how come people tend to fail playing as evil characters in an all-evil campaign so often?
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how come people tend to fail playing as evil characters in an all-evil campaign so often?
how come people tend to fail playing as evil characters in an all-evil campaign so often?
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Really? What do you mean? It's not hard to be evil, most people already are.
I have no idea what you're talking about. Can you cite any examples? In my experience, it's hard for the players to *not* be evil, sometimes to the degree of Evil. My players would rub their hands at an all-evil campaign, to the point where it wouldn't really be interesting or fun at the end of the day.
As much as I think that most people are awful, the majority of them are not actually Evil.
>In my experience, it's hard for the players to *not* be evil,
When you are playing a good or neutral campaign people are going to be evil buttholes but not go full on edge lord psycho, at least for most people who play. And because the main story they are saving the kingdom as they murder hobo across the land they think of themselves as the good guys not thinking about the actions they are doing. When you say you are going to be playing an evil campaign they just start doing needlessly evil crap and for once in their lives have an incentive to play the game and take charge on what they want to do next. That is the only difference.
This goes back to the top reply. With certain players when they are the "good guys" they feel justified in doing evil shit. When they are the bad guys then they feel like they are being judged as on the outset they are playing an evil character so they tone it back down a bit to not be that evil so people might like them more. These people are extremely socially conscious and often fall in line with the herd and are sociopaths American Psycho style.
Hate to break it to you chum, but most people don't actually think about it that hard. The average Joe sees what other average people think is bad and thinks that's bad because all those other people can't be wrong, can they? After all, if they were, then you'd have to come to terms with a society that is either fundamentally insane or has no actual ethics whatsoever or both. Culture is a form of consensus reality.
The alternative is advocating for your ideals among people who might not agree with you and who may quite possibly hate you for having a different perspective. Take, for instance, WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic) ethics. People with WEIRD ethics tend to view things in terms of individual items, instead of relationships. Individualistic, rule-based, universalist ethics tend to result. After all, you are an individual- your rights and responsibilities are not significantly tied to the fact that you happen to be a firstborn son, right?
Except other people don't always see it that way. Someone who doesn't subscribe to WEIRD ethics could see a firstborn son as having the right to make familial decisions and being responsible for extending the familial bloodline, whether he's personally interested in doing so or not. The nature of the individual's relationship to others, that is, being the firstborn son of his father, provides that man additional rights and restrictions that WEIRD ethics simply doesn't recognize in the same way.
Not to mention time. Time in a lot of cultures is frankly relative. "It'll happen when it happens, what's the rush" isn't laziness in some other culture's eyes, it's just the way time works.
You think every individual within those cultures individually sat down and decided for themselves how the world works? That would be akin to sitting down and remaking math from scratch, which admittedly some people have tried to do. Neutrality, for all its issues, is consistent.
the same reason people tend to fail playing as good characters in all-good campaigns
The reason people have a hard time playing evil characters is that ruthlessness does not come easily to most people
The reason people have a hard time playing good characters is that altruism does not come easily to most people
But yes - real human being have nebulous, complex and situational moralities that for the most part would be considered "neutral". That's really the whole intended purpose behind alignment, to give players an opportunity to think about character motivation in a more straight forward way and maybe reflect on actual morality, even if it's "just doing whatever crazy thing you feel like at any given moment" (we have an alignment for that)
Through the limitations imposed on our role playing games we reduce the limitations we unconsciously impose on ourselves in real life. Modern players seem to not understand that.
>But yes - real human being have nebulous, complex and situational moralities that for the most part would be considered "neutral".
Kind of funny how the game that came closest to having accurate alignments was Lamentations of the Flame Princess. It says in the chapter on alignments that "almost every real-life human in Neutral; in order to be either Lawful or Chaotic you basically have to be insane".
>ruthlessness does not come easily to most people
True. Boardgames that require or allow a certain amount of backstabbing amongst the players take a backseat to ones with nicer play.
>Through the limitations imposed on our role playing games we reduce the limitations we unconsciously impose on ourselves in real life
I am not my character. I am not ever going to BE my character, and if my make a self-insert, you are cringe, a homosexual, and probably struggle with separating fiction from reality and also a political extremist who should be lined up against a wall and shot for the good of humanity as a species.
>post ends in 47
Well, he's just a professional killer.
Most people don't do evil deeds for evil's sake - they do it for any number of bad reasons, to sate some form of impulsive drive, or because something has incentivized them to do so.
The many flavors of evil are still evil.
Yes. *Fantasy* evil, RPG evil, capital E cosmically defined Evil - the sort of Evil that pings as Evil when you start throwing around spells that define people as Evil?
That doesn't come so easily or so naturally. Here in reality, evil can be rendered banal, hidden behind rationalizations and proxies and a thousand layers of obfuscation to keep you from having to look your fellow man in the face or acknowledge their humanity even as you tread upon their hopes and lives. In a *fantasy* setting, you do have to look that poor village girl in the face as you run a blade through her gullet as her family and village burn.
It does actually, both easily and naturally.
