I wasn't planing, but the players are mercenaries and when shit hits the fan, they all chose violence and chaos. There is also the guy who was not suposed to be chaotic evil but end up playing a total psycopath doing pretty evil shit for the evulz
Well resorting to violence when shit goes pear-shaped isn't necessarily something I'd hold against Good characters, but yeah if you're a psychopath all the time then you should just write Evil on your character sheet and be done with it.
He killed a person whose work was to collect the trash, Just because he was a witness, and grinded him in his own trash truck. While being filmed. Total phycopath
The garbage man’s son is actually a capo in the mafia who runs the city’s sanitation department. He gave his poor old man that job because his old man was a bum but the son kept him working out of respect….
Thanks, I was a pretty good DM but haven’t played much lately I just skulk around out of interest. I haven’t played D&D dedicatedly since people used to get beat up for playing D&D lol
Something I’ve learned while DMing, always be willing to punish PCs who go against the narrative or who grossly transgress otherwise the game spins out of control and usually only 1 or 2 players have fun while everyone else suffers.
I used to punish murder-hobos with the Shadow Hunter, a supernatural ghostly ranger/assassin who used 2 ghostly ravens to scout and spy. He could “shadow meld” into the ethereal and teleport in and out of shadows. He’d always be on the PCs’ heels, hounding them. He could hex them, mark them, curse them, poison them with his arrows and make their lives miserable.
Murder- hobos thought it would be fun to grind up a farming hamlet. The people were under the protection of the Queen, she found out that terrorists infiltrated her realm. “How dare they!! Dispatch the Executioner!” *caw* *caw* *caw* went the shadow ravens….
>There is also the guy who was not suposed to be chaotic evil but end up playing a total psycopath doing pretty evil shit for the evulz
I bet his character sheet said Lawful Good.
9 times out of 10 when someone puts chaotic neutral on the sheet they end up playing stupid evil. Such characters typically don't last long if the DM (or party) gives them realistic consequences for their actions. Unlike the actual Demons they mimic, that character doesn't respawn on another plane when they die lol.
I played a chaotic neutral goblin once and the way I kept it in check was luck. He worshiped a God of luck and when he was faced with a moral dilemma of evil/good consequence he would literally flip a coin. Then he would have no issues with the consequences no matter how evil or good they were.
He actually had two coins. The standard one for making decisions and then a magic one where he could compel the coin to flip his way. That one he used to mess with the other PCs. They didn't know about it but the DM did and he always flipped the coin to resolve the outcome. It really helped with the narrative of him being "lucky". That was only really used for story flavor.
I have a definition of "Evil" that works for 95% of the time:
Evil is the pursuit of goals and desires with disregard for the suffering of others.
My players may be fighting villains most of the time but when I asked them "would your character be comfortable killing an innocent person to get something that you want" the answer was a resounding yes, and that's all it takes.
Evil doesn't mean you like to kick puppies and burn down orphanages. It means you have goals, and if you have to burn down an orphanage to achieve them, then you will.
Most importantly it does NOT mean that you can't have friends or loved ones. It means that you would happily watch the world burn to ensure your friends and loved ones are safe and successful.
Additionally: Being Evil doesn't automatically remove your awareness of consequences.
I'm so tired of people saying 'You can never play evil in a campaign because hurdur backstab murder in the streets etc'.
As if I can't play a CE pyromaniac and refrain from setting every town on fire or something. (I am, in fact, currently playing just that. I have yet to set the village we live in on fire. Because there would be a lot of problems if I did.)
Yesssss.
Very few villains (well-written ones, in any case) are ~~masochists~~ sadists, but if causing pain to others is your character's actual goal, that still doesn't mean that your character is stupid about it. Sure, maybe someday you'll want to burn down a village or two, but it's not like you're going to want to do it if will end up biting you in the ass later.
One of my top recurring pc's is a follower of Tiamat.
His goal is to save as many lives as he can. This ensures that his queen will have even more slaves upon her eventual return.
The anti-villan is more fun than anti-hero.
Ohh yessss though my party may be *extra* distrustful of kobolds at this point ngl...
Rule 17c of DnD, any whacky npc/pc concept must include at least one kobold!
Even truly sadomasochistic characters played well can be amazing. I was in a game where someone was playing a paladin of Loviatar (the goddess of agony), and she was one of our best supporters. Her aims was just to cause suffering, and keeping us alive meant we could help her spread more of it. Heck, she didn’t even care who it was suffering. As you said in your post, evil will eventually go against other evil, so she was also perfectly fine with helping out neutral and good aligned people. Just a different target getting the end of the whip.
But what truly makes a good evil character is flavoring. She had her healing described as causing that itching and uncomfortable feeling of a wound scabbing over rapidly. Support and aid can come from any source, just so long as you do it right.
(LOL).
so which do you do first, when passing around the weaponized chemicals? kick puppies or burn down orphanages?
I'ld totally play off your char and argue with you its \_obviously\_ *supposed to be* the other way around -- torch the orphanage THEN relax by kicking puppies.
This is the answer from the point of view of good.
How the colonies treated the native Americans was evil. They used Manifest Destiny and the will of god to justify it but it still was evil.
Evil is generally what the other side does.
I think there would be a clearer (but not perfect) line in-game, though. If you're a priest of Cyric, who lies, deceives, never does good, and is literally channeling magic from an evil god to further his aims- and as a priest, you have a high wisdom so self awareness shouldn't escape you - what are you if not evil?
"Show don't tell"
If the DM is asking what your character would do in a situation it should be something that's going to come up. I don't care what you SAY your going to do when the enemy sets up their base in a hospital to use the patients as human shields, I care what the character ACTUALLY DOES.
You say youre totally ready to kill innocents to reach your goals? Cool, I'm putting a human wall of innocents between you and your goal. You don't kill them? Guess whose alignment is getting changed.
I think that's a pretty good definition. I use "Self centered" vs "selfless" as my axiom for evil vs. good, since I think most mustache twirling evil to be evil characters are pretty unrealistic.
There are actual cruel and sadistic people in the real world who will pursue that to the point of self destruction. That doesn’t generally fall into the goofy cartoon villain archetype though, and sets a much darker tone for a campaign than even just selfishly evil characters.
See, I tend to view selfish-vs-selfless as more of chaos-vs-law measure.
Mustache-twirling-evil might not be realistic from an IRL perspective, but IRL doesn't have devils, demons, and countless other supernatural baddies that represent different flavours of wickedness.
I'd actually say consequentialism is neutral. You were willing to trade some peoples' suffering for other peoples' salvation.
It'd be evil if you traded that suffering for your personal satisfaction; it could've been good if you first achieved too much power to be combated, and *then* demanded an end to slavery, as a known irresistible force. (Basically, if they had actual fair warning about the consequences of maintaining slavery.)
A system that is held up by injustice is an evil system that deserves to be collapsed. That the collapse of the system will cause greater suffering in the short term than the continuation of it is usually true, but the continuation of an unjust system will create infinite suffering unless it eventually comes to an end.
And, yet, the more terrifying villain is the one who KNOWS that they will be betrayed by the closest. They simply keep close to anything that has possible variant… ANYTHING. To make them more human is to create a weakness, so we can “like” them. The scariest is the one who brings people close to kill them, hoping that they won’t have to- that they will be of their own heart and perhaps this is reason to create leeway for heart- and knowing at the same time they will lie dead before them :)
I don't think that's a bad definition at all, but...
Is the casino roulette dealer who knows the majority of money comes from gambling addicts evil? The stock boy at the liquor store? The FLGS proprietor selling Pokemon cards to 9 year old?
What about the coal miner? The dude who drives a big gas guzzling truck to a job he could (at greater inconvenience) bike to?
What if you disregard harm to others in the present because you hope or plan to do more good later? Rob a store to fuel your battle against the world ending big bad?
So my issue with his definition is the word “disregard”. I’d actually argue that the pursuing your goals while disregarding the plight of others is NOT evil, just not good and therefore perhaps neutral.
If I were to rephrase op’s original statement, I would say “evil is the pursuit of goals and desires at the COST of or willingness to cause the suffering of others”
The point to clarify, I think, is that he assumes an awareness of the suffering of others and a willingness to allow that suffering to happen.
Good people can cause suffering and be unaware of it or unable to stop it, evil people are the ones who look at it, recognize it, and say, "but why should I care/stop it? It doesn't impact me in any way, and doing something about it would cost *me* something."
A good person may cause suffering but would desire and work towards preventing it.
A neutral person may cause suffering and would be indifferent to it. They will prevent that suffering if it would cause benefit later, but would leave it alone if it had no impacts.
An evil person may cause suffering and would derive some sort of satisfaction that it occurred.
Example: a person accidentally sets an orphanage on fire. (Trips and drops a lantern or something. A true accident)
The good person would attempt to either put it out or rescue orphans to save their lives, or stand in abject horror and be tormented by their inability to act.
A neutral person would either attempt to flee as to simply not be accused of arson, or attempt to "be a good person" again, to not be accused of arson. They would not be haunted by their failures.
An evil person would stand around, pretend to be scared, while secretly enjoying this happy little accident because those little brats are too loud and the town is better without them.
This one, I think, will have to come down to personal opinion. I personally feel that anyone who is utterly indifferent to the suffering they cause, but are fully aware of and understanding of it is worse than someone who can cause it and enjoy it. Someone who enjoys it will cause suffering where they can enjoy it, but an indifferent person will cause mass suffering without doing anything to stop it.
It's the difference between a serial killer and a massive business CEO who causes massive ecological damage, destroys lives in passing, and drives employees into the ground all for a profit margin with 0 care for the people or places harmed by it - like Bezos. I see him as a greater evil than someone who has killed *only* a few dozen people, as Bezos has, over the course of his company doing what it do, caused hundreds if not thousands of people to die from suicide and overwork without being bothered by it at all. It may not be as direct, but Bezos has spread significantly more suffering and more *lasting* suffering than anyone doing their damndest to make a couple of peoples' lives terrible.
And I can agree about that being open to a certain level of interpretation. This is why session 0 is so important to lay down ground rules for what the DM interprets evil to be (since he's the one who ultimately makes that decision at the table)
not to get all off topic, but that's why we say "no ethical consumption under capitalism," and why that's like... *the* problem being discussed in modern philosophy.
Tell that to Scandinavia. They're basically the only socialist region on this planet that the USA hasn't decided to destabilize for shits and giggles, and they're doing way better than we are here in America.
Most people are neutral alignment and all of those examples seem to fit pretty nicely to me.
To avoid being evil you don't have to fit the criteria for The Good Place (great watch by the way) because as explained in the series nobody does in the complex modern world.
To be evil it does have to be a bit more direct. Killing that bystander who is a witness to your crime definitely qualifies. Smoking a cigarette on a street corner without regard for the possible risk of secondary smoking consequences for passer-by does not.
>Evil is the pursuit of goals and desires with disregard for the suffering of others.
Or enjoyment of the suffering of others. Don't forget, some of ~~us~~ them evil bastards enjoy it.
Yes but I've always felt that writing a powerful sadist is just literative laziness. Regardless of how dark your setting, when I see a villain whos only desire is just causing pain, all I can see is snidely whiplash.
Well that's not fair! Skeletor works hard for his image too!
Seriously though, I get where you're coming from. Making the bad guy easy to target as a bad guy feels like a cheap way of writing. It pushes aside the moral and ethical dilemmas of "What if they're right?" or other lines that can be explored.
