TheRPGSite

...describes one of the worst RPG experiences I ever had...as a player.

 It was the "Evil" campaign. I wanted to game....the group were all players that had just played in a GURPS: MECHA mini-campaign. (which was much more fun)


The 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.


I just did not enjoy playing Evil.



- Ed C.

I ran a campaign where my wife played an despicable Russian agent. Seriously, a killer of babies and the hand of death upon the earth. He buddies in the campaign was a guy, an Aussie, who was just not right in the head. He had been tortured by Japanese in China and the result was a guy who could only feel any emotion when he was hurting someone...preferably slowly. Another guy was a real Peter Lorey kind of guy. Not so scary but utterly without any moral conviction. I kept thinking "Naw, this guy wont do tha...By the gods, he did!" and then he would be off to something else. The scariest thing about the group was not that the were "Teh Evul" but that they really played some sinister nasty guys with perfect rationale. They either KNEW they were superior to these lesser creatures that waddled in the dirt or they KNEW they were good, just misunderstood, or they KNEW they did what they did because they had to survive. It was one of the most entertaining and dare I say epic campaigns of my whole life. I fell in love with my wife all over again. A group that can play true evil (not naughty bad-bad) can make an incredible adventure nay, campaign of it.

However, that is not some folks cup of tea. That is cool too.

Bill

My group has a lot of morally ambivalent or grey stuff, but not often evil.

Mostly because it's a bit easy and therefore a bit dull.  If you're Evil (capital E), then you don't face much by way of moral quandaries or conflicts between what's right and what's expedient.  And those quandaries and conflicts, within reason, are fun.

When it comes to my friends, I'd much rather find out they have heroic delusions of greatness rather than finding out they enjoy graphic fish fucking or have nascent cannibalistic appetites. That's a buzzkill that lasts after the Cheetos are gone, so why tempt fate?

It really depends on what you mean by "evil", Ed. The PCs in my games are sometimes lying, manipulative, caprious, egomaniacs but they are also altruistic, have a moral code and are functional members of society.....some may call this "grey". All these characters draw the line when it comes to fishfucking, though. I suppose this is what NPCs are for.

Regards,
David R

I don't have good and evil in games. I just have people who do stuff. Because Balbinus is right--pure Evil is as banal a concept as pure Good.

Quote from: Koltar;267840...describes one of the worst RPG experiences I ever had...as a player.

The 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.


I just did not enjoy playing Evil.

That sounds hilarious (apart from the Rolemaster bit - now that is evil), but I'm not sure its evil as Balbinus is discussing. I don't think you can see it as good vs evil but rather playing different stereotypes or genre roles. That kind of hamming play has its own merits, but its hardly evil in the same way that the same sort of gaming for 'good' is really about being good - its about melodrama and hamming it up. Although I'm assuming this is a short term campaign, because a player who did that over a year would become really annoying. What did they do that made them evil?

Otherwise I agree with other posters - pre-defining characters as good or evil removes a degree of free will from their actions (not always I admit) which ultimately makes the terms meaningless if you are taking them seriously.

Quote from: Balbinus;267866My group has a lot of morally ambivalent or grey stuff, but not often evil.

Mostly because it's a bit easy and therefore a bit dull.  If you're Evil (capital E), then you don't face much by way of moral quandaries or conflicts between what's right and what's expedient.  And those quandaries and conflicts, within reason, are fun.

hmm, see, I find this to be too narrow a view of evil. I often see people define good as some sort of complex and intricate thing then turn around and say evil is a two dimensional caricatured.

The thing that was interesting for the evil campaign I mentioned was that the players took the time to come up with a moral code, there were things they would not do. They then took the time to come up with a rationale. Evil generally, does not stroke its pointy mustachio and revel in its "evilness". An evil person is going to rationalize the living crap out of what they are doing. There in lies the challenge. What is your moral code? Kill everyone but you would never rape a person? That would just be sick. Then, how do you rationalize killing the infant for the ritual? Well, he was going to die anyway. He had no parents. Hey, but you killed his parents.

Now, don't get me wrong. I like playing good also. I had a knight who was the bastion of good in the country, the enforcer of law and order. He would selflessly throw himself in harms way to save peasant or noble alike. He also did not view bandits or those who broke the law as worthy of mercy. He would torture them mercilessly to get information then dispense "justice" as empowered in him. My GM said that he was the most evil good buy he had ever seen. Likewise, the same GM felt a rogue I played who had a strict moral code he lived by, although evil, was also one of the most noble.