Because usually it's just one shitter who's playing Evil characters because they think they're the smartest person in the room when they're a fedora-wearing moron and everyone else agreed to the social contract of playing a cooperative game.
But when you go all Evil, most people think of the moronic stealing from the party back stabbing shitter as what it means to be Evil, and so that's what they do. All Evil is All moron.
DnD Manichean alignments/cosmology basically ensure that evil means completely psychotic.
When someone says they're running an Evil Campaign, they don't mean Byronic heroes or magnificient bastards like Bronn, the Punisher, Ozymandias. They mean the group is going to do edgy shit like burning down orphanages for a couple weeks untill everyone gets bored.
>DnD Manichean alignments/cosmology
This. I never had issues with morally ambiguous or straight evil games with other rulesystems.
>DnD Manichean alignments/cosmology basically ensure that evil means completely psychotic.
Someone doesn't know what lawful evil is.
They don't. Most of my characters i play are evil because their motivations are ultimately self serving. You don't have to be a bastard to be evil in a tabletop setting. You're probably just wanting murder porn and people aren't about it
My last pf1e character was a neutral evil kobold witch. He was a completely normal creature with ethics and morals, who was a massive nationalist and had completely lost faith in his species as a whole, believing the acquisition of power and ascending to become a lich was the only way his species could prosper.
In this way, he could still deal with, talk to and be empathetic towards other races as they really didn't concern him that much.
Most people are too stupid to understand the difference between being an evil person and just doing bad things. Ironically, dumb people will generally be more reprehensible when attempting to be normal than when role playing as a villain.
Last evil campaign I played died after two games (star wars, old Republic, we were playing on the side of the Sith), but in that span I cut off hands and legs of a Trandoshian that ambushed us, tortured him and finally killed him by throwing him out of a transporter, and on the second game when the negotiations went south I murdered a teenage scavenger as the right starter and when the enemies surrendered I simply slaughtered them all.
Is that evil enough?
Kind of similar to the way our party from an evil dnd two-session campaign "tortured" a rival gang member; we didn't get anywhere just beating on him/cutting off limbs/one guy biting chunks out of him so we used illusion magic to show we had his kids (we assumed he had some), he cracked, then we strung him up by his own entrails.
People have no problem playing selfish powergrabbing psychos they just don't want to be mean to npcs that aren't cartoon villains.
The only good thing most "good" characters do is make sure they kill and rob the bad guys, whatever the bad guys are at the moment or in that society.
>People have no problem playing selfish powergrabbing psychos they just don't want to be mean to NPCs that aren't cartoon villains.
See, this is it, this is really it.
I like acquiring power for my evil characters and making people dance to their will and all that shit.
I even manage to cope with playing someone who is generally indifferent to how others will react to them doing something bad or hurtful - although they're usually not stupid and will try not to piss off their party members.
But I feel bad if I make people who are just trying to get on with their day feel bad. Even NPCs who aren't real.
And what's the point of being evil if you don't feel happy in yourself?
Now, if it's Other Evil Guy Moving In On My Territory or Guy Who Is Trying To Fricking Kill Me, I'll happily ask if they're allergic to nuts and feed them theirs before they can say no. But I'm not out here kicking puppies, metaphorically or otherwise.
Also, as a professional adventurer/merc/whatever you want to call it, I'm not going to seek to kill or hurt people if I'm not getting paid or profiting in some way. It just devalues my work, and we can't have that.
Usually because "Evil Campaign" and "Sandbox Campaign" go hand-in-hand, and most players are incapable of playing Sandbox games where they make their own goals and go out and try to do them. Combine this with most players thinking evil means "Do evil shit to your party members", you quickly get a game that falls apart.
If you can get a group of Players that can actually formulate long-term goals, and have the ability to comprehend that an evil party still needs to work together, you've got a functioning evil game.
because constant pointless evil, or even pragmatic evil, becomes nauseous after a while. sure, some people like it, but its normal that someone would feel a sense of disgust and frustration at the constant shittery and try to do something heroic or at least to subtly punish the others, even if at first that person tought he was going to like an "evil campaign".
its the same as when a player makes the usual smug lawful evil butthole character who can never fail because hes sooo logical and pragmatic, but extended to the whole party. at least one person HAS to snap.
Thing is most: of the whole good and evil are artificial constructs to begin with. The reason we have that stuff in modern society is because, well; we don't live in a state of nature where everyone needs to behave like a wild animal. It's more advantageous to us to live in a community with a social contract of moral codes that at least sets a base level of behaviour and thinking. How right or wrong this is I can't say because Philosophers have been pondering this for decades because ultimately it's nearly entirely subjective what is good and what is evil to a given group or individual.
D&D though then applies another layer by trying to silo types of good and types of evil which just leads to stupid tropes; with the best characters being those that don't fall into this bucket system and the worst are those that try to exemplify it.
>the whole good and evil are artificial constructs to begin with
>Falling for the commie propaganda to further deteriorate the concepts of what is right and wrong so commies can rewrite what they believe is right and wrong.