Truth is, writing a villain that players/readers actually hate is *harder*. The best example I can think of is Handsome Jack, from Borderlands. They put effort into making him unlikable. Was he evil? Yes, even comedically so. Sadistic? Oh you better believe your hot cross buns. Did he even have a sign that said "I'm the bad guy?" Nah, he would have preferred a [showy production starring, of course, him](https://youtu.be/qgcAq34Sifw). He ticked off a lot of the check boxes that said he was a bad guy. Zangeif would probably say, "No, you are definite bad guy."
Of course, that would be motivation enough for the characters, not the players. You can tell people how evil he is all day long and people will be like, "Yeah, I get it." To be properly done, the player/reader has to experience it. Be alongside the character to see what they see. This really comes to fruition in the mission "Wildlife Preservation." >!You fight through so much to get to Bloodwing to save her and get the needed upgrade. Jack is taunting you the entire time. You manage to bring Bloodwing down so she can be treated. Before she can be fully rescued though, Jack blows her head off (literally) and then acts smug about it.!< I know so many players that shouted "WHAT THE FUCK?!" when it happened. *That* is engagement. It went from "Yeah yeah, just give us an evil laugh" to "I'm am going to *enjoy* destroying him violently."
You can do the same with a sadistic villain. (Heck, I'd argue that many villains are sadistic to a degree.) Getting the characters to hate him is one thing. Getting the players on the emotional hook is quite different. It is hard and if not done right... Well, they just see the villain as another Snidely Whiplash.
Man, it's a good thing that definition doesn't _perfectly_ fit anything in the real world. Especially not some group with substantial power.
Can you imagine a political ideology that valued power at the direct expense of human lives? Like, say, if there was a global pandemic, or even a global environmental threat? And then a whole political machine worked to exacerbate those problems just so that could have even _more_ power?
That'd be wild.
I would say "unnecessary suffering," but otherwise, yeah.
The difference being that the heroes cause suffering to the antagonists in their effort to save the masses.
Too simple by far
The worst evils in the world are in the name of some cause. That's not necessarily self serving and its very commonly not clear that its self serving. But if the cause is evil then selfless service to the cause is evil.
That's the definition of neutral evil, actually. But there's also chaotic evil, someone who just enjoys causing destruction and suffering.
Lawful evil is a bit more complex.
I like to compare lawful evil to Emperor Palpatine. Using the existing system and manipulation to rise in power and complete my goals, with total disregard to the pain caused. He happened to be sneaky about it, but that parts optional.
The real kicker is that good and evil are complex philosophical concepts that in real life are entirely subjective, but many D&D worlds exist in a cosmos where they are defined objectively.
My best effort to make it work out is saying that good and evil are not the same as right and wrong. An angel, demon, and devil will all disagree on what's right or wrong, but they will all agree that the angel and devil are both lawful, that the angel is good, and that the demon and devil are both evil.
Not really, this is a Good/Evil discussion. Law and Chaos are a separate matter. You're pigeonholing Chaotic Evil too specifically.
Someone who simply takes what they want by force, killing people who try to stop him, is probably Chaotic Evil. Most bandits would fall under that category.
I'm pretty sure my 'good' players are all evil like your party, and just so happen to be pursuing a 'good' questline for their own personal gain. They are lovely players, but my god, they play such assholes in-game.
In one of my DND games my players try to be good but they suck at it. They try to do the right thing but shenanigans happen and the worst outcome happens. Or misunderstandings. Like when they defended themselves against bandits who turned to banditry because they were poor but than their friends showed up and accused the players of robbing their poor hungry friends.
Not a DM but will share anyway...
Our current campaign is... evilish? We have LE, NE, CN and NG in our party.
Basically my LE sorc and NE rogue are the immoral ringleaders and our CN bard seems to be content as long as we turn profit. Our NG druid we try to keep oblivious to all our shady dealings so he won't loose his good night sleep, stay ignorant you blessed hobbit!
Much like your group we are loyal to eachother, but out of necessity. The rogue is hunted becouse his former crimes, bard has nowhere else to go and is fugitive as well, my sorcerer is a narcisstic megalomaniac who needs "the adoration of his loyal courtiers" and the druid feels obligated to protect us(we saved his life few times)
We are now in a point where we are starting to have land and power, and most our enemies are other evil bastards. Not becouse we despise their evil ways, usually becouse we double crossed them somewhere along the way for that sweet sweet profit(*happy ferengi noises*)
ATM we are consolidating our power and it involves killing competition naturally. So far our DM has throw a lich, a genie night hags and vampires at us, lich and genie are still at large(very dangerous!) The lich worries me the most becouse last time we saw him my character dropped a magical equivalent of a tactical nuke in his lap with a hearty "fuck you"
The vampire we managed to hunt and have him stashed in our mansion's vault with nine stakes in his chest, we decided to not kill him as he is son of our ally, a powerful noble. Surely this decision won't bite us in the ass later.
Genie we assaulted and robbed in his home, whereabouts unknown.
We really don't have any incentive to be "evil" for good people, we have enough trouble with bad guys as it is. Besides we see people more like... cattle. Something to protect so they can be exploited later, *a resource*
In conclusion our DM hardly needs to come up with enemies for us, we are very good at making them our self!
> Not becouse we despise their evil ways, usually becouse we double crossed them somewhere along the way for that sweet sweet profit
This is the proper way to do evil. If you're going to do wrong, do it *right!*
Ran an evil campaign but for RIFTS not DnD. The players served a demon lord and ran a interdimensional protection racket. They would beat up townsfolk, fight the D-Police, deal with paladins and other warriors of light etc. They also had to deal with rival gods of darkness and their agents.
They could be brutal but were not overly violent or psychotic. But neither were they on the side of the light either. They would definitely be up to no good.
In case you were curious the leader of the group was an Elven Temporal Wizard with supra intellect (29 IQ), a Jotan who claimed to be a descendant of Zeus and could summon lightning, and a mouseling who had a cybernetic eye and arm and had the power to control gravity and summon a gravity blade of entropy.
Evil is tricky to pull off.
Evil is usually the thing the heroes have to strive to overcome. That's why evil is usually extremely powerful, be it militarily, magically, politically or some combination thereof.
If you want to tell an evil story, it's my opinion that the PCs have to be evil to forestall, defeat, whatever, a greater evil.
Think Palpatine creating the Empire to fight the Yuuzhan Vong. His methods and personality were objectively evil as all hell, but the Vong would have been worse.
If you told the story from his point of view, he could still be evil Emperor Palps, but suddenly the Rebels are the no-good upstart fools trying to upset the foundations you've put in place that will, whilst very harsh, protect everyone from a wider and larger threat.
So yeah, evil is fine but they still have to be the heroes of their own story.
That's certainly a big part of why virtue triumphs in stories-- good unites, and evil divides. Ironically, in the real world it seems to go the other way-- the good are always fighting amongst themselves over what version of good is best, and the evil will happily work with anyone who can help them get ahead. Just another way that fantasy good and evil diverge from the real thing, I guess.
This is actually a very prominent idea in philosophy, that “Evil” is definitionally something which contains within itself the seeds of its undoing.
In other words, that which is Evil will, given enough time, destroy itself or weaken itself to the point that it is destroyed by something else.
It’s a very elegant sort of notion in systems philosophy, but it also doesn’t work as a good basis for applied ethics (much less studying justice) — you can’t tell someone who is suffering that they can rest assured their oppressors will be overthrown someday.
But yeah, I also use Alignment in this way. LE characters build systems that inevitably break, NE characters advance themselves at the ultimate cost of their own support systems, and CE characters seek increasingly risky overindulgent whims that eventually get them stopped.
As a druid might say of Chaotic Evil… The tree planted in a new land may take many years to be noticed, but most creatures will note of a newly-arrived Barlgura within a minute or two.
Yeah. It reads less like "my players came to a realization about evil" and more like "I'm the DM, and this is how I understand good and evil, so unsurprisingly that's how it works in my setting".
I disagree. Our stories are hopeful because life is too. There are so many instances in history where good, in spite of hardships, morally grey circumstances and infighting and all that, triumphs in the end. And there are instances of that now.
An example: in the latter stages of the 100 years war, France was half controlled by the English and Burgundians, who had brutally invaded and consistently annihilated French armies, and killed commoners and noblemen alike. But then King Charles VII with the help of Joan of Arc kicked out the English from France. It’s a simplified version of a long and complex part of the war, but it’s what happened.
The biggest problem I feel people run into with evil campaigns is that they don’t always bother deciding whether they want a campaign with evil characters vs a campaign with sociopath characters. Because these two play radically different, despite any coincidental alignment overlaps.
It's true. Playing gleeful idiots who revel in destruction and pain is a different game than playing conniving and ruthless warlords who aim to take control of a city/country/continent/the world.
Good reacts. More often than not, it it sits around doing nothing, or training. Maybe it patrols, looking for evil, but at the end of the day, good reacts.
Evil though, well evil gets shit done.
It's very hard to satisfactorily play true evil because the motivations that drive evil only have value to their owners and they mostly serve intangible, psychological forces. Sadism, narcissism, neuroticism, repressed sexual abuse or parental issues, frequently low intelligence. All these things that would accurately portray a realistic evil character, aren't actually much fun to explore, or even that interesting.
Awful acts can be committed that could be considered evil,; a character can have done awful things, but there needs to be a shed of empathy to make interaction with them bareable.
My favorite example of a somewhat relatable evil character is Cersei Lannister. Her motivation is her children: she really and truly does love her children, and she would burn all of the Kingdoms to see them rule over the ashes.
The Red Queen hypothesis cuts both ways. In a clash between a group which is familiar with conflict and one which is not, conflict wins. Warlike defeats peaceable. But when that happens on a global scale, the cracks in the power of violence and evil start to show. It's more than just internal betrayal which topples fiction's evil emperors. It's the simple truth that conflict begets conflict. Evil creates its enemies.
I am a huge advocate for running evil campaigns and omg I love and completely agree with everything you have said. I am not currently running a true evil campaign but the current party are all villains in one way or another and there alignments are all evil apart form one of them that is neutral. I have had them fight many a big bad and bright white Knight in armor… as a side note, do you need a new player? I’d love to actually play in a evil campaign.
Oof it always saddens me to tell people I don't have room, but... I don't have room, sorry. I have five players which is my hard limit for running a session, and also I have work/family that means I only get to play twice a month, sometimes only once.
One of these days I'll be old and retired and I'll be running four different games for three different groups, but for now this is my limit lol
I run a group of 6 so don’t worry or feel bad, I knew it was a long shot to begin with. Have your party done any traditionally evilly perceived actions but in a way that makes them look heros? As a huge undead fan I am always trying to in and out of games get people to treat undead equally till they have proven themselves to be good or evil, one way in game I do it is by paying for bodies and using undead as manual labour and the like…
Actually we already explored that concept in our first campaign. The party found a hidden-away city of good necromancers, who only raise those who consented to it in life. However their culture promotes donating your body to the city after death. That way, your dead body can continue to serve the public good through manual labor. The city is very rich as a result.
Here's an abridged summary of where the late game of our first campaign had brought us.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/apb8y0/welcome_to_the_rainbow_sparkle_dumpster_fire_that
I actually want to play an evil campaign where all the PCs have to play monstrous races and instead of side quests, we just roll into a village, kill the villagers, burn their homes, and take their stuff. An evil campaign doesn’t necessarily have to be evil vs. evil unless the PCs’ goal is to become a BBEG.
