Has anyone ever had a successful evil player character campaign, or maybe stuck it to a group of murder hobos?
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Has anyone ever had a successful evil player character campaign, or maybe stuck it to a group of murder hobos?
plenty
have you tried playing an evil character outside dnd?
I don't think I've ever tried a system other than D&D. I was interested in stories from other people.
fudge is a great system for running evil games
Have you played actually ever playing any game in any system, spammer?
take your meds
Yes, im quite proud of my chaotic evil barbarian. The trick is to temper his bloodlust with laziness and greed. Sure i WILL murder everyone as violently as possible if i need to and i can get away with it, but most of the time i can get what i want by letting everyone else do the heavy lifting for me. Why fight against a free lunch?
Evil player characters are boring, just like murderhobos, because at the end of they day they have no nuance. They care only for themselves and their own goals, even in relation to other people. They don't want to help someone because they're good or kind, they want to help someone because it stokes their ego, or that person is so important to them that they'd burn the world for it.
I played an evil butthole character, it was fun for about one session before I got bored and wanted to flip the script entirely and play a super good guy.
>HYTNPDND?
Yes actually, our GM gave us free reign to pick one of three starting points for a digimon game. We could either be a bunch of what amounted to pro gamers from that one megaman series with exe and the worst we'd do is fetch our manager's coke from his dealer, be moronic edgy chain gangers who fought digimon on the streets and where the risk of being shanked was high, or be le edgy hackermen and do hacker shenanigans.
I was outvoted 3-1 for hackers (I voted for the pro gamer route), and then - I shit you not - my digimon was probably the most evil motherfricker in the party for most of the game. A psychotic battle junky blackagumon with bloodlust on the mind paired with a stoic all-business tamer whose big weakness was his family,
which he would do anything to protect which I did to give the gm ways to frick with me and let us do evil shit. The rest of the party was a couple of butthole with a heart of gold types, the littlest cancer patient, and a fat neckbeard (whose player had to bail early on cause of IRL stuff). Their digimon were, in order, a bacomon (box robot digimon) that went on about fricking justice, a cowardly palmon (Plant thing), wii fit trainer but a pulsemon (Piss yellow thunder dinosaur with jordans), and the guy who left doesn't matter he reworked the line and build for a different game.
Now you'd think that because we picked black hat hacker as our starting point we'd at least go through bastardization arcs for the others yeah? No, not entirely, maybe the wii fit trainer but not the rest.
So game starts, we immediately join up with what amounts to saturday morning cartoon skynet with the Dark Masters, spend 70% of the game doing shit for them while I'm the only one willing to actually commit crime and be evil up to and including murder.
Turns out skynet is also moronic and wouldn't know what to do with all the power we gave it if it tried because the digimon bonding with tamers is what lets them grow out of their usual programming and these four jabronis we were working for were all programmed to job as final bosses in a 100 year old computer game.
So right, justice box and plant's tamers get chromed up; one gets robot eyes, the other robot arms, and we get them from one of our bosses as a good job present. The GM however, was tired of the party pussyfooting and okay'd me taking some initiative. So I did. I initiated going turncoat via my digimon (who had gained half a brain upon reaching the third stage of its evolution) and pulled the trigger on it, so it ends up with the arm guy being a cripple, the eyes guy being blind, the cancer patient fricking dies and is revived through vampire schizo tech that fuses her to her digimon (this comes up later when said digimon tries to gloat to the final boss and gets his tamer killed because his player is a glutton for punishment/wasn't taking the GM seriously), and because I've been playing ball I get to have the only real character arc where m ydigimon finds out she was part of a bootleg version of the royal knights (big shots) called the olympos 12 and her "dad" is an insane tentomon who thinks he's dagoth ur or some shit and hilariously everyone ends the game miserable, and my human frickin dies to vampire schizo tech.
It seems like every story of an evil PC in a party that gets posted here ends with "And so I colluded with the GM to make everyone else unhappy at the end of the game."
So yeah, tldr, nobody wants to play evil characters except actual psychos. It's not fun, it isn't interesting or deep, it's extremely boring for anything more than maybe a one shot at best because when you're a psycho villain who's only out for yourself you make for a shitty adventurer and an even worse ally, and on top of that most human beings want to do good, we don't want to be evil buttholes, and the people who do are mentally ill homosexuals who need to swirl some shotgun mouthwash before they hurt anyone else IRL.
You have a very flawed idea of what constitutes evil. There are many options other than psychos and purely selfish individuals.
I don’t man, it’s pretty easy to create an evil charter that isn’t a jack ass to play with.