To me, that is the challenge of playing characters with strong morals and codes, ones who you might call "good" or "evil".

But like I said, it might not be some folks cup of tea.

Bill

All of our players do not believe in the existence of absolute morality, and this is often reflected in the game; while we've tried very hard at times to play truly heroic characters - Good people who actively go out of their way to do Good things - it generally just ends up being frustrating for the players involved; we prefer a more morally ambiguous game, in which morality is not reflected in subjective character beliefs, but in consequences of actions taken.

Still, while we've had a lot of characters be extremely selfish, we haven't had very many who were truly Evil, people whose morality said it was right to spread and accelerate entropy. We've talked about it, about playing a group of proto-evil-masterminds, but it's just never happened. I do think it'd be interesting to do, particularly if you then turn the tables, let some decades pass, and then play people who live in the lands torn apart by these people's continuing actions. Your old characters then become the opposition for the new campaign.

But I doubt we'll bother; evil for the sake of evil doesn't please our players any more than good for the sake of good. Well, maybe a little more.

Ed,
  My wife decided to run an evil supers campaign. She decided to keep it from turning into a PvP bloodbath by imposing two restrictions
1) We were all part of a Brotherhood of evil
2) We had to keep our identities and the existence of the Brotherhood secret
  Well, it didn't take more than 30 minuted before we degenerated into Bond villains. It was ironic and sad.
  But, it was fun and we got to do that little backstabby moves and start wars, etc.

  I guess, we weren't classically evil, no one killed babies or kicked puppies just to prove we were evil. but we were bad and it turned out fun.

  I don't think our group has enough juice to run another game of evil campaign without getting squicky. But the one was fun.

My experiences with so-called evil campaigns is that they quickly turn into dumb campaigns. Or, as I like to think of then, Chaotic Dumb. I also agree with the other posters who think that playing evil campaigns turns moral choices into...meh.

Seanchai

I think I'm lost for evil campaigns. Having a 3 years old daughter, every time I read "evil" I picture Mermaid Man and Sponge Bob now.

(http://www.funbumperstickers.com/images/mermaid_man.gif)

The only game in which I played an objectively evil character was 1e AD&D. My character was a lawful evil cleric worshipping some god-of-war-type deity. I played him as a low-key megalomaniac. Mostly he was good for offing wounded prisoners and planning grandiose schemes of conquest. Other than the humour value, I didn't get much out of the experience.

I've never wanted to play a callously evil, randomly violent deviant -- that's not really evil, it's just sociopathic.  I did play with a couple of others like that, though, in my early-early AD&D days.  These were the same sorts of guys who liked to pull legs off insects and kick dogs, though, and they simply treated the imaginary construct as a world in which they would suffer no lasting consequence.  Like I said:  sociopathic.

I have played devious, unsympathetic, and amoral characters, though.  In D&D terms, they were on the far, downward side of Chaotic Neutral -- totally okay with doing whatever they wanted for their own personal satisfaction.  They still worked well with a group of adventurers, though.

You know, I'm suddenly recalling the Vampire: the Masquerade group I was in back in the early '90s.  I had grown increasingly tired of the society of bored do-nothings who only come out to argue with each other at night.  The Sabbat book had just come out, and I was really quite interested in the notion of playing a vampire in a truly malevolent, monstrous, amoral society.  When I broached the notion of playing a Sabbat campaign, my fellow players told me I was crazy, and that they'd never stand for such a thing.  It struck me as odd that they seemed to want to filter out the real horror from a "horror" roleplaying game.

!i!

In 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.

Quote from: Ian Absentia;267954When I broached the notion of playing a Sabbat campaign, my fellow players told me I was crazy, and that they'd never stand for such a thing.  It struck me as odd that they seemed to want to filter out the real horror from a "horror" roleplaying game.

Strange reaction ! I ran a short campaign using the Montreal by Night source book. It was very gonzo badass vampire hysteria (I was trying to go for more horror but my players didn't help) but we laughed a lot :)

There is an awesome GM in the San Francisco Bay Area who runs Evil Star Trek and Evil Dark Heresy as one-shot games at conventions.    