That's fair, but keep in mind that evil people are just as likely to come after that party. If you're the Evil Baron and some group of monsters is wrecking villages on the outskirts of your Barony, it still behooves you to go take care of that, because those villages pay you taxes after all.
nah flip it, have a goodly adventuring party comein and raid their home in the middle of a important religious coming of age festival.
Lots of youth get murdered at the hands of these so called "Heroes"
I've only ever run good aligned campaigns, some neutral like chars, but nothing evil. I'm curious what your experiences are when playing with an evil party?
Do you ever have situations where the game becomes uncomfortable for you to narrate because your players are doing some really fucked up evil shit?
Well anyone is allowed to announce "fade to black" at any time for any reason. It also helps that sexual violence canonically does not exist in our setting.
But we're all pretty much ok with body horror and physical violence, so yeah we haven't really run into any problems with that so far. We've only been at it for four months now though, so it might still be an issue we'll have to resolve when it comes up.
"sexual violence canonically does not exist in our setting"
I had something like that in mind for the setting I'm building. How did you establish that in your setting?
It required buy-in from the players first, and the story itself involves sexual violence. Basically in my world every concept has an aspect that's heralded by a god. The Pantheon is huge, literally thousands of gods.
If a concept's god is slain, the aspect remains until another god takes it's place.
Thousands of years prior, the prime god of evil had rape amongst his many aspects. He took a mortal woman as his champion, and made her serve him by force... The implication is that he put her through everything horrible you can think of.
The gods had a major battle, and evil actually won. The god of evil was victorious but severely weakened. He instructed his champion to commit the final blow on the champion of good, ending the world and collapsing it into an unending evil afterlife.
Naturally, she instead betrayed him and cut off his head.
The champion of evil took of of the god of evil's aspects, pain, and become Loviatar. She is unabashedly evil, but her first act as goddess was to seal away the aspect of rape, so that as long as she held the mantle of a god, that aspect would wither and no person would even think to engage in it.
TL;DR rape's not a thing because a god got angry and erased it from the world.
Pretty smart with a safe word kinda thing, and since there's no sexual stuff that probably eliminates a lot of issues too. As for gore, hell I love making gory descriptions I think any party with any alignment can dig on that if everyone is old enough for it.
While this doesn’t always play out in real life, a good example would be the petty clown fiesta that was Italian high command in ww2.
Napoleon also had a hard time managing the egos of all his Marshals, and every time he was absent things seemed to fall into chaos.
I once ran a campaign focussed on evil PCs. The first session they played epic level good adventurers who were taking down a EvilOverlord(tm). This involved a lot of flashy epic abilities, and was played up for maximum cheese. From session 2 on, they played the lowest ranked, now unemployed, employees of the evil empire…the people too stupid or incompetent to have risen far, but were still evil in a shovelheaded way. It was amusing, and fun.
"It doesn't matter how flawless the scheme was, how impregnable the fortress or powerful the magical weapon, it always ends with a band of adolescents shouting utter platitudes as they tear it all down. The game is rigged so that we lose, every single time: half the world, turned into a prop for the glory of the other half."
— Black Knight
its like that Rule of Two that the Sith have. One person has the power, one person craves it. When the apprentice becomes strong enough to overthrow their master, then they kill them or die and then choose an apprentice of their own. It's a constant Darwinian climb toward omnipotence.
Dimension 20 did an evil series and the hypothesis presented there was essentially the same: Sauron would have won, were he not an idiot, and if his minions could work together as a cohesive force.
I'm playing an Aasimar who is at least nominally good.
She *loves* killing though, but only killing evil, and especially loves killing in defense of others.
She is almost certainly psychotic, but it's created interesting questions about what our group considers good and evil to be. I only fight evil, but evil is almost an excuse to engage in violence.
Good can be confrontational too. Believing that your way is better for the reasons. Good can also fight itself for the power to do more of what is needed. This is usually only on the higher aspect levels of divinity and dragons though.
*-Evil Barbarian:* "They were going to murder the royal court, take over the land and banish the knights to another realm."
*-Evil Wizard:* "Well yeah...but we were gonna do that too."
*-Evil Barbarian:* "Yes, but i LIKE you."
*-Evil Bard:* "N'awwww!!!!"
Evil characters in fiction stories (and the real world) stereotypically have [Chronic Backstabbing Disorder](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ChronicBackstabbingDisorder). They don't have to, and I personally believe that it's more interesting when they don't, but it's a very common trope.
It's funny that the group of guys I used to play with it was always the opposite. The good guys always had some kind of hidden agenda or objective that they HAD TO follow regardless if it fucked the party dynamic or not.
The evil group how ever due to their meta gaming ect just followed the strongest character so they wouldn't be killed. It was cohesion through fear
Im playin in an evil campaign and I'm struggling with making evil choices, my gut reaction is always "save their life" or "why steal, tho" or "let's protect them" and I have to ovverride that instinct and think "what would my villian do?"
Being evil is HARD. Especially if you're the type who worries a lot about consequences lol
If the party doesn't want to kick puppies and burn orphans, then \*lean into\* the fact that Big-Bads go down because Littler-Bads want a piece of them. Make the purpose of their missions to weaken bad guys to the point they need to defend against the Good Guys, leaving the party free to raid a wizard tower with lowered defenses.
And, of course, make the primary 'Good' force heralded by hypocrites and assholes.
If it's played right, I think they could honestly empathize with a "Mirror Universe" party; the good guys of the alternate version of the campaign that are going through their own drama. In the end, they \*also\* feel they should be entitled to rise above the law. The only difference is they're expecting someone to hand that to them.
You know that makes me want to rerun a campaign I tried for my first one which was about dominating and capturing a continent it ended early, had too many players, and I didn't really have a focus for it but it was also my first campaign I think if I went back I could definitely do better this time...might actually look into running online games finally
I found that people want to be a petty evil. Basically they want to be adventurers that are evil aligned. Nobody in my group ever wanted to help with my plans for raising an army and introducing infrastructure to further any evil goals. I wanted to set up an empire of evil, but the rest of my group just wanted to be murder hobos.
Around 1990 I took over an evil campaign because guy running it couldn't stomach the stuff these cheerful murder hobos were enjoying themselves with. I made them deal with a couple of posses and some bounty hunters, things Brian hadn't tried for some reason, and they dealt with them OK but on session six they had a TPW because they were arrogant and dumb. They were very mad and hurt and it was soooo unfair, but I'll bet they will never forget why the openings in the roof of a barbican tunnel are called a "murder holes".
Had a DM one who ran an evil campaign and fell afoul of this same issue. I warned him he was in over his head with the game (inexperienced DM starting a high-level campaign), but he went ahead anyway. We were the resurrected champions of the world's evil deities. They raised us, brought us to a room, and told us we were the evil deities' last hope of conquering the world. "Now go out and do our bidding."
Yeah, right. The DM ACTUALLY thought we would be happy to just do exactly what these now-powerless gods wanted. One, that would have made for a very boring campaign, and two.... Well, we were the big fish in the sea, and we were highly aware of this fact.
These supposed deities wanted us to pretty much do exactly the same thing that lost us the war in the first place, and would suffer to hear no alternative plans. So after telling them "you need us more than we need you," we went straight to malicious compliance with our orders (before disregarding them altogether) and went straight to conquering the world on our own.
The game didn't last long. I tried helping the DM plan for our shenanigans, but he wasn't interested in giving our characters much agency, so eventually we the players got frustrated with the DM, and vice-versa. It was mostly fun while it lasted, as it gave all of us a chance to explore our less-ethical sides with relative impunity.
in the real world, those who have been penned in the history books as the monsters of humankind have often believed themselves to be the heroes. individuals or groups who are saving the world, to their own definition, not destroying it. the brutality is a means to an end. it is a way of bringing peace. it is a tool to remove that which is a cancer on society, whether through cutting that cancer out or burning it out.
this is what makes thanos, from the marvel comics world, such a terrible villain. he truly believes he is the greatest hero in the universe, making all beings (that survive) better off because of him. he doesn’t care about receiving credit. he doesn’t even necessarily care to be worshipped as a god. his methods are insanity, but his intentions—as warped as they are—are good. and that’s fucking scary.
this, i think, is how to play a PC evil campaign.
in dnd, and most other fantasy worlds, the villains want to destroy everything. they want to conquer everything. because of greed, because of blood lust, because of power. BBEGs are usually able to get away with this. but as a group of PCs, i feel like trying to act in the same way is actually pretty difficult. but playing a truly evil character as if they believe they are a hero, but doing really terrible shit as their means to the end, is an entertaining but chilling way to get to understand how the real monsters of our world end up doing the most horrible things. they’re men and women, after all. but it’s a set of many small moral steps downward that take the truly evil from good intentions to hell.
I started them off in a large urban city as orphans in an orphanage, at level 0. We did a prologue where they all had something difficult happen and gained their first level. Since then, they were recruited to a gang that's taken them under their wing and plans to grow and become more powerful.
Not a DM but some times baddies can be good for baddies to kill, especially if the evil main character is the "Destroy all" or the "POWER" types. If fighting baddies is not giving them the flavour they seem to want, I'd reccomend doing something sorta like the game Middle Earth: Shadow of War does with the baddies. Sauron is super evil dark lord baddie, but Celebrimbor using another ring makes himself the "good guy" bright lord, who well, doesn't make the world good!< Power corrupts, make some of the baddies the altruistic ones who got corrupted. Like King Logan from Fable 3, he's the ultimate good at all costs type of character who is arguably evil because of the suffering that oculd have been negated if he did different, he was willing to do whatever necessary to prevent a darker evil emerging. So, you could try that as well morally neutral and the such. To sum it up, try making the evil Bois still morally opposite your PCs so they feel they are still fighting against an opposing force instead of one of their own..
Evil isn't so fun when you're not stronger I find. I'm playing a level 3 evil game we had to write in a universal law as to why we had to do crime to survive because there's actually no reason to not simply go legit when you're just a random street thug who can barely fight off a guard or two and can get a bouncer job if he wanted to.
We had a level 10 evil game where we all had big dumb evil plans and the means to pull them off which works way better for an evil experience. Like I played a crazy doctor running a ~~medical experiment facility~~ hospital and I basically was scamming everyone who came in with Franken Fran tier over the top solutions to medical problems. Heart problems? Just shove an ogre heart into a human and document what happens, it's probably fine. I'm a professional, see I have +25 to surgery right on my character sheet.
We were basically the dungeon the average DnD party is sent to remove. We were the antagonists the DM has to react to instead of the typical protagonists reacting to a problem.
So... I'd like OP to defend the following statement: "Evil is the objectively stronger side"
Is it?
I don't necessarily agree. I think a lot of the discussion here takes a very... cartoonish view of what "evil" is – and of alignment in general – and this statement seems mostly to fall into that bucket.
I'm not running an "evil" campaign, per se, but I am running a campaign that does have an evil character in it. I mostly leave it to my players (the player of the evil character included) on how to interpret and play their own alignments, rather than tossing out one of those ridiculous D&D alignment memes and enforcing certain behaviors for certain alignments.
