How do you make playing a party of actual badguys fun? Hardmode: The table has no edgelords
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How do you make playing a party of actual badguys fun? Hardmode: The table has no edgelords
I'm not sure, but I love the concept of OP image. I suppose the way I'd try to do it is to make it a comedy setting and mostly make your "bad guys" the lesser evil in a broader sense, while also often terrorizing those that in no way deserve it. But even then, keep it light, keep it fricked up but funny.
Examples: Rance and to a lesser extent Disgaea HOD (Laharl was trying to be bad, til he wasn't)
Oh and by keep it light I don't mean toothless. They can be kidnappers, rapists, muderers and/or terrorists but it's all about the way the narrative presents it. And again it helps if there's an arguably even worse evil than them, or some sort of "bully's bully" angle in there somewhere.
Oh another game where you play as a pretty despicable character is Dohna Dohna, but again the silliness offset a lot of how fricked up your actions really were. Plus it was for a... "good" cause (but not really lol)
Dohna Dohna is somewhere deep down my backlog, is the narrative actually decent enough to push it higher?
The presentation was bright and over the top and I found the characters entertaining. Even though the main character is pretty deadpan and serious, his chemistry with his wacky companions was good and so the whole thing worked for me. That said, the actions you're taking are pretty fricked up, even if it's in the name of taking down an evil megacorp. But at least the characters cop to being bad people, especially the protag.
The core gameplay is alright. Not incredible but I never found it too annoying either, simple to understand and also not too difficult. Only a few bosses really gave me trouble, mainly the final. If you've played Darkest Dungeon it's similar to that, but less restrictive.
As long as your sense of humor doesn't mind your typical over the top anime shenanigans, and you can ease up on your moral compass enough to settle into being a human trafficking terrorist that would even pimp out middle school girls, I think you'll have a good time.
I also avoided all the bad ends because I'm a sap (at least when it comes to my party members)
>If you've played Darkest Dungeon it's similar to that, but less restrictive.
The real question should be - is it less grind-intense than DD?
>you can ease up on your moral compass enough to settle into being a human trafficking terrorist that would even pimp out middle school girls
I've prostituted a technically-21-years-old e-girl before, I think I'll manage on the moral front.
>is it less grind-intense than DD?
I would say so. You may wind up revisiting places to find more girls to prostitute out or for items and weapon unlocks. But again, for the most part found the game fairly easy, especially compared to Darkest Dungeon, so you shouldn't need to grind quite as much
>I've prostituted a technically-21-years-old e-girl before,
What did he mean by this?
The world may never know
20 y/o should already know how to swim.
>American Hentai.gif
Always associated him more with Germany, myself
Just let players do their thing without forcing any judgemental moralhomosexualry on them. They will naturally gravitate towards becoming party of actual badguys.
Basically this. I mean, you don't even need edgelords. Like, how often do we have threads that are like "hey guuuuuuys, like, necromancy isn't really evil you can totally be a good guy while violating corpses with magic for your own personal gain, right? It's totally cool to turn people into flesh-eating ghouls who feast on the flesh of living and totally not something a bad guy does right?" or "it's totally the morally correct thing to do to poison a well and kill every man, woman, and child of a village if they're orcs, right guys? Or if they like, worship the wrong god. Or it's like tuesday and I feel like it. Right? If you think about it I'm actually a hero."
Speaking as the grandson of a grave robber (morgue robber?), sometimes you just need to violate corpses for personal gain.
Got him through med school and he went on to become a respected doctor and hospital administrator, helping plenty of people along the way.
Nobody was using that brain anyway.
>Needing to grave rob or poison villages when the average party produces something like five usuable bodies a day, quasi-legally.
Absurd.
Yep, every time a party of self-righteous doo-gooders capture a henchman they immediately start reaching for the pincers and fire irons
Make all the evil slapstick.
>As you continue your pillow fight with the bags of gold you plundered, several orphans appear to ask you for bread
19 SECONDS LATER
>The orphans screams can still be heard as they plummet down the well
>You get the barrel of rabid man-eating ants ready
>As you continue your pillow fight with the bags of gold you plundered
Same energy
cartoonish evil >> realistic evil
Cackle all the way
This. If you're not laughing you ass off while evilmaxxing then you are doing it wrong. My party would turn originally good people into apsolutne monsters because "let's ruine this person's day" keeps getting out of control and turns into "let's make his/hers life a living hell for shits and giggles". And of course our blessed GM isn't a gay and let's us do that stuff, just so he can see where it will go. It also helps that it's usually not out of tone as we play Dark Heresy and Delta Green.
