mhacdebhandia
Explorer
The first Third Edition game I played, a Planescape campaign, included a slight majority of evil characters.
The simple solution is twofold.
First, remember that "evil" doesn't have to mean "stupidly shortsighted". You might be playing an amoral wizard who is willing to step on anyone who gets in the way of her controlling the Mages' Guild, but if there was ever a set of candidates for "careful cultivation" instead of "ruthless exploitation", it's your fellow PCs. Nine times out of ten it is genuinely in your best interests to work with each other to achieve your goals - any betrayal has to be committed in order to gain something that's genuinely worth losing a known quantity as your ally.
None of this is an issue of "law" versus "chaos", either. On the scale of an adventuring party and their associates, even the most chaotic characters can work together in (relative) harmony. The real problems you might encounter would be when the long-term goals each character is shooting for conflict: if one PC wants to establish iron-fisted rule over a small barony and another wants to tear the same barony's major city apart with factionalism by pitting its powerful factions against each other, you have to consider what will happen when these two goals collide. Both can work together for a while - having the city fall apart from internecine strife is probably a good setup for a tyrant to take over by promising to restore order - but eventually these contrasting motivations will come into conflict.
Second, as the DM, structure your adventures to encourage the PCs to cooperate, even if they never become best of friends. Apart from the old standby of "you all work for a larger power which demands that its agents cooperate", it's also not that hard to work things out so that the best ally for a particular job is one of the PCs.
I remember, for instance, that a wizard in the previously-mentioned Planescape game wanted to take over a wizards' society to which he belonged and turn it into a cultlike organisation which he could control and exploit for power and resources. He ended up striking a deal with one of the warriors in the party to organise a group of mercenaries who would help the wizard eliminate his superiors, as well as with another PC who could arrange for assistance from the forces of a certain demon lord of the Abyss.
This latter arrangement had repercussions later in the campaign when the demon lord in question expected the wizard and, by extension, the rest of the party to serve his interests in a looming conflict with the forces of Baator. As it happened, the wizard turned his back on this purported debt - but, unbeknownst to him, the cleric in the party became a devotee of the demon lord and kept tabs on the party's activities on his behalf.
None of these allegiances and betrayals came to a head until the climax of the game, when everyone took sides and tried to screw each other over. Before that point, though there was plenty of conflict between personalities and arguments over the direction we should be taking, there were very few serious problems.
I think the key is to give everyone a reason why they should cooperate. Evil people can have friends or family whom they wouldn't betray, for instance. A common faith or cause can provide cohesion. Making sure that another PC's unique abilities or resources are important to fulfilling another PC's goals is a pretty easy GM "cheat" to keep them working together.
The simple solution is twofold.
First, remember that "evil" doesn't have to mean "stupidly shortsighted". You might be playing an amoral wizard who is willing to step on anyone who gets in the way of her controlling the Mages' Guild, but if there was ever a set of candidates for "careful cultivation" instead of "ruthless exploitation", it's your fellow PCs. Nine times out of ten it is genuinely in your best interests to work with each other to achieve your goals - any betrayal has to be committed in order to gain something that's genuinely worth losing a known quantity as your ally.
None of this is an issue of "law" versus "chaos", either. On the scale of an adventuring party and their associates, even the most chaotic characters can work together in (relative) harmony. The real problems you might encounter would be when the long-term goals each character is shooting for conflict: if one PC wants to establish iron-fisted rule over a small barony and another wants to tear the same barony's major city apart with factionalism by pitting its powerful factions against each other, you have to consider what will happen when these two goals collide. Both can work together for a while - having the city fall apart from internecine strife is probably a good setup for a tyrant to take over by promising to restore order - but eventually these contrasting motivations will come into conflict.
Second, as the DM, structure your adventures to encourage the PCs to cooperate, even if they never become best of friends. Apart from the old standby of "you all work for a larger power which demands that its agents cooperate", it's also not that hard to work things out so that the best ally for a particular job is one of the PCs.
I remember, for instance, that a wizard in the previously-mentioned Planescape game wanted to take over a wizards' society to which he belonged and turn it into a cultlike organisation which he could control and exploit for power and resources. He ended up striking a deal with one of the warriors in the party to organise a group of mercenaries who would help the wizard eliminate his superiors, as well as with another PC who could arrange for assistance from the forces of a certain demon lord of the Abyss.
This latter arrangement had repercussions later in the campaign when the demon lord in question expected the wizard and, by extension, the rest of the party to serve his interests in a looming conflict with the forces of Baator. As it happened, the wizard turned his back on this purported debt - but, unbeknownst to him, the cleric in the party became a devotee of the demon lord and kept tabs on the party's activities on his behalf.
None of these allegiances and betrayals came to a head until the climax of the game, when everyone took sides and tried to screw each other over. Before that point, though there was plenty of conflict between personalities and arguments over the direction we should be taking, there were very few serious problems.
I think the key is to give everyone a reason why they should cooperate. Evil people can have friends or family whom they wouldn't betray, for instance. A common faith or cause can provide cohesion. Making sure that another PC's unique abilities or resources are important to fulfilling another PC's goals is a pretty easy GM "cheat" to keep them working together.