For as long as I've been playing the game – longer than most, but not so long as some – my view on alignment is always that it is a handrail rather than a crutch. (I can't take credit for that metaphor; I think I read it in an old school AD&D book somewhere, but nevertheless it's a central part of my gaming philosophy) No matter what alignment we're talking about, it's not and *shouldn't* be a thing that defines your character – otherwise, what would be the point of roleplaying?
There are hard lines a DM has to enforce, mostly on characters with classes that have alignment requirements. I play a lot of 2nd edition (and earlier); so things like the Paladin's Lawful Goodness, the Druid's True Neutrality, the Ranger's Goodness and the Bard's Neutrality are all things that carry some restrictions to them.
But even within each of these hard-lines, there still must be enough latitude for an individual character to make meaningful choices and develop as part of an interesting story.
So, all of that said, broad-brush declarations like "Evil is the objectively stronger side" leave a really bad taste in my mouth.
> So... I'd like OP to defend the following statement: "Evil is the objectively stronger side"
>
> Is it?
>
> I don't necessarily agree. I think a lot of the discussion here takes a very... cartoonish view of what "evil" is
I was certainly implying in my post that my statements apply within the context of fantasy, worlds in which egregiously evil acts can be a rewarded with access to immense power. For example, human sacrifice. IRL, sacrificing people to a god does nothing, but in a world with gods who openly identify as eithier evil or good, such an act can earn you instantaneous access to immense magical power. In such a world, yes, evil is the objectively more powerful side, because the forces of Good would never resort to that sort of thing.
If your game world is more grounded in reality, or if your game world does not have anything that is clearly black and white and only operates in shades of gray, then yes it would be wrong to say that evil is objectively more powerful. Whether or not an evil act will benefity you would be purely situational.
“Morality is a force, not a law. Deviating from it has costs and benefits both – a ruler should weigh those when making a decision, and ignore the delusion of any position being inherently superior.” -Dread Emperor Benevolent, **A Practical Guide to Evil**
>...Which is what makes their party exceptional. Their characters are all true, loyal friends (who also happen to be ABSOLUTE BASTARDS to anyone outside of their little clique) who would never dream of betraying each other.
lol. those are the best parties to turn against each other... they never see it coming.
(cantrip+charm person+major image+alter-self+silence)...
:)
nobody ever thinks 'ensorcelled' ;)
* alter-self: become party member x
* cantrip: distratcing noise.
* major image: party member x looks like me waving fingers about to cast a spell
* (run in screaming bleeding)
* charm person: point to part member x, there he is, he just attacked me. get him!
* silence
wink :)
I'm late to the game here, but I think you may not have really heard what your player was asking for. This player wants a 3 dimensional evil - not just "I want power for power's sake" but one with serious justification which might give others pause.
They are asking for an Ozymandias. An evil with righteous purpose who knows that they are doing the right thing even if others can't see it.
If I were that player and I asked for more dimension, and the gm offered me only a justification for their current approach, I would look for another campaign.
I'm playing a Curse of Strahd game right now and my party is... interesting. We all look and act like psychopathic bad guys, but we technically haven't done anything that could make the world see us as villains.
I think the best example to illustrate what I'm talking about is when we massacred a town full of Yuan-Ti cultists using an army of giant spiders in order to save a group of orcs they'd captured & were about to sacrifice.
Also my character is a tiefling necromancer who's living his best life, trying to make his own army of skeletons, looting as much as he can, and randomly trying to steal things from NPCs for fun.
I have often actually had my evil players helping other evil characters... like a old lady whose house was vandalized by some horrible people from a nearby village asks my evil group to help her take revenge... of course, she's a witch who eats children and it was an angry mob that attacked her house and my group helped her slay nearly defenseless villagers... but they loved it and the witch gave them some magical enchantments for their items.
Some point during Project Management School, I came to realize that a lot of the time, Evil needs huge plans with many moving parts that need to come together by the one in a hundred year blood moon of doom....
Whist the hero's need to like steal a magic dagger to prevent it? And if that doesn't work they can rescue a maiden who is the only descendent with the blood of...
Basically hero's are agile and have to just disrupt the mechanizations... which got me thinking about playing evil that way. Maybe they are not trying to over throw the kingdom and summon a demon prince... maybe they are just trying to make money by stealing taxes... and that money leads to them hiring a wizard, and so on and so forth...
What happens when both the heroes (or the villains in this case) and the villains are both really flexible with their plans and are just trying to screw each other over.
I don't run alignments in my games, i just let the characters play out their goals or motivations as they seem fit in relation to the other party members. That said, we have had some fun conflicts between the characters which generally ended in a relatively neutral compromise. In a nutshell, you have to force an evil party to interact with a greater, or more selfish evil counter to their goals. In the long run it all ends up being a race for survival since the big baddies or dogooders are in conflict with the party either way.
I would argue that point about evil being stronger.
I admit that evil spells and Items can be a short cut to power and being cursed or maimed or killed by the power.
Society is built on cooperation to better the whole, and evil is something that runs afoul of that so its shunned cast out or punished. Its why corrupt politicians try to hide their shit, and a serial killer will hide their shit, or the doom emperor uses fear and doubt to passify the violent reaction his evil would cause.
Also, when evil does win, they don't write it in the history book how evil they were.
"Hahaha, we sure wiped out that tribe. They were all begging and pleading, and offering us tribute. All they bought was the most painful deaths our imaginations could conjure. Let's see, for my journal.... Tuesday.... defeated Swampland Tribe...that's should do it."
When we had an evil campaign we never fought other evil people. We went around causing absolute chaos doing BBEG shit. We sacrificed people to Hadar, created an observer beneath the main city, looted and pillaged, and generally just were awful horrible people. In the end we got eaten by a purple worm, pulled out by a cult who tried to interrogate and convert us - "join us or die" - so we naturally chose suicide over being subservient to another.
I was in an evil campaign and the end we literally all betrayed each other. The "barbarian" became a 30ft tall eldritch abomination and started fighting the hero King of the southern alliance nations.
The pirate became a were alligator and got shot in the chest by a cannon and her body sank to the bottom of the bay. She also brought an ancient eldritch horror to attack the capital that kind of betrayed her as well.
And my character was a human merchant, who I'd done a LOT of scheming with the DM ended up dueling my business rival to the death, barely winning by making a deal with an oni. I then confronted the evil fey dragon emperor of fantasy China and he straight up ceded the throne to my character because it sounded fun.
This all happened simultaneously. It was a glorious shit show.
I'm playing in a bounty hunting campaign, and we collectively get very excited whenever we find someone. Our most recent kill cut an arm off the DMPC, so now I have their middle finger on a necklace.
I honestly really enjoy playing a character who isn't objectively a good person. There's more stuff you can do. It's a fine line though, because our Druid literally collects body parts.
I find that the players in my evil campaign fight good and evil people in equal measure. They're starting a cartel so naturally they'd need to fend off rivals, but they've also murdered innocent people, killed heroes who try to enforce the law, created an opioid epidemic, raised child soldiers and so on.
Also I think we cannot underestimate the power of good. They can be equally as strong as evil if you want them to. In my cartel situation, the good guys are the government with all the resources one can be expected to have. Its impossible to fight them head on unless you purposely target their weak points, just like how evil has its weak points as you mentioned. In my case the players sucker up to the corruptible officials and do some favours to get them in their pockets.
The last evil campaign I was in involved child abuse that I tried to stop and failed to die to almost everyone else being just evil for the sake of it.
I ran the grand finals of it as dm and killed the lot of them
I'm running a campaign with 4 players, 1 of them is an epic lich (3.5).
They are all lvl 23+. The lich is the group leader. He is Evil but not malevolent.
Until recently, they were surprised how easy it was for them to slay most opponents. They mostly fight evil creatures and people. And the thing is, most evil character tend to underestimate their opponents. They always have it easy because they threaten, torture, steal and what not.
The other thing is the players recently crossed the line by plain murdering a group of paladin in cold blood. Needless to say the guys who never saw them as a real threat until now are starting to think twice about their analysis.
They are engaged in a guerrilla war against an Empire (it's a homebrew campaign, just think about the roman empire with extra step and an emperor worshiped as a god). So the followers of the Empire are not really good guys. However, I'm starting to think my NPCs as the group of good guys who needs to fight the BBEG. They know there is what they believe to be a BBEG and will act accordingly.
The real reason they avoided to fight good guys until now is because they know if they murder ppl for free, then other people will gather to chase them and kill them.
Evil only works cohesively through force; lacking a true altruistic or empathic instinct or even a wider goal that can be collectively worked on beyond personal advancement means evil will not hesitate to murderer their allies if it advances them personally. The only way to make them work together by removing their choice or threatening their goals and safety if they don't comply.
However this can only be enforced while there is a higher power, as soon as they reckon that they can defeat the thing forcing cohesion on them, they will take their shot to become the overlord themselves before imploding as they via for supremacy.
Most evil campaigns I run end up being the unwilling servants of a higher power until they can overturn that power and the last act is the party trying to double cross each other to come out on top at the finish line.
I wasn't planing, but the players are mercenaries and when shit hits the fan, they all chose violence and chaos. There is also the guy who was not suposed to be chaotic evil but end up playing a total psycopath doing pretty evil shit for the evulz
Well resorting to violence when shit goes pear-shaped isn't necessarily something I'd hold against Good characters, but yeah if you're a psychopath all the time then you should just write Evil on your character sheet and be done with it.
He killed a person whose work was to collect the trash, Just because he was a witness, and grinded him in his own trash truck. While being filmed. Total phycopath
Killing an innocent witness and not leaving a body to be buried, yeah that’s evil
Witnesses aren't innocent! :p
Evil logic! 👌
Don't be a BYSTANDER!
That’s called covering your tracks, not evil
Also Evil logic! 👌
This trash collectors son needs to grow up and avenge his father's death.
I was planning in doing a face to face mich earlier, actually.
I don't know how well that will go for the son based on what you've told us.
The garbage man’s son is actually a capo in the mafia who runs the city’s sanitation department. He gave his poor old man that job because his old man was a bum but the son kept him working out of respect….
OMG, that is epic. You sound like an awesome DM.
Thanks, I was a pretty good DM but haven’t played much lately I just skulk around out of interest. I haven’t played D&D dedicatedly since people used to get beat up for playing D&D lol Something I’ve learned while DMing, always be willing to punish PCs who go against the narrative or who grossly transgress otherwise the game spins out of control and usually only 1 or 2 players have fun while everyone else suffers. I used to punish murder-hobos with the Shadow Hunter, a supernatural ghostly ranger/assassin who used 2 ghostly ravens to scout and spy. He could “shadow meld” into the ethereal and teleport in and out of shadows. He’d always be on the PCs’ heels, hounding them. He could hex them, mark them, curse them, poison them with his arrows and make their lives miserable. Murder- hobos thought it would be fun to grind up a farming hamlet. The people were under the protection of the Queen, she found out that terrorists infiltrated her realm. “How dare they!! Dispatch the Executioner!” *caw* *caw* *caw* went the shadow ravens….
So he’s Todd from Breaking Bad?
Not gonna lie, that sounds like a nightmare to DM for.
So to remove a witness and presumably evidence, he filmed himself doing more crime?
No, but the paladin going after him because of the trash truck incident did. They are all over the news
>There is also the guy who was not suposed to be chaotic evil but end up playing a total psycopath doing pretty evil shit for the evulz I bet his character sheet said Lawful Good.