>Gyaruo
Yeah. Galo sengen.
GO GO GO GO
Lean into the suicide squad idea (which predates the bad movies)
You’re C list bad guys forced together by an outside force, working for either your freedom or your lives. From that genesis anything can happen
Go Inglorious Bastards. You are absolute monsters, but you are technically “the good guys” and the guys you are killing are monsters too.
I've always disliked this weak-willed "out" that people like to give themselves for enjoying morally reprehensible shit. Ironically turning off your morality because someone declared the targets acceptable is typically shown as villain behavior in media that doesn't try to cater to this specific niche.
> Ironically turning off your morality because someone declared the targets acceptable is typically shown as villain behavior in media that doesn't try to cater to this specific niche.
Nits make lice, even Gygax admitted this.
Gigax never had morally "ambiguous" choices.
At his worst, you could simply execute the clearly "evil" civilians or enslave them, but only for the purpose of conversion. That's it.
Anything else is evil behaviour no matter how you twist it.
You know exactly why, say it
>muh jooz!!!!!one
Begone /misc/
Play with a group of friends who are good roleplayers that don't make the same character over and over, and won't get upset when bad things happen to their character. Give the characters a reason to work together without controlling their actions, and let them betray eachother.
That's how my group does it and it works pretty well. About a month into our campaign the GM did a soft reboot after thinking about what parts of the adventure were working and what wasn't.
Depends on the group. My own group is pretty mild-mannered and fun-oriented, so if someone pressed a gun to my head and forced me to do this, I'd probably go for some kind of crime setup. Good, old "crime lord has something big on you and you have to go on one last big score".
Designated Villains. Dark Lord of Derkholm, Megamind, Villains By Necessity, Wreck-It Ralph, etc. The world requires a Bad Guy (because Balance Demands It or The Gods Must Be Entertained or A Wizard Did It) and at this time that Bad Guy is your party. Mustache twirling, monologuing, needlessly complicated death traps, tying maidens to the railway tracks or staking them out for dragons, all a must.
>The world requires a Bad Guy (because Balance Demands It or The Gods Must Be Entertained or A Wizard Did It)
What dialect is this? TVTropes?
Tough Guide to Fantasyland-ish.
>tying maidens to the railway tracks
And then setting to work inventing the first steam engine because mine carts don't quite do it.
There's other ways to start running trains on the captured maiden when her father won't pay the ransom.
Stemming from this idea: Bad Guy with a self-imposed limit to that kind of theatrical villain, specifically because they know that they'd enjoy the deeper levels of depravity and cruelty too much.
You just play murderhoboism straight.
The players are amoral bountyhunters who themselves have massive bounties because they're piece of shit criminals. The fact that they're secretly part of some plot to take over the world is secondary until it isn't.
I miss these two but their deaths was the last straw that kept me read that shit. Their asspull of death made me realize how shitty Naruto turned to be
My final straw was how underwhelming Kakashi gaiden was. Then the time skip seemed so moronic I just gave up. Pic unrelated
these two are proof that Kishimoto can't worldbuild for shit
>an S-rank elite ninja who is straight up an immortal either as a result an esoteric cult of murderhobos developed an immortality justu that in theory can be replicated many times over, or he is the chosen to the world's equivalent to Khorne, either of which has huge implications that aren't touched for shit in the canon
>a long lived hard-to-kill bounty hunter who when first introduced when revealed to be immortal is implied to have been the one to put down Hashirama who in canon died in battle, one of the more level headed members of the akatsuki only to die to naruto's new jutsu after contracting plot induced stupidity, despite having a solid strategy, and fighting style to avoid it. Later gets nerfed to looking like a chump when power creep demands Hashirama has to be as strong as madara who is himself wanked to high hell. Somehow despite having lived for so long in the black market/ wet works did not have an inkling of an idea that madara was up to something or at the least an elite uchiha was going around playing geopolitics as madara the whole time.
This just shows that if mangaka aren't rushed to finish certain arcs or to appeal to uchiha dicksuckers in popularity polls you could have a good story
>Hidan
I'm actually glad that Jashinism didn't become a big thing because the gimmick of immortality would get boring really fricking quick, like ninjutsu absorption did.