He takes a standard Star Trek episode (any of the shows) with all its assume moral quandries and need for heroism...and then hands out the characters...and then tells them they are in the Mirror Universe.  

It gets wild and crazy and incredible fun.   Maybe not the best set up for a long term campaign, but truly excellent for 4 hours with strangers.

His new setup is Dark Heresy where you play Chaos Cultists trying thwart those nosy Inquisitors while achieving your Dark God's mission.  I am really looking forward to playing a session of that.

I played in a sweet evil campaign.  We were rebuilding an old necromancer's keep and building a city around it.  Albeit a city built around an any means necessary approach.  We had standing troops, a mercenary company, a monestary of evil monks, and a variety of peasants we'd pressed into service as citizens of our budding community.

We had a manor in Waterdeep and did some trading with many of the businesses there.  In short we were organized and had shared goals, rather than a bunch of back-stabbing rapist baby killers.  It made for a really fun time, but unfortunately our GM wasn't expecting organized evil and the game fell apart because he wanted Paranoia style gameplay.

Quote from: Idinsinuation;267992...unfortunately our GM wasn't expecting organized evil and the game fell apart because he wanted Paranoia style gameplay.

Shame on you.

!i!

Quote from: Ian Absentia;267995Shame on you.

!i!

I know right.  How dare we shoot for longevity and in depth character developement over backstabbing shenanigans.  :D

I once played a real scumbag private eye in Shadowrun. He was more evil in "The Shield" sense than in a Darth Vader way; more callous and opportunistic than rampant sadistic. Even so the effects were pretty devastating.

Within the three short sessions we played he got one innocent member of the party arrested just so he could collect the reward and the rest of the party killed, ironically trying to protect my character while he ran off with all the money and his lady friend.

To this day I wonder why the other players chose to stand and defend my character. They did have a chance to get away and I had made very obvious that my character wasn't to be trusted. I can only think that either they took my character sleazy behaviour as just empty posturing and that, in true Hollywood tradition, when the chips were down he could be counted on to do the right thing or, more likely, they were just spoiling for a fight and had not really been paying attention to how that game had unfolded thus far.

It was kind of fun to do as an experiement, but really it hard to see how one could run a long-term campaign this way.

I played in a very large campaign wherein during the first session one of the other players, who was a dick in RL, fucked me over in a minor way. He was a magic user. I was a thief/fighter/magic user- but I never ever used magic or thieving skills in front of any of the other PCs. So from their point of view I was just an underpowered fighter.
Our first adventure was some kind  of nautical thing. I was the third officer on the ship. All the other officers mysteriously died or vanished during the course of the voyage, and I somehow ended up as Captain, which entitled me to something like 80% of the treasure upon our return.
There was a moment as we were debarking and the other players were walking off the ship with their little bags of gold as two crew men wheeled mine away in barrows, that I almost felt guilty. Mostly I was amazed that they all just took it.
Anyway, the rude MU used his share of the loot to buy two fancy daggers. He flashed them around everywhere. Made a real big deal out of them. I stole them both when he was drunk or asleep or something, and broke into the mayor's house, killed the mayor with them and  left them on the scene with a bunch of material spell components.
Magic User guy got fingered for the crime. He was completely in the dark. I buried the hatchet with him and told I'd use my vast fortune to help him out- which I did by hiring the worst lawyer in town to defend him.
At this point, one of the other players finally clued into the fact that I was raw fucking evil. We had a confrontation. I was totally ready to kill him, but all he wanted was to be my henchman.
 It went on like that for a while, with the trial taking center stage. Eventually the other player characters finally got hep. They moved in on me- but they thought my henchmen was on their side and they ended up walking into trap. That was pretty much the end of the game. I had everyone's money and My henchman and I were the only ones left alive. I bought a sailboat and we fled the city.
I think my favorite moment was when the magic user finally realized what I was up to but somehow thought he would turn it around, not knowing that I was already prepared for his retaliation.

Quote from: Ian Absentia;267954I've never wanted to play a callously evil, randomly violent deviant -- that's not really evil, it's just sociopathic.

Good point but I have to say, it depends on how the player handles this type of character. One 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....

Regards,
David R

...just now checking back in on the thread...my day was kind of busy...

If the game had Shades of Gray I would have liked it better .