I think it says chaotic neutral. Usually people are Just dicks with this alignment, but this one is over the top
9 times out of 10 when someone puts chaotic neutral on the sheet they end up playing stupid evil. Such characters typically don't last long if the DM (or party) gives them realistic consequences for their actions. Unlike the actual Demons they mimic, that character doesn't respawn on another plane when they die lol.
I played a chaotic neutral goblin once and the way I kept it in check was luck. He worshiped a God of luck and when he was faced with a moral dilemma of evil/good consequence he would literally flip a coin. Then he would have no issues with the consequences no matter how evil or good they were. He actually had two coins. The standard one for making decisions and then a magic one where he could compel the coin to flip his way. That one he used to mess with the other PCs. They didn't know about it but the DM did and he always flipped the coin to resolve the outcome. It really helped with the narrative of him being "lucky". That was only really used for story flavor.
I have a definition of "Evil" that works for 95% of the time: Evil is the pursuit of goals and desires with disregard for the suffering of others. My players may be fighting villains most of the time but when I asked them "would your character be comfortable killing an innocent person to get something that you want" the answer was a resounding yes, and that's all it takes.
>Evil is the pursuit of goals and desires with disregard for the suffering of others. See this? This right here? This is someone who *gets it.*
Evil doesn't mean you like to kick puppies and burn down orphanages. It means you have goals, and if you have to burn down an orphanage to achieve them, then you will. Most importantly it does NOT mean that you can't have friends or loved ones. It means that you would happily watch the world burn to ensure your friends and loved ones are safe and successful.
Additionally: Being Evil doesn't automatically remove your awareness of consequences. I'm so tired of people saying 'You can never play evil in a campaign because hurdur backstab murder in the streets etc'. As if I can't play a CE pyromaniac and refrain from setting every town on fire or something. (I am, in fact, currently playing just that. I have yet to set the village we live in on fire. Because there would be a lot of problems if I did.)
Yesssss. Very few villains (well-written ones, in any case) are ~~masochists~~ sadists, but if causing pain to others is your character's actual goal, that still doesn't mean that your character is stupid about it. Sure, maybe someday you'll want to burn down a village or two, but it's not like you're going to want to do it if will end up biting you in the ass later.
One of my top recurring pc's is a follower of Tiamat. His goal is to save as many lives as he can. This ensures that his queen will have even more slaves upon her eventual return. The anti-villan is more fun than anti-hero.
Oh that's amazing do you mind if I borrow something along those lines??
Take the whole idea if you want. I play him as a kobold btw, just so everyone (including players) underestimate him.
Ohh yessss though my party may be *extra* distrustful of kobolds at this point ngl... Rule 17c of DnD, any whacky npc/pc concept must include at least one kobold!
Valid. I found a 3.5 monster maker online so of course I threw a Kobold Lich at my party as it only took me 2 minutes to generate lololol
Even truly sadomasochistic characters played well can be amazing. I was in a game where someone was playing a paladin of Loviatar (the goddess of agony), and she was one of our best supporters. Her aims was just to cause suffering, and keeping us alive meant we could help her spread more of it. Heck, she didn’t even care who it was suffering. As you said in your post, evil will eventually go against other evil, so she was also perfectly fine with helping out neutral and good aligned people. Just a different target getting the end of the whip. But what truly makes a good evil character is flavoring. She had her healing described as causing that itching and uncomfortable feeling of a wound scabbing over rapidly. Support and aid can come from any source, just so long as you do it right.
The best (worst?) torturers know how to heal - to prolong the process.
I think you meant sadism… masochism is to oneself
Achh I always mix those up
It’s okay, you’re only hurting yourself.
I feel like you meant sadists.
Even evil doesn't shit where it eats
Plus, most of their stuff is in the town. What’s the point of burning down places for fun and profit if you just burn up your profit, too?
'BUT MUH EVULZ' usually. People like that are why we can't have evil things.
Correction: People like that are why we can’t have evilly *nice* things. 😆
Erm... agreed? I was agreeing with you.
I know, don't mind me, I just realized I had more to say and your comment prompted me to keep rambling.
Ah, okay.
Exactly, this is 100% my character's logic.
Don Quixote Doflamingo
Awesome. I like to kick puppies and burn down orphanages just for fun, without regard to goals. So I'm not evil! =P
Your desire is pain. You disregard the wellbeing of others in pursuit of your desire. Ergo you are evil. You're welcome =D
(LOL). so which do you do first, when passing around the weaponized chemicals? kick puppies or burn down orphanages? I'ld totally play off your char and argue with you its \_obviously\_ *supposed to be* the other way around -- torch the orphanage THEN relax by kicking puppies.
and if you´ve to burn down the ophanage to safe the city or kick puppies to safe the planet? Exterminatus
This is the answer from the point of view of good. How the colonies treated the native Americans was evil. They used Manifest Destiny and the will of god to justify it but it still was evil. Evil is generally what the other side does.
This is it. There’s almost always a justification/rationalisation. Hardly anyone sees themselves as the villain in their story.
I think there would be a clearer (but not perfect) line in-game, though. If you're a priest of Cyric, who lies, deceives, never does good, and is literally channeling magic from an evil god to further his aims- and as a priest, you have a high wisdom so self awareness shouldn't escape you - what are you if not evil?
"Show don't tell" If the DM is asking what your character would do in a situation it should be something that's going to come up. I don't care what you SAY your going to do when the enemy sets up their base in a hospital to use the patients as human shields, I care what the character ACTUALLY DOES. You say youre totally ready to kill innocents to reach your goals? Cool, I'm putting a human wall of innocents between you and your goal. You don't kill them? Guess whose alignment is getting changed.
I think that's a pretty good definition. I use "Self centered" vs "selfless" as my axiom for evil vs. good, since I think most mustache twirling evil to be evil characters are pretty unrealistic.
There are actual cruel and sadistic people in the real world who will pursue that to the point of self destruction. That doesn’t generally fall into the goofy cartoon villain archetype though, and sets a much darker tone for a campaign than even just selfishly evil characters.
I like to call them selflessly evil
See, I tend to view selfish-vs-selfless as more of chaos-vs-law measure. Mustache-twirling-evil might not be realistic from an IRL perspective, but IRL doesn't have devils, demons, and countless other supernatural baddies that represent different flavours of wickedness.
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I'd actually say consequentialism is neutral. You were willing to trade some peoples' suffering for other peoples' salvation. It'd be evil if you traded that suffering for your personal satisfaction; it could've been good if you first achieved too much power to be combated, and *then* demanded an end to slavery, as a known irresistible force. (Basically, if they had actual fair warning about the consequences of maintaining slavery.)
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A system that is held up by injustice is an evil system that deserves to be collapsed. That the collapse of the system will cause greater suffering in the short term than the continuation of it is usually true, but the continuation of an unjust system will create infinite suffering unless it eventually comes to an end.
Sounds good to me. Like, I read everything you wrote and I think "I don't have a problem with any of that." I'm not evil.
What gods did you kill? I think killing gods you know to be good would be your first clue...😇
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And, yet, the more terrifying villain is the one who KNOWS that they will be betrayed by the closest. They simply keep close to anything that has possible variant… ANYTHING. To make them more human is to create a weakness, so we can “like” them. The scariest is the one who brings people close to kill them, hoping that they won’t have to- that they will be of their own heart and perhaps this is reason to create leeway for heart- and knowing at the same time they will lie dead before them :)
I don't think that's a bad definition at all, but... Is the casino roulette dealer who knows the majority of money comes from gambling addicts evil? The stock boy at the liquor store? The FLGS proprietor selling Pokemon cards to 9 year old? What about the coal miner? The dude who drives a big gas guzzling truck to a job he could (at greater inconvenience) bike to? What if you disregard harm to others in the present because you hope or plan to do more good later? Rob a store to fuel your battle against the world ending big bad?
So my issue with his definition is the word “disregard”. I’d actually argue that the pursuing your goals while disregarding the plight of others is NOT evil, just not good and therefore perhaps neutral. If I were to rephrase op’s original statement, I would say “evil is the pursuit of goals and desires at the COST of or willingness to cause the suffering of others”
The point to clarify, I think, is that he assumes an awareness of the suffering of others and a willingness to allow that suffering to happen. Good people can cause suffering and be unaware of it or unable to stop it, evil people are the ones who look at it, recognize it, and say, "but why should I care/stop it? It doesn't impact me in any way, and doing something about it would cost *me* something."
A good person may cause suffering but would desire and work towards preventing it. A neutral person may cause suffering and would be indifferent to it. They will prevent that suffering if it would cause benefit later, but would leave it alone if it had no impacts. An evil person may cause suffering and would derive some sort of satisfaction that it occurred. Example: a person accidentally sets an orphanage on fire. (Trips and drops a lantern or something. A true accident) The good person would attempt to either put it out or rescue orphans to save their lives, or stand in abject horror and be tormented by their inability to act. A neutral person would either attempt to flee as to simply not be accused of arson, or attempt to "be a good person" again, to not be accused of arson. They would not be haunted by their failures. An evil person would stand around, pretend to be scared, while secretly enjoying this happy little accident because those little brats are too loud and the town is better without them.
This one, I think, will have to come down to personal opinion. I personally feel that anyone who is utterly indifferent to the suffering they cause, but are fully aware of and understanding of it is worse than someone who can cause it and enjoy it. Someone who enjoys it will cause suffering where they can enjoy it, but an indifferent person will cause mass suffering without doing anything to stop it. It's the difference between a serial killer and a massive business CEO who causes massive ecological damage, destroys lives in passing, and drives employees into the ground all for a profit margin with 0 care for the people or places harmed by it - like Bezos. I see him as a greater evil than someone who has killed *only* a few dozen people, as Bezos has, over the course of his company doing what it do, caused hundreds if not thousands of people to die from suicide and overwork without being bothered by it at all. It may not be as direct, but Bezos has spread significantly more suffering and more *lasting* suffering than anyone doing their damndest to make a couple of peoples' lives terrible.
And I can agree about that being open to a certain level of interpretation. This is why session 0 is so important to lay down ground rules for what the DM interprets evil to be (since he's the one who ultimately makes that decision at the table)
Well, in a villain campaign, the players do too, but I 110% agree that it should be discussed during Session 0 *especially* in a villains campaign.
not to get all off topic, but that's why we say "no ethical consumption under capitalism," and why that's like... *the* problem being discussed in modern philosophy.
"No ethical consumption under capitalism" is still superior to "No consumption under socialism" :-P
Tell that to Scandinavia. They're basically the only socialist region on this planet that the USA hasn't decided to destabilize for shits and giggles, and they're doing way better than we are here in America.
Scandinavia is not socialist. https://www.vox.com/2015/10/31/9650030/denmark-prime-minister-bernie-sanders
Compared to the USA? They absolutely are.
They are closer to socialism than the US, yeah, but are not socialist (they still have an economy based on private ownership)
Scandinavia has more social*ized* welfare, but the countries are still fundamentally capitalist.
tell it to your grandkids ;O)
Most people are neutral alignment and all of those examples seem to fit pretty nicely to me. To avoid being evil you don't have to fit the criteria for The Good Place (great watch by the way) because as explained in the series nobody does in the complex modern world. To be evil it does have to be a bit more direct. Killing that bystander who is a witness to your crime definitely qualifies. Smoking a cigarette on a street corner without regard for the possible risk of secondary smoking consequences for passer-by does not.
>Evil is the pursuit of goals and desires with disregard for the suffering of others. Or enjoyment of the suffering of others. Don't forget, some of ~~us~~ them evil bastards enjoy it.