That said, my headcanon is that its a Kekkei Genkai and he's either the progenitor or the first in a very long time to manifest it, and Lord Jashin is something he just made up because he's nuts.
>Kakuzu
I don't think he was ever implied to have *killed* Hashirama. Just fighting the man is impressive enough and I think the main intention is to say he was around at the time. Might be wrong.
While you may be right anon, the whole thing with Jashin, making a kekki genkai still runs into the same problem as having a jashin cult, cause you need to explain how the frick you even get to that point, cause for as ""rare"" as kekki genkai are supposed to be, we see they function like one drop rule, where if you are part of the bloodline, you get the powers no questions asked.
As for Kakuzu, that one is on Kishimoto for allowing power creep get in the way, cause now the earlier parts of the story went from "two kage level shinobi went at each other" to "how the frick did he even fight OP woodman?"
>we see they function like one drop rule
Theoretically, an uchiha can go their entire lives without ever awakening the sharingan if they just live a normal peaceful life (i'm ignoring sarada because frick boruto). I'd argue that it either had something to do with him witnessing all of the corpses in that one village or him killing his village. I forget where his backstory comes from, so not sure on canon. In which case, given that his belief is that you have to slaughter everyone close to you, you can pretty much never start a clan around that so it makes sense that it gets to be so scarce.
Like i said, I just prefer that Hidan is on his own. Not every idea needs to be "worldbuilding" to be cool.
gotta agree with that assessment anon
me on the left
>straightest shota
Get out of here Ken Ashcorp, you have content to release, your horny is what drives your symphony, now get back to it.
Damn, that's a name I haven't heard in a while
I think he means the other left.
Although I wouldn't mind squeezing some cute noises out of Ken myself.
Anon, "left" is on the left.
Me on the right.
Easy, just play mobsters
Evil as far as you all know, was the natural state of things, and the way things should be returned to. The forces of good are dominant, they have conquered most of the world, but it is you and your evil allies quest to seek out the ancient secrets of the world, to find the ancient evil and bring it back/revive it.
have the party be low ranked villains/baddies/antagonists working for a professional villain syndicate as an actual 9-5 type job full of horseshit standard operating procedures, codes of conduct, professional standards, etc. where the social dynamics inside the syndicate and with the good guys/protagonists are really corporate-like with autistic rules sticklers and petty office politicking and gossip and people just generally being mentally checked out and just going through the motions for a paycheck. you have to lean into absurdity or cartoonish goofiness if not an all edgelord group
My player character will be a bungler.
Every ttrpg campaign is a party of self serving bad guys murderhoboing through the world. They all think they're good, but that's true of all bad guys too.
Is this hyperbolic or is your only exposure to trpgs actually memes and people completely ruined by memes?
I don't think I've been exposed to a murderhobo group since I was a teenager. Thinking of the last couple years games, I can't fit that descriptor to any of my groups.
>The village healer, the village priest, a local businessman and his little brother and the tavern cook trying to save the region from a cult
>A court sorcerer and a druid with their soldier bodyguard, all part of an expeditionary force, ally with some primitive locals - a goblin bard and lizardman barbarian - to explore the new continent and root out the evil gods that enslave the local races
>A group of paladins march into the desert to find a pyramid and put its inhabitants back to sleep, after they woke up and started a ritual to destroy the world
>a ragtag bunch of criminals on a loaned spaceship smuggle spices for a crimelord while getting involved in local sector politics
>A knight and his retinue (a halfling rogue, a dwarf priest and their alcoholic magician girl) work for the local lord to keep the countryside safe, battling devils and ogres and such, recently rescueing the baron's daughter from elf kidnappers
>the town watch of a tiny backwater village try and find out why children are going missing and animals are turning to stone, before the terrified villagers decide to burn people on the stake
I think you need a better gm and try not playing d&d if you have such a narrow perception on ttrpgs.
The Forces of Darkness™ as a rule don't screw over their lieutenants and agents. If you want to take over the world and embrace the darkness to do it, and then you actually win, congratulations mr dark lord, here's your crown and throne and harem and the shadows aren't going to consume you or subvert your free will or anything, and historical records of previous dark lords bear that out. You've got nothing to lose as long as those pesky heroes don't kill you.
