly not to offend each other's sensibilities and partly so that they wouldn't be stopped by some do-gooder follower of Heaven or the Light. Then again, the game does point out that all Nobles are in it together (and especially the ones in the same Familia) despite their different philosophical leanings, so that the same group may well include fiends and saints with wildly varying personal goals: even Hell must compromise to get anything worthwhile done. Indulging in mindless slaughter and petty torture doesn't benefit anyone.

Quote from: GrimGent;268115Sometimes they went about the business of the devils discreetly behind the backs of their more well-meaning comrades, partly not to offend each other's sensibilities and partly so that they wouldn't be stopped by some do-gooder follower of Heaven or the Light.

For years we'd been told not to mix good and evil in our adventuring groups; if you're going to do evil, make an entirely evil group. But in one of our recent D&D campaigns, we had a paladin, a neutral good cleric, a pretty neutral fighter, and then two guys whose morality could best be described as "casual." Neither of the two "bad guys" were really evil, by their standards, anyway, it's just that they had a more relaxed attitude toward things like, say, killing people to get what they wanted.

This presented some fascinating in-game and out-of-game challenges, as the players tried to not make their characters conflict too much, and - more interestingly - the characters began to compromise on their principles in order to be able to work together. Sometimes the goodies would look the other way, even though they knew something pretty bad was probably happening. ["We're going to go...ah, get information from that trader. No, no, paladin, we probably don't need your, ah, help."] And sometimes, the baddies had to pass up opportunities for goods and information because their only method of doing so would be rejected by the goodies. ["No, Kaas, I don't think it's acceptable for you to eat this gentleman's children to get him to talk."] I really found the evening of morality into a neutral gray a fascinating insight into how, when, and why we choose to change or ignore our principles; like all things in roleplaying, it's clearly an artificial situation, but it's still thought-provoking.

Quote from: David R;268030One of my players based her character on T-Bone from Prison Break. It worked out pretty well but if the whole group was made out of such characters I think it would have been a disaster....

...and...

Quote from: riprock;268070I've gotten a lot of positive feedback for my socially unacceptable PCs.  They were not nice, and maybe no group would want such characters at every single session.  But they definitely are a good tool in the dramatic toolbox.

Reading these two posts, I'm suddenly reminded of the game Unknown Armies.  Really, I think it's a very good game, but I eventually had to step back and walk away from it because the players and fandom seemed to have gotten this idea in their heads that every character had to be like this.  And since every character had to be like this, there was a certain competition to be a little edgier than the other characters at the table.  Frankly, I saw the same thing happen with Vampire games, too (my Sabbat-refuting fellow players aside).

I think there's a line where "edgy" becomes "gratuitous camp" awfully fast, and games that encourage it as the baseline character are unintentionally pushing toward camp.

!i!

Ah, it seems people are drawing some sort of distinction. So, Evil is mad dog sociopath? Yeah, I don't particularly like that either. Back int he day this was called "Chaotic Evil" and it sucked because they usually could not last more than a session or two. Now, I am not sure "socially unacceptable" is what I would use since that sounds like using the wrong fork at a dinner party. One of my biggest problems with most gamers is they want to play "Evil" the way Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is evil, that is to say "Naughty". They giggle into their hand and think they are James Dean or something. An exploration of evil, the way Ian and others have expressed it, can be quite fun (oh, my, I used the "F" word). Do I only want to play evil? No, believe me, after a year of V:tM six nights a week you get very cured of that.

Bill

Quote from: Engine;268116This presented some fascinating in-game and out-of-game challenges, as the players tried to not make their characters conflict too much, and - more interestingly - the characters began to compromise on their principles in order to be able to work together.

In the case of Nobilis, it helps that none of the great factions in the setting are diametrically opposed to each other, or "good" or "evil" in any objective sense although some of them are definitely more benevolent than others. The Light might protect a certain serial killer because by culling away the weak he's improving the gene pool and helping the human species as a whole to survive; the Dark might track down and dispose of the same killer because with each murder he's taking away someone's chance of realizing the futility of his own life and ending it himself. Heaven might look favourably on the murderer because his killings are works of brutal beauty and poetic justice; Hell might take an interest in stopping him because in the eyes of the devils he brings an untimely end to suffering on Earth. With a little effort, it's not all that difficult to convince someone who by all rights should be your sworn enemy that in this case collaboration just makes sense.

I play evil characters, as do my fellow PCs, regularly, and we play mixed groups of good and evil characters, also regularly.

As others have noted, it's perfectly fine so long as you focus on the motivations of characters and the behaviours that result from that. Allowing some PvP can make things more interesting, so long as you're able to accommodate it without pissing people off OOC.