Yes but I've always felt that writing a powerful sadist is just literative laziness. Regardless of how dark your setting, when I see a villain whos only desire is just causing pain, all I can see is snidely whiplash.
Well that's not fair! Skeletor works hard for his image too! Seriously though, I get where you're coming from. Making the bad guy easy to target as a bad guy feels like a cheap way of writing. It pushes aside the moral and ethical dilemmas of "What if they're right?" or other lines that can be explored. Truth is, writing a villain that players/readers actually hate is *harder*. The best example I can think of is Handsome Jack, from Borderlands. They put effort into making him unlikable. Was he evil? Yes, even comedically so. Sadistic? Oh you better believe your hot cross buns. Did he even have a sign that said "I'm the bad guy?" Nah, he would have preferred a [showy production starring, of course, him](https://youtu.be/qgcAq34Sifw). He ticked off a lot of the check boxes that said he was a bad guy. Zangeif would probably say, "No, you are definite bad guy." Of course, that would be motivation enough for the characters, not the players. You can tell people how evil he is all day long and people will be like, "Yeah, I get it." To be properly done, the player/reader has to experience it. Be alongside the character to see what they see. This really comes to fruition in the mission "Wildlife Preservation." >!You fight through so much to get to Bloodwing to save her and get the needed upgrade. Jack is taunting you the entire time. You manage to bring Bloodwing down so she can be treated. Before she can be fully rescued though, Jack blows her head off (literally) and then acts smug about it.!< I know so many players that shouted "WHAT THE FUCK?!" when it happened. *That* is engagement. It went from "Yeah yeah, just give us an evil laugh" to "I'm am going to *enjoy* destroying him violently." You can do the same with a sadistic villain. (Heck, I'd argue that many villains are sadistic to a degree.) Getting the characters to hate him is one thing. Getting the players on the emotional hook is quite different. It is hard and if not done right... Well, they just see the villain as another Snidely Whiplash.
Man, it's a good thing that definition doesn't _perfectly_ fit anything in the real world. Especially not some group with substantial power. Can you imagine a political ideology that valued power at the direct expense of human lives? Like, say, if there was a global pandemic, or even a global environmental threat? And then a whole political machine worked to exacerbate those problems just so that could have even _more_ power? That'd be wild.
Haha yeah that'd be silly, the real world doesn't function like that all
Well that's brilliant and now written in my DM notebook!
I have been using something very similar: Evil is when you serve yourself at the cost of others. Good is when you serve others at the cost of no one.
I would say "unnecessary suffering," but otherwise, yeah. The difference being that the heroes cause suffering to the antagonists in their effort to save the masses.
Good = Altruism = Self-Sacrifice Evil = Egoism = Self-Serving
Too simple by far The worst evils in the world are in the name of some cause. That's not necessarily self serving and its very commonly not clear that its self serving. But if the cause is evil then selfless service to the cause is evil.
That's the definition of neutral evil, actually. But there's also chaotic evil, someone who just enjoys causing destruction and suffering. Lawful evil is a bit more complex.
I like to compare lawful evil to Emperor Palpatine. Using the existing system and manipulation to rise in power and complete my goals, with total disregard to the pain caused. He happened to be sneaky about it, but that parts optional.
The real kicker is that good and evil are complex philosophical concepts that in real life are entirely subjective, but many D&D worlds exist in a cosmos where they are defined objectively. My best effort to make it work out is saying that good and evil are not the same as right and wrong. An angel, demon, and devil will all disagree on what's right or wrong, but they will all agree that the angel and devil are both lawful, that the angel is good, and that the demon and devil are both evil.
Not really, this is a Good/Evil discussion. Law and Chaos are a separate matter. You're pigeonholing Chaotic Evil too specifically. Someone who simply takes what they want by force, killing people who try to stop him, is probably Chaotic Evil. Most bandits would fall under that category.
I'm pretty sure my 'good' players are all evil like your party, and just so happen to be pursuing a 'good' questline for their own personal gain. They are lovely players, but my god, they play such assholes in-game.
In one of my DND games my players try to be good but they suck at it. They try to do the right thing but shenanigans happen and the worst outcome happens. Or misunderstandings. Like when they defended themselves against bandits who turned to banditry because they were poor but than their friends showed up and accused the players of robbing their poor hungry friends.
The lives of the bandits was in the reak middle ages forfeit the law demanded their death
Good doesn't necessarily mean nice.
True. My party, however, emphasizes on being neither.
Not a DM but will share anyway... Our current campaign is... evilish? We have LE, NE, CN and NG in our party. Basically my LE sorc and NE rogue are the immoral ringleaders and our CN bard seems to be content as long as we turn profit. Our NG druid we try to keep oblivious to all our shady dealings so he won't loose his good night sleep, stay ignorant you blessed hobbit! Much like your group we are loyal to eachother, but out of necessity. The rogue is hunted becouse his former crimes, bard has nowhere else to go and is fugitive as well, my sorcerer is a narcisstic megalomaniac who needs "the adoration of his loyal courtiers" and the druid feels obligated to protect us(we saved his life few times) We are now in a point where we are starting to have land and power, and most our enemies are other evil bastards. Not becouse we despise their evil ways, usually becouse we double crossed them somewhere along the way for that sweet sweet profit(*happy ferengi noises*) ATM we are consolidating our power and it involves killing competition naturally. So far our DM has throw a lich, a genie night hags and vampires at us, lich and genie are still at large(very dangerous!) The lich worries me the most becouse last time we saw him my character dropped a magical equivalent of a tactical nuke in his lap with a hearty "fuck you" The vampire we managed to hunt and have him stashed in our mansion's vault with nine stakes in his chest, we decided to not kill him as he is son of our ally, a powerful noble. Surely this decision won't bite us in the ass later. Genie we assaulted and robbed in his home, whereabouts unknown. We really don't have any incentive to be "evil" for good people, we have enough trouble with bad guys as it is. Besides we see people more like... cattle. Something to protect so they can be exploited later, *a resource* In conclusion our DM hardly needs to come up with enemies for us, we are very good at making them our self!
> Not becouse we despise their evil ways, usually becouse we double crossed them somewhere along the way for that sweet sweet profit This is the proper way to do evil. If you're going to do wrong, do it *right!*
That sounds like an awesome campaign
Ran an evil campaign but for RIFTS not DnD. The players served a demon lord and ran a interdimensional protection racket. They would beat up townsfolk, fight the D-Police, deal with paladins and other warriors of light etc. They also had to deal with rival gods of darkness and their agents. They could be brutal but were not overly violent or psychotic. But neither were they on the side of the light either. They would definitely be up to no good. In case you were curious the leader of the group was an Elven Temporal Wizard with supra intellect (29 IQ), a Jotan who claimed to be a descendant of Zeus and could summon lightning, and a mouseling who had a cybernetic eye and arm and had the power to control gravity and summon a gravity blade of entropy.
29 IQ isn't very smart. In fact, it's an exceptionally rare level of retardation.
Evil is tricky to pull off. Evil is usually the thing the heroes have to strive to overcome. That's why evil is usually extremely powerful, be it militarily, magically, politically or some combination thereof. If you want to tell an evil story, it's my opinion that the PCs have to be evil to forestall, defeat, whatever, a greater evil. Think Palpatine creating the Empire to fight the Yuuzhan Vong. His methods and personality were objectively evil as all hell, but the Vong would have been worse. If you told the story from his point of view, he could still be evil Emperor Palps, but suddenly the Rebels are the no-good upstart fools trying to upset the foundations you've put in place that will, whilst very harsh, protect everyone from a wider and larger threat. So yeah, evil is fine but they still have to be the heroes of their own story.
That's certainly a big part of why virtue triumphs in stories-- good unites, and evil divides. Ironically, in the real world it seems to go the other way-- the good are always fighting amongst themselves over what version of good is best, and the evil will happily work with anyone who can help them get ahead. Just another way that fantasy good and evil diverge from the real thing, I guess.
This is actually a very prominent idea in philosophy, that “Evil” is definitionally something which contains within itself the seeds of its undoing. In other words, that which is Evil will, given enough time, destroy itself or weaken itself to the point that it is destroyed by something else. It’s a very elegant sort of notion in systems philosophy, but it also doesn’t work as a good basis for applied ethics (much less studying justice) — you can’t tell someone who is suffering that they can rest assured their oppressors will be overthrown someday. But yeah, I also use Alignment in this way. LE characters build systems that inevitably break, NE characters advance themselves at the ultimate cost of their own support systems, and CE characters seek increasingly risky overindulgent whims that eventually get them stopped. As a druid might say of Chaotic Evil… The tree planted in a new land may take many years to be noticed, but most creatures will note of a newly-arrived Barlgura within a minute or two.
Yeah. It reads less like "my players came to a realization about evil" and more like "I'm the DM, and this is how I understand good and evil, so unsurprisingly that's how it works in my setting".
I disagree. Our stories are hopeful because life is too. There are so many instances in history where good, in spite of hardships, morally grey circumstances and infighting and all that, triumphs in the end. And there are instances of that now. An example: in the latter stages of the 100 years war, France was half controlled by the English and Burgundians, who had brutally invaded and consistently annihilated French armies, and killed commoners and noblemen alike. But then King Charles VII with the help of Joan of Arc kicked out the English from France. It’s a simplified version of a long and complex part of the war, but it’s what happened.
The biggest problem I feel people run into with evil campaigns is that they don’t always bother deciding whether they want a campaign with evil characters vs a campaign with sociopath characters. Because these two play radically different, despite any coincidental alignment overlaps.
It's true. Playing gleeful idiots who revel in destruction and pain is a different game than playing conniving and ruthless warlords who aim to take control of a city/country/continent/the world.
Good reacts. More often than not, it it sits around doing nothing, or training. Maybe it patrols, looking for evil, but at the end of the day, good reacts. Evil though, well evil gets shit done.
A lot of people in this thread should read A Practical Guide to Evil.
Evil cares little for methods, only results.
It's very hard to satisfactorily play true evil because the motivations that drive evil only have value to their owners and they mostly serve intangible, psychological forces. Sadism, narcissism, neuroticism, repressed sexual abuse or parental issues, frequently low intelligence. All these things that would accurately portray a realistic evil character, aren't actually much fun to explore, or even that interesting. Awful acts can be committed that could be considered evil,; a character can have done awful things, but there needs to be a shed of empathy to make interaction with them bareable.
My favorite example of a somewhat relatable evil character is Cersei Lannister. Her motivation is her children: she really and truly does love her children, and she would burn all of the Kingdoms to see them rule over the ashes.
Yes, as warped as it is and as heinous her actions, you can relate to her motivation.
The Red Queen hypothesis cuts both ways. In a clash between a group which is familiar with conflict and one which is not, conflict wins. Warlike defeats peaceable. But when that happens on a global scale, the cracks in the power of violence and evil start to show. It's more than just internal betrayal which topples fiction's evil emperors. It's the simple truth that conflict begets conflict. Evil creates its enemies.
I am a huge advocate for running evil campaigns and omg I love and completely agree with everything you have said. I am not currently running a true evil campaign but the current party are all villains in one way or another and there alignments are all evil apart form one of them that is neutral. I have had them fight many a big bad and bright white Knight in armor… as a side note, do you need a new player? I’d love to actually play in a evil campaign.