Humans always had base outlines on what is morally acceptable even from a young age. The only cases that work against this is if they are raised in a society that beats kindness out of them and to raise them to be evil in itself like to lie, cheat and steal.
>Humans always had base outlines on what is morally acceptable even from a young age.
you literally have to beat that shit into kids
Kids are like dogs in that respect: they can differentiate right from wrong, but they have absolutely no idea why right is different from wrong.
anon kids are amoral little shits, they know every action they take, but they don't give a shit about the consequences. You have to make them understand the difference between acting "nice" and being "mean" while driving into them that being "nice" is acceptable and being "mean" isn't. What they do understand at am early age is self gratification and they base their actions off of that.
maybe they have absolutely no idea what is good or evil because it's a fricking social construct that you have to beat it into their heads so they can understand it
>social construct
really think about what this is, stretch the definition as far as it will go
then think why they are essential
are social systems in apes artificial? if they are does this reduce them to being arbitrary?
yes
no they conform to the group they occur in because they are constructs developed by a particular society. Societys that have different values will treat actions in a different manner. Murder is wrong in most society's but killing newborns is acceptable if it will be a burden to the group in the olden days, or leads to an increase of resources via war.
id possibly reconsider what you think is natural and artificial but a lexical semantics argument would be nonconstructive here
>killing newborns is acceptable if it will be a burden to the group
this is present today in a different form as abortions
they are essential because we are not fricking cavemen anymore and technology has revolutionized the entire human society down to its core, but even then you can notice "evilness" being done by people in high positions of power.
morality as we see it today is completly artificial, it is moronic to deny that the vast vast majority of humans would feel shitty hitting or hurting someone they love but it doesn't apply to the people beyond them
hi jokerman
artificial in the sense that generations have codified morality locally in the form of law and religion, has spoken word nullified meaning?
ooga boogaing about society is wilfully chasing your tail
I hate people who clearly have never been bullied
Good for you
But I have, that's one reason why I know good and evil are clear things that exist in this universe.
Jealous are we?
I always enjoyed bullying others, social standing has to be formed somehow
Because people tend to think playing evil means being chaotic stupid, never working as a team unless it means you can backstab people at a later date for "character development" and expect the DM to bail them out of trouble when they decide to attack the capitol with only 20 goblin bandits. What you get is people wanting to play Grand Theft Auto multiplayer with cheats on
Honestly, if I have to use alignment, my favorite evil characters are actually neutral.
One of my favorite characters was a LN noble who didn't really mean harm (i.e. was not a malicious actor), but would still utilize tactics like false flags and political assassinations because that's how all the other nobles operated. The rest of the party was mainly thugs and outcasts, so they were always useful for doing that kind of dirty work.
If the campaign lasted longer, he probably would have become Lawful Evil, though. Maybe he already was.
I don't enjoy playing evil characters because I'm not a sociopath.
99% of people who claim to like playing "evil" characters are actually playing neutral antiheros.
I always took Evil to be Machiavellian, not just being a douche for no reason.
>just being a douche for no reason
That's being neutral on the good/evil axis and especially either lawful neutral or chaotic neutral
And that's why Good and Evil alignments were a mistake. Frick you Gaygax.
Why do so many GMs fail to run evil games when they advertise ones? Most "evil" campaigns I've played in has just had us fight even more evil enemies.
My DM generally doesn't allow evil characters since he's seen casmpaigns fall apart because of people having no diea how to play an evil party and just backstab each other for no reason.
During one one-shot we thankfully had a chance to play some evil PCs and we thought it went pretty well, though it was also a one-shot and we knew well enough even evil PCs can cooperate to a common goal.
The game itself involved being trapped in a dungeon by an insane evil wizard as part of his collection(the other three were at least).
>Two goblins, an alchemist and a gunner. Both sillier, but had no problem with immoral methods to achieve their goals.
>A Lawful Evil necrowarrior. Also a bit on the sillier side, but was more dark and like eating souls.
>Me, a Chaotic Evil horrific shapeshifting omnivore created as an experiment, used as a guard dog to hunt down escapees(with suspicion that the wizard occasionally let people escape to be hunted as a joke). I was much more serious and had few problems doing things even the other PCs considered horrifying. I still knew enough that teaming up with the others and cooperating was my best odds of escape. Also my PC was incredibly racist towards goblins.
We ended up escaping, then stealing a boat to be pirates with the zombie pirates we escaped with. Good times.
Having standards != Being not evil
All my characters I've made are willing to help someone that comes to them with a desperate plea. Every single one.
It's just, I flip a coin when making a character to determine if this character is a complete wreck of a human being or not. These people still will help if the call comes, but also will casually rob, do dangerous/stupid things, and what have you, as they are fricking wrecks of people.
Being mean makes me feel bad.
My true neutral character's alignment shifted to neutral evil recently when he attuned to the hand of vecna.
Instead of having him immediately backstab the party, I made it so he views his friends as cherished possessions and thus extensions of himself.
I once had a necromancer that viewed the party as pawns that required 'social niceties' for their upkeep
He eventually turned the fighter into an intelligent undead
Post five examples.