>Evil barbarian who is only with the party because they are constantly in fights with tough opponents
>Death cultists who teams up with the party because the bad guys are trying to end the world the wrong way
>Racist Ethnonationalist who teams up with the lessers because their imperialist nation isn’t isolationist
>psycho villain who's only out for yourself
Evil can have nuance, anon. Unfortunately most folks in this hobby, and especially in DnD, present it as rampant murder and theft. Just because you're evil doesn't mean you can't be dedicated to an ideal or a cause, nor does it mean you can't have loved ones.
The best evil character I've ever had at my table actually had a wife and child back home, and engaged in all sorts of vile shit (slavery, contract assassination, political mudslinging and false-flag operations to discredit candidates), in order to send whatever income he could back to them. The other players at the table couldn't fathom that an 'evil' person could be anything other than "murder, rape, steal". It was surreal to see how narrow-minded folks in this hobby - one that utilizes imagination - can be.
>people who do are mentally ill homosexuals who need to swirl some shotgun mouthwash before they hurt anyone else IRL
Hello Jack Thompson, tired of trying to shut down video games?
idk man a digimon game just sounds like a pretty bad setting to try doing a proper evil campaign
What's the real difference between good guys who save people for no reward, and bad guys who would only consider it for a reward? I don't see how one would be more boring than the other. They're kind of besides the point of fun or excitement.
After a hiatus and switch in systems, most of my campaign has remade characters and the party has now gone a substantial paradigm shift from motley resistance to the corrupt city leadership to wheeler dealers willing to work with anyone and backstab them once they get bigger.
Currently in a party that is nearly all evil, and various flavors. Not one of them would claim to be a villain, but everyone is motivated to do evil pretty often. Some are just greedy, others lack empathy, others just care about power more than morals. They still do good things, there's worse villains out there, but at the end of the day they are seen as a violent gang at best.
It's some of the most fun party dynamics I've ever had.
A Blades in the Dark campaign where the characters are either insane, ruthless, violent or all three. The games structure helps with always having the players relations with the different factions in mind. They have made a lot of enemies and have made the city a worse place in the long run but they have also made friends and allies. The faction reputation helps a bit but I think it's more about how it prompts both the players and the GM to decide the crews next course of action based heavily on practical goals and benefits while also taking into account which factions would either help them with that or have a problem with it.
>They want to get a new drug den to make some extra money, this violent gang of thugs would likely have one available to take but I see they are allied with these cultist dudes but enemies with this other faction of smugglers, what if the crew went to them for a temporary alliance against the thugs?
Explain to me how a campaign about orcs raiding border forts of colonizing humans for sick loot is any different than good fighters raiding goblin caves for sick loot.
Evil societies still exist and orcs literally have cities going by old school d&d. This clearly means it's not le baby eating montage, to me, it just means on average the society is more selfish (lawful evil cares about other orcs only, while chaotic evil only care about themselves) doesn't mean a group of PCs wont be battle hardener EVIL comrades. You can even be honorable and evil to the core.
That was kind of what I was getting at
good or evil, they are very comparable at a glance.
A few times. Fun to begin with, but then someone usually turns on another a session or two in and it's a TPK. Tried to have a bigger boss instill a sense of teakwork on them, but they just turned on the boss and THEN killed each other. Evil does what it does.
There's an evil guy in our party. Our alignments are LG, LG, CN, NE.
It really depends on the maturity of the group. Some people take evil characters being backstabbing jackasses to one another personally. Was in a Black Crusade game years ago that broke down because a player threw a fit and started b***hing at other players directly when another player didn't give a shit over their favorite slave escaping when we had other shit to worry about. Turned the whole game into a petty high school drama, so it mercifully died.
Warhammer rpgs have fantastic support for evil campaigns both in 40k and fantasy, mostly because they have a war game with lots of lore around evil factions. Lots of backstabbing and risk/reward are incentivised.
Yeah, we were all evil overlords, each with their own fiefdom. It worked well fairly well and didn't wage war against each other. However, it went bonkers soon enough since everyone seemed to be trying to quickstart the industrial revolution and modernity in their feudal magical kingdoms. I guess it is because otherwise there was not much to do with an unifying threat.
Just play rogue trader or high level traveller
You will do a colonialism, you will be doing a capitalism and by god you will be doing a lot of imperialism
I am indeed playing a rogue trader game soon, I'm looking forward to getting to be the villain of various saturday morning cartoons, especially Captain Planet
I play a LE type of dude, although cp2020 does not have a D&D style alignment system. He's evil but smart enough to know that being some unreasonable murder hobo isn't a great recipe for survival or getting people to help you, so he acts with self interest and malice while trying to keep it under the radar. Kind of like those serial killers who maintain a wholesome public identity where they've got a wife/kids and a 9-5
This reminds me strongly of a player in my cp2020 group who was told off by the rest of the group for playing exactly like this, because he's basically LE in real life and didnt understand that things like pasting unarmed civilians for $1000 is considered bad behavior, even by other edgerunners
Isn't Cyberpunk™ a life is cheap setting? in the wild west, knocking off civilians for little profit is the norm.