 One of the few campaigns I've ever been in where two of the players almost came to violently arguing about stuff - and I had to ride home with one of them.  There were too many players as well. Got to be annoyingly chaotic at times.  Only two players in that bunch that I stayed friends with were the friends that originally invited me to play with that group . They were later in my GURPS: TRAVELLER campaign. (a married couple)


- Ed C.

Quote from: Koltar;268036If the game had Shades of Gray I would have liked it better .

Rather than Good vs. Evil, try gaming with "socially acceptable" vs. "socially unacceptable."



I've gotten a lot of positive feedback for essentially playing subversives, visionary madmen, war criminals, etc.

They all did "bad" things, but they all had reasons they believed in.

Also, watch Vincent Price movies.  Vincent Price played a lot of great characters.  They usually weren't good, and they were almost uniformly socially unacceptable, but they made great stories.

Vincent Price said, about his characters, in a quote I can't find a source for, "I don't play monsters. I play men besieged by fate and out for revenge."

That is exactly how to have fun playing evil.  Do not play a monster.  Play a man with reason and feelings and uncertainties, who has been besieged by fate and who does not care who has to die or feel pain -- including himself -- so that he can see justice according to his standards.

Okay - yeah but Vincent Price in regular life was a pretty nice guy. He liked his fans and would sign autographs & everything.


Thats one autograph I wish I could find around here.....

- Ed C.

Are sure you're talking about evil, and not, just over the top goofiness? There is nothing particualry evil about your example. It just sounds like a too big group and character with silly name.

Quote from: Koltar;268056Okay - yeah but Vincent Price in regular life was a pretty nice guy. He liked his fans and would sign autographs & everything.


Thats one autograph I wish I could find around here.....

- Ed C.

That's why they call it acting...and role-playing.

Okay then - they were playing "Evil" but for me it was obnoxious and boring...and frustrating.


I prefer to play Good guys.


- Ed C.

Quote from: Koltar;268056Okay - yeah but Vincent Price in regular life was a pretty nice guy. He liked his fans and would sign autographs & everything.


Thats one autograph I wish I could find around here.....

- Ed C.

I do recommend being likeable in real life.  Also, if possible, try to avoid getting besieged by fate in real life.  (However, if fate decides to besiege you, I don't think you can do anything but what you're fated to do...)

But when you play a game (especially a game with any kind of violence, such as GURPS, D&D, etc.) consider the joy of playing a non-monstrous man who does monstrous things.

Let me paint you a picture in 241 words.

   Alan is a 40-year-old meth chemist.  His tragic flaw is sloppiness.  He's sloppy enough to get caught by Bob the cop.

Bob's tragic flaw is sadistic bullying.  He's a great guy otherwise -- he's devoted to every factual detail of the law, he's self-sacrificing, he drives himself harder than his subordinates -- but when it comes to the value judgment that would guide his actions, he can't tell the difference between law enforcement and sadistic violence.

Bob catches Alan and beats him to death with a police baton.  Alan takes a long time to die in great agony and humiliation.  Bob would normally get in trouble, but he's married to the District Attorney, Darlene, whose tragic flaw is ambition.  She knows the killing is wrong, but she will cover it up to save her career.

Alan's 20-year-old son, Carl, is a great guy but his tragic flaw is that he's an anti-Hamlet -- he takes too much effective action too quickly.  Carl is a technology whiz. He had just installed a security camera on the morning of the day Bob killed Alan, so Carl gets to watch every minute of his father's death in grainy black-and-white with tinny audio.  Then Carl looks up Bob's badge number on a cracked police database, finds his house, and ambushes Bob just as Bob is returning home to his loving wife, Darlene.

Carl cripples Bob;  then  Bob must watch Carl kill Darlene slowly and painfully.


None of these people are cartoon-evil villain-monsters.  All of these people do monstrous things (even Alan, the meth chemist whose products might injure his customers).

Carl is the main tragic hero of this piece (although it could be argued that all four characters are tragic heroes).  Carl is besieged by fate and his life is going to be monstrous.  But Carl is not a monster -- he's an essentially average man, fated to be in a situation whose trials he could not withstand.  

I've never played a guy exactly like Carl in a role-playing game, but RPG player-characters get into situations like Carl rather frequently.  (Part of the problem is that lots of the kewl powerz in RPGs revolve around ultra-violence.)  I've definitely been in a lot of game situations where my player character was just as socially unacceptable as Carl.

I'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.

Hear, hear.

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.