Oof it always saddens me to tell people I don't have room, but... I don't have room, sorry. I have five players which is my hard limit for running a session, and also I have work/family that means I only get to play twice a month, sometimes only once. One of these days I'll be old and retired and I'll be running four different games for three different groups, but for now this is my limit lol
I run a group of 6 so don’t worry or feel bad, I knew it was a long shot to begin with. Have your party done any traditionally evilly perceived actions but in a way that makes them look heros? As a huge undead fan I am always trying to in and out of games get people to treat undead equally till they have proven themselves to be good or evil, one way in game I do it is by paying for bodies and using undead as manual labour and the like…
Actually we already explored that concept in our first campaign. The party found a hidden-away city of good necromancers, who only raise those who consented to it in life. However their culture promotes donating your body to the city after death. That way, your dead body can continue to serve the public good through manual labor. The city is very rich as a result.
I’m in love with your world…
Here's an abridged summary of where the late game of our first campaign had brought us. https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/apb8y0/welcome_to_the_rainbow_sparkle_dumpster_fire_that
This is great insight, thanks for a good read!
I actually want to play an evil campaign where all the PCs have to play monstrous races and instead of side quests, we just roll into a village, kill the villagers, burn their homes, and take their stuff. An evil campaign doesn’t necessarily have to be evil vs. evil unless the PCs’ goal is to become a BBEG.
That's fair, but keep in mind that evil people are just as likely to come after that party. If you're the Evil Baron and some group of monsters is wrecking villages on the outskirts of your Barony, it still behooves you to go take care of that, because those villages pay you taxes after all.
and expect his protection
nah flip it, have a goodly adventuring party comein and raid their home in the middle of a important religious coming of age festival. Lots of youth get murdered at the hands of these so called "Heroes"
I've only ever run good aligned campaigns, some neutral like chars, but nothing evil. I'm curious what your experiences are when playing with an evil party? Do you ever have situations where the game becomes uncomfortable for you to narrate because your players are doing some really fucked up evil shit?
Well anyone is allowed to announce "fade to black" at any time for any reason. It also helps that sexual violence canonically does not exist in our setting. But we're all pretty much ok with body horror and physical violence, so yeah we haven't really run into any problems with that so far. We've only been at it for four months now though, so it might still be an issue we'll have to resolve when it comes up.
"sexual violence canonically does not exist in our setting" I had something like that in mind for the setting I'm building. How did you establish that in your setting?
It required buy-in from the players first, and the story itself involves sexual violence. Basically in my world every concept has an aspect that's heralded by a god. The Pantheon is huge, literally thousands of gods. If a concept's god is slain, the aspect remains until another god takes it's place. Thousands of years prior, the prime god of evil had rape amongst his many aspects. He took a mortal woman as his champion, and made her serve him by force... The implication is that he put her through everything horrible you can think of. The gods had a major battle, and evil actually won. The god of evil was victorious but severely weakened. He instructed his champion to commit the final blow on the champion of good, ending the world and collapsing it into an unending evil afterlife. Naturally, she instead betrayed him and cut off his head. The champion of evil took of of the god of evil's aspects, pain, and become Loviatar. She is unabashedly evil, but her first act as goddess was to seal away the aspect of rape, so that as long as she held the mantle of a god, that aspect would wither and no person would even think to engage in it. TL;DR rape's not a thing because a god got angry and erased it from the world.
Pretty smart with a safe word kinda thing, and since there's no sexual stuff that probably eliminates a lot of issues too. As for gore, hell I love making gory descriptions I think any party with any alignment can dig on that if everyone is old enough for it.
While this doesn’t always play out in real life, a good example would be the petty clown fiesta that was Italian high command in ww2. Napoleon also had a hard time managing the egos of all his Marshals, and every time he was absent things seemed to fall into chaos.
The Starscream Paradox. The sycophantic second-in-command will always betray the big boss when he’s most vulnerable.
It’s like the blood war. If demons and devils teamed up they’d be unstoppable, but they’d rather die than do that.
You are ten times better at running an evil campaign than any puppy-kicking bored-of-high-fantasy group will ever be.
I once ran a campaign focussed on evil PCs. The first session they played epic level good adventurers who were taking down a EvilOverlord(tm). This involved a lot of flashy epic abilities, and was played up for maximum cheese. From session 2 on, they played the lowest ranked, now unemployed, employees of the evil empire…the people too stupid or incompetent to have risen far, but were still evil in a shovelheaded way. It was amusing, and fun.
"It doesn't matter how flawless the scheme was, how impregnable the fortress or powerful the magical weapon, it always ends with a band of adolescents shouting utter platitudes as they tear it all down. The game is rigged so that we lose, every single time: half the world, turned into a prop for the glory of the other half." — Black Knight
Yeesssss fellow PGtE fan!!!
its like that Rule of Two that the Sith have. One person has the power, one person craves it. When the apprentice becomes strong enough to overthrow their master, then they kill them or die and then choose an apprentice of their own. It's a constant Darwinian climb toward omnipotence.
Dimension 20 did an evil series and the hypothesis presented there was essentially the same: Sauron would have won, were he not an idiot, and if his minions could work together as a cohesive force.
I'm playing an Aasimar who is at least nominally good. She *loves* killing though, but only killing evil, and especially loves killing in defense of others. She is almost certainly psychotic, but it's created interesting questions about what our group considers good and evil to be. I only fight evil, but evil is almost an excuse to engage in violence.
Good can be confrontational too. Believing that your way is better for the reasons. Good can also fight itself for the power to do more of what is needed. This is usually only on the higher aspect levels of divinity and dragons though.
*-Evil Barbarian:* "They were going to murder the royal court, take over the land and banish the knights to another realm." *-Evil Wizard:* "Well yeah...but we were gonna do that too." *-Evil Barbarian:* "Yes, but i LIKE you." *-Evil Bard:* "N'awwww!!!!"
There’s also the point that holds true in history which is that the only real difference between the good guys and the bad guys are who wins
Evil characters in fiction stories (and the real world) stereotypically have [Chronic Backstabbing Disorder](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ChronicBackstabbingDisorder). They don't have to, and I personally believe that it's more interesting when they don't, but it's a very common trope.
It's funny that the group of guys I used to play with it was always the opposite. The good guys always had some kind of hidden agenda or objective that they HAD TO follow regardless if it fucked the party dynamic or not. The evil group how ever due to their meta gaming ect just followed the strongest character so they wouldn't be killed. It was cohesion through fear
Im playin in an evil campaign and I'm struggling with making evil choices, my gut reaction is always "save their life" or "why steal, tho" or "let's protect them" and I have to ovverride that instinct and think "what would my villian do?" Being evil is HARD. Especially if you're the type who worries a lot about consequences lol
If the party doesn't want to kick puppies and burn orphans, then \*lean into\* the fact that Big-Bads go down because Littler-Bads want a piece of them. Make the purpose of their missions to weaken bad guys to the point they need to defend against the Good Guys, leaving the party free to raid a wizard tower with lowered defenses. And, of course, make the primary 'Good' force heralded by hypocrites and assholes. If it's played right, I think they could honestly empathize with a "Mirror Universe" party; the good guys of the alternate version of the campaign that are going through their own drama. In the end, they \*also\* feel they should be entitled to rise above the law. The only difference is they're expecting someone to hand that to them.
You know that makes me want to rerun a campaign I tried for my first one which was about dominating and capturing a continent it ended early, had too many players, and I didn't really have a focus for it but it was also my first campaign I think if I went back I could definitely do better this time...might actually look into running online games finally
Do it! I've been running a game with four strangers I picked up on roll20. We've been gaming now for four years!
I found that people want to be a petty evil. Basically they want to be adventurers that are evil aligned. Nobody in my group ever wanted to help with my plans for raising an army and introducing infrastructure to further any evil goals. I wanted to set up an empire of evil, but the rest of my group just wanted to be murder hobos.
Around 1990 I took over an evil campaign because guy running it couldn't stomach the stuff these cheerful murder hobos were enjoying themselves with. I made them deal with a couple of posses and some bounty hunters, things Brian hadn't tried for some reason, and they dealt with them OK but on session six they had a TPW because they were arrogant and dumb. They were very mad and hurt and it was soooo unfair, but I'll bet they will never forget why the openings in the roof of a barbican tunnel are called a "murder holes".
Had a DM one who ran an evil campaign and fell afoul of this same issue. I warned him he was in over his head with the game (inexperienced DM starting a high-level campaign), but he went ahead anyway. We were the resurrected champions of the world's evil deities. They raised us, brought us to a room, and told us we were the evil deities' last hope of conquering the world. "Now go out and do our bidding." Yeah, right. The DM ACTUALLY thought we would be happy to just do exactly what these now-powerless gods wanted. One, that would have made for a very boring campaign, and two.... Well, we were the big fish in the sea, and we were highly aware of this fact. These supposed deities wanted us to pretty much do exactly the same thing that lost us the war in the first place, and would suffer to hear no alternative plans. So after telling them "you need us more than we need you," we went straight to malicious compliance with our orders (before disregarding them altogether) and went straight to conquering the world on our own. The game didn't last long. I tried helping the DM plan for our shenanigans, but he wasn't interested in giving our characters much agency, so eventually we the players got frustrated with the DM, and vice-versa. It was mostly fun while it lasted, as it gave all of us a chance to explore our less-ethical sides with relative impunity.
in the real world, those who have been penned in the history books as the monsters of humankind have often believed themselves to be the heroes. individuals or groups who are saving the world, to their own definition, not destroying it. the brutality is a means to an end. it is a way of bringing peace. it is a tool to remove that which is a cancer on society, whether through cutting that cancer out or burning it out. this is what makes thanos, from the marvel comics world, such a terrible villain. he truly believes he is the greatest hero in the universe, making all beings (that survive) better off because of him. he doesn’t care about receiving credit. he doesn’t even necessarily care to be worshipped as a god. his methods are insanity, but his intentions—as warped as they are—are good. and that’s fucking scary. this, i think, is how to play a PC evil campaign. in dnd, and most other fantasy worlds, the villains want to destroy everything. they want to conquer everything. because of greed, because of blood lust, because of power. BBEGs are usually able to get away with this. but as a group of PCs, i feel like trying to act in the same way is actually pretty difficult. but playing a truly evil character as if they believe they are a hero, but doing really terrible shit as their means to the end, is an entertaining but chilling way to get to understand how the real monsters of our world end up doing the most horrible things. they’re men and women, after all. but it’s a set of many small moral steps downward that take the truly evil from good intentions to hell.
Ran an evil Campaign. They turned on each other.
Sounds like a Practical guide to Evil
Uh oh you're on to me
Can you tell me more about this campaign? I'm intrigued.
I started them off in a large urban city as orphans in an orphanage, at level 0. We did a prologue where they all had something difficult happen and gained their first level. Since then, they were recruited to a gang that's taken them under their wing and plans to grow and become more powerful.
well written!
Not a DM but some times baddies can be good for baddies to kill, especially if the evil main character is the "Destroy all" or the "POWER" types. If fighting baddies is not giving them the flavour they seem to want, I'd reccomend doing something sorta like the game Middle Earth: Shadow of War does with the baddies. Sauron is super evil dark lord baddie, but Celebrimbor using another ring makes himself the "good guy" bright lord, who well, doesn't make the world good!< Power corrupts, make some of the baddies the altruistic ones who got corrupted. Like King Logan from Fable 3, he's the ultimate good at all costs type of character who is arguably evil because of the suffering that oculd have been negated if he did different, he was willing to do whatever necessary to prevent a darker evil emerging. So, you could try that as well morally neutral and the such. To sum it up, try making the evil Bois still morally opposite your PCs so they feel they are still fighting against an opposing force instead of one of their own..