By doing it gradually. You start off with one, maybe two explicitly morally dubious PCs, then repeatedly sprinkle in complications that result from the criminal PCs' backgrounds during regular adventures. Bounties are particularly effective. In no time at all, the party will have become so embroiled in back-alley bullshit that even the supposedly good-aligned PCs start to suggest extortion, fraud, and even murder to get out of the messes they keep landing in. Run them afoul of the law and/or rival criminals a few more times and you'll have them building their own crime syndicate and taking their anger out on beggars while thinking it was all their idea in the first place.
>HA HA HA HA IM SUCH A CHRINIC MASTURBATOR I HAVE IN-JOKES ABOUT MY MASTURBATION HABITS XDDDDDDDDD
Brapditional James?
War profiteering.
The party needs to keep a war going on or to cause a war to happen so they can make money on investments.
The ugly bastard guy is hot
Anon, I have bad news for you about your sexuality...
>goes from Ganker to Ganker and now to /tg/
Go away, baal-shill.
>/tg/ thread is actually full of on-topic discussion
/tg/ confirmed best board.
Funny, I don't see any traditional games discussed here
Villains competing against other villains and heroes works. Villains have different goals and ideologies the same as any.
it's a bit cliche, but you could have a party of adventurers who think they're doing heroic stuff, but through their actions are just ruining people's lives and furthering the objectives of the bad guys in the world
Godspeed, legendary heroes
>your DM is Yoko Taro
It wasn’t a whole party of villains but in Burning Wheel I played a morally neutral merchant/mercenary bowmen who was slowly turning into Machiavelli in his quest to reunite the kingdom and put the rightful prince (another PC) back on the throne.
There was definitely some slapstick to the character as he was a self important prick playing a charicature of what he (a commoner) thought court manners and nobles were like.
As he became ever more self important he treated peasants worse and worse.
He was getting up to some serious scheming, skullduggery, and petty revenge plots as the game went on.
Unfortunately everyone else bailed before he could get into a major moral conflict with the other PCs.
does it really count as ntr if it's tentacles
Only if she A) gets addicted and returns willingly and/or B) gets impregnated with monster spawn following a mind break or hypnosis
Captcha: N0 AAHN
alright ya know what, I could get into that, that sounds hot
but I guess that's just overlapping with my minor corruption fetish
Don't corrupt minors!
okay but can I corrupt miners
Alright, but no unionization!
oh buddy I'm going to be the most corrupt miner's union boss you have ever SEEN
wait, no! I was supposed to be corrupting THEM oh noooooo
What if the miners are minors?
The party is looking to get rich and they're happy to be complete bastards if it helps them get there.
>shota
Pedophile
>balks at the shota
>ignores the bestiality
He's not THAT kind of black guy. He's a faceless shadowman
Got a chuckle out of me.
only the wife is.
follow rules 1 and 2 of the board: Be excellent to each other and Party On!
I mean really, treat each other with a modicum of respect and you'll eventually grow legitimate respect for each other and the rest will manifest itself. just don't be a shithead to others and keep others to not being shitheads.
SOMEONE LEFT THE ORPHANAGE UNGUARDED...
BIG MISTAKE
>kicks out all of the children and nuns out and turns the building into a haunted mansion. it is now a dungeon for adventurers to clear
>actual badguys
>no edgelords
Impossible.
You put them up against even worse guys and monsters. This is the simplest trick I've found, use it in WFRP to assuage the guilt of players who are uncomfortable being evil to normal folks.
The Phantom Troupe form Hunter x Hunter would be my ideal model for a bad-guys party.
Lot of camaraderie among them but utter disdain for people outside their group, work for themselves and only for themselves which sometimes brings them to do evil shit, and sometimes brings them to do good shit because it serves their current goal. Overall just having a good time and having no regard for human life.
This.
Japs generally like to do "likeable bad guys wielding power of friendship" - En's "family" in Dorohedoro, Kuroko's team/harem in Murcielago, the Black Lagoon crew and so on. While west has grand total of what - The Boys and that one Harley Quinn cartoon?
A lot more than that, depending on where you draw the line for bad guy. Han Solo was a self serving abrasive butthole at first but he was intended to be likeable and charming even before he warmed up to the others. There are many examples in old westerns where the outlaw is the hero, off the top of my head Billy the Kid and some Clint Eastwood movies. Terminator 2 took the killer robot from the first movie and made him a no kill good guy through the power of friendship. I can probably think of better examples those are just the fastest I could think of
>the only thing people can compare this criteria balls buttboy art to is a Japanese pedophile comic
Sure is traditional games in here
good people being forced to do bad things because of PURELY SOCIOECONOMIC REASONS.
just set a game in commie russia or some other shithole where there's not enough food for everyone, and let the players realize that they might have to make some hard decisions, or else...