It's really not, not in real life. Life is absolutely cheap, but there are still rules and social mores and degrees of behavior, and while it's fine to kill people for money, a lot of people look more askance at killing certain kinds of people for money, or people in certain circumstances. A lot of the time these rules, if they exist for people at all, tend to cover only the most helpless and those who dont actually pose any possible threat to you, hence the rest of our team not being very happy with our teammate shooting an unarmed woman who was barely involved with the job, for an amount of money most of us wouldn't get out of bed for. It is, if nothing else, a questionably professional attitude.
What harm is there, mechanically? I don't understand the aversion futuristic gangsters would have to killing unarmed women. The few bits of money that could be on one could be enough to upgrade your stuff.
>what harm is there, mechanically?
This is almost verbatim one of the things he said about this, yeah
yeah
the primary antagonists in my current game are a bunch of murder hobos who consistently do shit that make the players actually want to hunt them down and kill them, they seem to really enjoy it when they get victories and are generally enthusiastic and motivated about the game over all
I did an evil campaign, it was about absolutely evil bastards locked away in some fricked up planar magic prison and attempting to break out, this unifying goal was enough to keep them working together. When they broke out they discovered they are actually soul-chained to the prison and have to find a way to unchain themselves before their souls get dragged into the abyss with the prison. again, pure evil bastards who would kill each other forced to work together for a common goal. I believe this has to be the heart of every evil campaign.
>Not being an Evil party that twirl their moustaches and go town to town trying to do evil
>Needing a reason to do evil instead of just loving Evil
>Not opposing Good simply because it is Good
Your Evil is my Good.
I've been thinking of running a CoC campaign from the perspective of the cultists, with the "investigators" being neophytes in a cultist cell and the campaign detailing their ascenscion through the ranks with the ultimate goal of freeing the great old ones from their shackles and bringing upon the great new age.
I would completely do away with the sanity mechanic and replace it with two mechanics, corruption and devotion that work in tandem with eachother. Basically, devotion is lost when you do something your character would deem immoral or that would hurt your loved ones, and is rolled against corruption, while corruption is gained when you entrech yourself deeper into the cult, or when you give yourself up to the dark gods further, letting their vile magic change your mind or body.
If devotion reaches 0 or corruption reaches 100 your character is considered dead and he can no longer be played.
Yes for Warhammer Fantasy we had long term game with a party that had
>Human Assasin
>Butcher Orc
>Human Necromancer (using some homebrew rules I got here)
>Human Engineer
>("Dark")Elf Ghost Strider
>Human Pirate Captain
Fun times, to bad we disbanded due to layoffs at work
What does work have to do with it?
I had three successful evil characters.
Neutral evil half-orc fighter (battlemaster), lawful evil human monk (path of long death) and chaotic evil tiefling cleric (trickery).
The half-orc was just a selfish mercenary, who fought for coin only, and only if it was convenient. He had no qualms about running away or betraying NPCs, but kept the party safe by reasoning they were a reliable resource he could exploit.
The monk is a indoctrinated nutjob who sees death as a fascinating mistery and is willing to kill anything in horrible ways just to learn more. However, his disciplined ways and weird honor code make him more or less reliable as an ally. He wants to kill the party "when they're truly ready for the magnificent gift of death."
The tiefling cleric is a loan shark turned cleric of Ralishaz. He hates everyone, everything and is always trying to make people give up what they believe and follow the hollow meaninglessness of Ralishaz bad luck faith. He tortures, lies, casts mind-control spells, steals and do a lot of harm to a lot of people. He sees the party as the carte blanche, the perfect morons to take the blame for anything he does. "I did what? I'd never do such things! I'm a hero with these guys. You must be mistaken. Hope we don't ever meet again, specially in a dark alley or something."
The latter is impossible, because the group is always more powerful than the individual. You might think you're smarter than three to four other players, but you're really not: They'll get the better of you every time.
In my last game I grabbed one of the players and we bullshitted our way through 2 layers of security and killed 5 bodyguards all so we could break into our enemies panic room and massacre his wife and two children while all the others players reeeeeeeeeeeee'ed. I'd say I'm fairly evil.
Having seen your thread I now kind of want to run a comedic evil player campaign. Any advice on how to do this?
A sort of misadventures of evil players try to make things worse for everyone type campaign.