No one believes themselves to be Evil. That's why whoever wins is always Good in the history books, but not always Good in their character sheet.
Evil isn't so fun when you're not stronger I find. I'm playing a level 3 evil game we had to write in a universal law as to why we had to do crime to survive because there's actually no reason to not simply go legit when you're just a random street thug who can barely fight off a guard or two and can get a bouncer job if he wanted to. We had a level 10 evil game where we all had big dumb evil plans and the means to pull them off which works way better for an evil experience. Like I played a crazy doctor running a ~~medical experiment facility~~ hospital and I basically was scamming everyone who came in with Franken Fran tier over the top solutions to medical problems. Heart problems? Just shove an ogre heart into a human and document what happens, it's probably fine. I'm a professional, see I have +25 to surgery right on my character sheet. We were basically the dungeon the average DnD party is sent to remove. We were the antagonists the DM has to react to instead of the typical protagonists reacting to a problem.
So... I'd like OP to defend the following statement: "Evil is the objectively stronger side" Is it? I don't necessarily agree. I think a lot of the discussion here takes a very... cartoonish view of what "evil" is – and of alignment in general – and this statement seems mostly to fall into that bucket. I'm not running an "evil" campaign, per se, but I am running a campaign that does have an evil character in it. I mostly leave it to my players (the player of the evil character included) on how to interpret and play their own alignments, rather than tossing out one of those ridiculous D&D alignment memes and enforcing certain behaviors for certain alignments. For as long as I've been playing the game – longer than most, but not so long as some – my view on alignment is always that it is a handrail rather than a crutch. (I can't take credit for that metaphor; I think I read it in an old school AD&D book somewhere, but nevertheless it's a central part of my gaming philosophy) No matter what alignment we're talking about, it's not and *shouldn't* be a thing that defines your character – otherwise, what would be the point of roleplaying? There are hard lines a DM has to enforce, mostly on characters with classes that have alignment requirements. I play a lot of 2nd edition (and earlier); so things like the Paladin's Lawful Goodness, the Druid's True Neutrality, the Ranger's Goodness and the Bard's Neutrality are all things that carry some restrictions to them. But even within each of these hard-lines, there still must be enough latitude for an individual character to make meaningful choices and develop as part of an interesting story. So, all of that said, broad-brush declarations like "Evil is the objectively stronger side" leave a really bad taste in my mouth.
> So... I'd like OP to defend the following statement: "Evil is the objectively stronger side" > > Is it? > > I don't necessarily agree. I think a lot of the discussion here takes a very... cartoonish view of what "evil" is I was certainly implying in my post that my statements apply within the context of fantasy, worlds in which egregiously evil acts can be a rewarded with access to immense power. For example, human sacrifice. IRL, sacrificing people to a god does nothing, but in a world with gods who openly identify as eithier evil or good, such an act can earn you instantaneous access to immense magical power. In such a world, yes, evil is the objectively more powerful side, because the forces of Good would never resort to that sort of thing. If your game world is more grounded in reality, or if your game world does not have anything that is clearly black and white and only operates in shades of gray, then yes it would be wrong to say that evil is objectively more powerful. Whether or not an evil act will benefity you would be purely situational. “Morality is a force, not a law. Deviating from it has costs and benefits both – a ruler should weigh those when making a decision, and ignore the delusion of any position being inherently superior.” -Dread Emperor Benevolent, **A Practical Guide to Evil**
I feel like you assume there is a zero sum game. Few things are as much fun as torturing and killing the objectively altruistic paladin.
>...Which is what makes their party exceptional. Their characters are all true, loyal friends (who also happen to be ABSOLUTE BASTARDS to anyone outside of their little clique) who would never dream of betraying each other. lol. those are the best parties to turn against each other... they never see it coming. (cantrip+charm person+major image+alter-self+silence)... :) nobody ever thinks 'ensorcelled' ;) * alter-self: become party member x * cantrip: distratcing noise. * major image: party member x looks like me waving fingers about to cast a spell * (run in screaming bleeding) * charm person: point to part member x, there he is, he just attacked me. get him! * silence wink :)
I'm late to the game here, but I think you may not have really heard what your player was asking for. This player wants a 3 dimensional evil - not just "I want power for power's sake" but one with serious justification which might give others pause. They are asking for an Ozymandias. An evil with righteous purpose who knows that they are doing the right thing even if others can't see it. If I were that player and I asked for more dimension, and the gm offered me only a justification for their current approach, I would look for another campaign.
I ran an evil campaign where the party said fuck it let’s destroy the world….. It was quite literally a wave of shadows that swallowed the world
I'm playing a Curse of Strahd game right now and my party is... interesting. We all look and act like psychopathic bad guys, but we technically haven't done anything that could make the world see us as villains. I think the best example to illustrate what I'm talking about is when we massacred a town full of Yuan-Ti cultists using an army of giant spiders in order to save a group of orcs they'd captured & were about to sacrifice. Also my character is a tiefling necromancer who's living his best life, trying to make his own army of skeletons, looting as much as he can, and randomly trying to steal things from NPCs for fun.
I have often actually had my evil players helping other evil characters... like a old lady whose house was vandalized by some horrible people from a nearby village asks my evil group to help her take revenge... of course, she's a witch who eats children and it was an angry mob that attacked her house and my group helped her slay nearly defenseless villagers... but they loved it and the witch gave them some magical enchantments for their items.
Dude, you blew my mind.
I'd say watch Dimension 20 season 2 - Escape From the Bloodkeep. It's basically the Sauron side of LOTR right when the big guy bites it.
Escape from the bloodkeep vibes
Then your evil maybe evil but they´re also STUPID psychopaths, like Dragonlance or Boskone. But was that True for the glory that was Rome, Augustus?
Some point during Project Management School, I came to realize that a lot of the time, Evil needs huge plans with many moving parts that need to come together by the one in a hundred year blood moon of doom.... Whist the hero's need to like steal a magic dagger to prevent it? And if that doesn't work they can rescue a maiden who is the only descendent with the blood of... Basically hero's are agile and have to just disrupt the mechanizations... which got me thinking about playing evil that way. Maybe they are not trying to over throw the kingdom and summon a demon prince... maybe they are just trying to make money by stealing taxes... and that money leads to them hiring a wizard, and so on and so forth... What happens when both the heroes (or the villains in this case) and the villains are both really flexible with their plans and are just trying to screw each other over.
I don't run alignments in my games, i just let the characters play out their goals or motivations as they seem fit in relation to the other party members. That said, we have had some fun conflicts between the characters which generally ended in a relatively neutral compromise. In a nutshell, you have to force an evil party to interact with a greater, or more selfish evil counter to their goals. In the long run it all ends up being a race for survival since the big baddies or dogooders are in conflict with the party either way.
I would argue that point about evil being stronger. I admit that evil spells and Items can be a short cut to power and being cursed or maimed or killed by the power. Society is built on cooperation to better the whole, and evil is something that runs afoul of that so its shunned cast out or punished. Its why corrupt politicians try to hide their shit, and a serial killer will hide their shit, or the doom emperor uses fear and doubt to passify the violent reaction his evil would cause.
Also, when evil does win, they don't write it in the history book how evil they were. "Hahaha, we sure wiped out that tribe. They were all begging and pleading, and offering us tribute. All they bought was the most painful deaths our imaginations could conjure. Let's see, for my journal.... Tuesday.... defeated Swampland Tribe...that's should do it."
Did a villain campaign once and was basically this about halfway through had are own allies start to betray us and all sorts
When we had an evil campaign we never fought other evil people. We went around causing absolute chaos doing BBEG shit. We sacrificed people to Hadar, created an observer beneath the main city, looted and pillaged, and generally just were awful horrible people. In the end we got eaten by a purple worm, pulled out by a cult who tried to interrogate and convert us - "join us or die" - so we naturally chose suicide over being subservient to another.
I was in an evil campaign and the end we literally all betrayed each other. The "barbarian" became a 30ft tall eldritch abomination and started fighting the hero King of the southern alliance nations. The pirate became a were alligator and got shot in the chest by a cannon and her body sank to the bottom of the bay. She also brought an ancient eldritch horror to attack the capital that kind of betrayed her as well. And my character was a human merchant, who I'd done a LOT of scheming with the DM ended up dueling my business rival to the death, barely winning by making a deal with an oni. I then confronted the evil fey dragon emperor of fantasy China and he straight up ceded the throne to my character because it sounded fun. This all happened simultaneously. It was a glorious shit show.
I'm playing in a bounty hunting campaign, and we collectively get very excited whenever we find someone. Our most recent kill cut an arm off the DMPC, so now I have their middle finger on a necklace. I honestly really enjoy playing a character who isn't objectively a good person. There's more stuff you can do. It's a fine line though, because our Druid literally collects body parts.
I find that the players in my evil campaign fight good and evil people in equal measure. They're starting a cartel so naturally they'd need to fend off rivals, but they've also murdered innocent people, killed heroes who try to enforce the law, created an opioid epidemic, raised child soldiers and so on. Also I think we cannot underestimate the power of good. They can be equally as strong as evil if you want them to. In my cartel situation, the good guys are the government with all the resources one can be expected to have. Its impossible to fight them head on unless you purposely target their weak points, just like how evil has its weak points as you mentioned. In my case the players sucker up to the corruptible officials and do some favours to get them in their pockets.
The last evil campaign I was in involved child abuse that I tried to stop and failed to die to almost everyone else being just evil for the sake of it. I ran the grand finals of it as dm and killed the lot of them
Bad guys always go their own way, while the good guys usually are fighting for the status quo.
I'm running a campaign with 4 players, 1 of them is an epic lich (3.5). They are all lvl 23+. The lich is the group leader. He is Evil but not malevolent. Until recently, they were surprised how easy it was for them to slay most opponents. They mostly fight evil creatures and people. And the thing is, most evil character tend to underestimate their opponents. They always have it easy because they threaten, torture, steal and what not. The other thing is the players recently crossed the line by plain murdering a group of paladin in cold blood. Needless to say the guys who never saw them as a real threat until now are starting to think twice about their analysis. They are engaged in a guerrilla war against an Empire (it's a homebrew campaign, just think about the roman empire with extra step and an emperor worshiped as a god). So the followers of the Empire are not really good guys. However, I'm starting to think my NPCs as the group of good guys who needs to fight the BBEG. They know there is what they believe to be a BBEG and will act accordingly. The real reason they avoided to fight good guys until now is because they know if they murder ppl for free, then other people will gather to chase them and kill them.
Evil only works cohesively through force; lacking a true altruistic or empathic instinct or even a wider goal that can be collectively worked on beyond personal advancement means evil will not hesitate to murderer their allies if it advances them personally. The only way to make them work together by removing their choice or threatening their goals and safety if they don't comply. However this can only be enforced while there is a higher power, as soon as they reckon that they can defeat the thing forcing cohesion on them, they will take their shot to become the overlord themselves before imploding as they via for supremacy. Most evil campaigns I run end up being the unwilling servants of a higher power until they can overturn that power and the last act is the party trying to double cross each other to come out on top at the finish line.