Ehh, I'm not sure that'll work out in practice. "Death before dishonor" is easier to pull of if the "death" is just a character you made and not actually, you know, you. If a player isn't already sold on the idea of playing that sort of character or participating in that kind of story, they'll happily have their character die whilst maintaining their principals.
t. That sort of player.
Solution:
>Everyone pitches in $10 at the start of the campaign
>Last one alive and not apprehended by the authorities wins the pot
The best evil campaign I've played in had everyone respect one another to a bro degree (through power, intent to corrupt, needing henchmen etc) but have no limits toward everyone else. The power of friendship but in villainous form. If everyone has unrelated backgrounds, play off each other's goals and work their success into your own agenda.
Optionally, convince the least edgy player in the group to be one. Every evil group needs a token edgelord to anchor the party's morals, and doing that way is just plain funny.
BASED BASED BASED BASED BASED BASED BASED
Best post itt
Evil and corrupt people or beings can still have ties, affections, bonds and flaws that make them all stick together
Being biased towards everyone else IS part of the evil as well, because
>I am quite hypocritical
Tell me more bout her campaign anon
Somebody post that screencap about goblin businessmen who started WWIII
Motherfricking cartoon villiany is best villiany.
"Haha! All the beer in in the dwarven realms is now mildly radioactive!" and other crippling but dumb shit like that.
Easy mode, make the characters Saturday morning cartoon villains rather than genuinely terrible people. Maybe give them a rival band of villains that are way worse by comparison to accentuate the party's ham vs the rivals' edge
Henchmen to some comically over the top but also incompetent villain
I actually do this regularly as one of my settings.
There's always a bbeg who won but all that's happened is the world order turned on its head and people see heroes as anarchistic agitators.
Heroes are always a small 3-6 character group with some kind of invulnerability based around a loophole until they enter a dungeon, which makes them mortal again.
Outside the dungeons it could be something like "you cannot willfully inflict damage on the hero" or "the hero always teleports behind whatever would hit them" and the players need to find a way to hinder the heroes while working around this destiny bullshit.
I also give the players an overpowered amount of levels and let them make the dungeon encounters.
I either make the heroes self righteous shit heels or so goody goody they're moronic.
Game with dudes who learned D&D in prison.
Is NTR Green a futa?
For pure fun, #1 trick I've found is have them escape every pc encounter alive, and bring them back every time there's a small time crime to do.
For big bads, multiple encounters throughout the campaign where the PCs are always just a little too late or barely arriving in time to stop the villain, who usually already is making their way out of the encounter. They got to be an active force, that is doing stuff and not just sitting around in their palace waiting to die. All the better if they start leaving traps or schemes to kill or frick with the pcs.
Hmm...
Study the players of your party and set up a setting where the world needs a serious and extreme fix, but make this fix juxtapose with the will of society at large. Quick example: society is giving cosmetic sex change surgery to children to make them into the image of their perfect society. Your group sees this as barbaric so you go about ending it. (No, not political; I got this idea from The Orville)
>players expect killing random farmers to be as profitable as killing monsters
>Max out stealth so I can't even make it interesting by putting bounties on them
>How do you make playing a party of actual badguys fun?
Easy, by setting them loose on enemies even worse than they are where almost any atrocity can be forgiven in the name of survival. Going full on captain war crimes with white phosphorus napalm mixed in with blessed holy silver shavings and aerosolized holy water mustard gas and landmines is totally okay if you're fighting the legions of hell or vampires or zombie hordes or whatever. Being mudcore bandits torturing peasants for coppers is lame, crucifying a pit fiend atop a consecrated altar and hanging him from the gates of your city as a warning to others is based and fun as hell. There's a reason antihero protagonists are so fun and common in zombie/horror/vampire/werewolf/etc media. Even Ghenghis Khan looks like a nice guy compared to zombie hordes, yeah the mongols were buttholes but against fricking dracula hell yeah I'm down for throat singing and horse archery.
My current campaign involves an extended campaign of terror against invading Oni where the party are essentially writing the setting's eventual geneva convention themselves as "okay, everything they've done is on the list"
Should my Saturday morning cartoon baddie PC be an alien invader/mad scientist, skeleton wizard, or some kind of reptile tyrant? Those are my favorite aesthetics for fun villains.