D&D 5E Evil parties that don't fall apart: ideas, suggestions, experiences?

[Warskull]

Evil characters get a bad reputation because a lot of players look at them as a license to be a dick and break rules that are not meant to be broken. They use it as an opportunity to troll the party and cause grief.

If you want an evil campaign I would lay out some ground rules. Let players know what you will not allow to happen. Explain to them that you will not allow the players to steal from, kill, or fight each other in a significant way. Thus the players need to come up with reasons why these evil characters work together. Ideally you want evil characters who will do almost anything, but still have their limits.

For example an two evil Dwarves who are brothers. They were captured by bandits when they were young and relied on each other quite a bit to survive the ordeal. Eventually they grew stronger and came to conquer those bandits. The immoral lifestyle rubbed off on them and they have no problem doing dirty work for coin, but they also share a strong bond. They will never betray each other. The see things as them against the world and they are willing to break any rule to ensure they win. They recently sacrificed the whole pack of bandits to save their own skin and are out to find a new source of coin and amusement.

You can evil codify some of your rules in the game world. Perhaps they all belong some sort of criminal organization. There are harsh penalties for betraying another member, a code of honor among things to ensure they can actually work together. Players know if they screw over another player and it gets out, there will be a huge price on their head and tons of very well trained assassins will come their way.

 

[fba827]

You must establish some reason why they are working together.

Meta reasoning gets tested very quickly and stretches plausibility. Ex of meta reasoning " because you're all pcs and we want to game"

Plot reasoning works well enough but only survives as long as the plot is present. Ex of plot reasoning " the king has wronged you, so you are working together to cause trouble for the king"
But once the first mission is done there is little incentive for the pcs to continue working together

Patron. A greater power, is forcing them to work together. He has something on each of them or is a force that they fear, or so on. The head if the thieves guild wants jobs done but doesn't want his men involved so he threatens or blackmails the pcs to do missions. Maybe they are all in prison but the guard offers to release them if they do special ops against an enemy kingdom ( with some magical spell/device that allows them to be tracked to keep an eye on them ) . Maybe they each have a similar underground contact ( ie they all use the same fence to sell their stolen loot) and this fence asks them to do something major with the promise of a huge reward at the end - this last idea really does need to be some campaign spanning arc with lots of sub steps cause otherwise it will fall apart as soon as the job is done.

Anyway that's my thoughts on it.

 

[Prism]

We have played two evil campaigns and both had very specific goals that kept the party together

One was during the fall of the drow city Ched Nasad. The PCs were generally evil having lived or traded in the city for a while but were non-drow now trying to survive a catastrophic event. Survival kept them together a bit like Lost or Walking Dead. At about 7th level we escaped the ruined city, the threat level dropped and things began to fall apart. We survived as a party until about 9th as characters goals began to differ. We split the party before it got bloody.

Another campaign was a city based crime campaign. What kept the characters together was their backstory. These were childhood friends that had survived the streets of Luskan together before making a run for it to Waterdeep, for a new life of crime. They made a good team and met their combined goal of getting rich and making a name for themselves. So character creation kept them strong but so did a shared goal. Throwing random evil characters together in this kind of campaign would have been much harder without the shared background story

 

[Li Shenron]

What would be a good setup for an evil party that would not immediately devolve into in-fighting or disrupting the entire story?

...

What have been your experiences? What worked or didn't work? What are some things you'd like to try?

With relation to having a plan, it's not strictly an issue with evil characters, as good characters benefit from long-term goals too. But I can definitely imagine that quests do fall on the laps of good characters even when they don't have plans.

About in-fighting, the solution is simple: do not allow it.

That doesn't apply to evil characters only, but to anyone. A PC shall not physically attack another, steal or harm its property, betray the party, or purposefully cause damage to the others in any other way. It doesn't matter if the player thinks he's "acting in character". That sort of character is banned, unless everyone is fully aware that it WILL disrupt the game, and is fine with the idea (but AFAIK, they may be fine with the idea only for a short while).

 

[Scripture]

It can be fun for one-shots. It can be fun for short-term/a few sessions storyline: we're all minions of Big-Evil-Despot let's go conquer lands for him and claim riches for ourselves. We're on a mission to assassinate X. We need to stop the establishment of the new temple of Good Guy in Village-town and turn it to the service of Dark Lord. Stuff like that..."little" adventures.

Both The Shield and Sons Of Anarchy made it to Season 7.

In an actual response to the OP, the character I plan to play getting back into D&D is a sociopath. That merely means he lacks emotions; he's true neutral and a necromancer. I imagine him more like Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes (smart and unconcerned about people and feelings). I'm just tired of the good guy Paladin prototype (which is why I liked the video game Dungeon Keeper).

I'll also support anyone saying this is a roleplay and no matter the alignment of the character, it's the people that give the roles a third dimension.

 

[Jack99]

In the last 25 years, I have run two evil campaigns. First was about 20 years ago in 2e and lasted for perhaps 9-10 levels. It was an awesome campaign (according to my players anyway) right up until the end, when it imploded in interparty backstabbing and betrayals. The second campaign finished last year, after running for a couple of years (up to level 15, 2e again).

IME, the key to making the second one successful was twofold.
1) The players wanted to play evil, but acknowledged (based on the experiences we made 20 years ago) that interparty fighting and backstabbing needed to be avoided, so that instead of seeking confrontations with each other, because they were evil, they would seek to avoid them, precisely due to them being evil.

2) We created ties and reasons to bind the characters together. Set in my own world, they played dark elves (not drows) and evil race of elves living in dark forests, with much of the family structure we know from the drow, but not necessarily as psychopathic-evil as the drow are usually portrayed. The tight family bonds and a father of their family who expressively forbade them to kill each other, as he needed them all to advance their house. This and the campaign, that pretty much pitted their house against the world, went a long way to make things work.

Now, I am sure that some who had witnessed our sessions would argue that they played evil poorly and weren't consistent. Maybe. TBH I don't really care. Players got to do evil stuff, make different decisions than the heroes they usually play get to make, and for a year or two, we had lots and lots of fun. And IMO, that's the most important thing.

 

[steeldragons]

Both The Shield and Sons Of Anarchy made it to Season 7.

I have no idea what this means or how it is relevant. I presume you're talking about tv shows?

 

[Dausuul]

IME, the big challenge for an evil party has nothing to do with the PCs and everything to do with the players. If your players are just itching to stab each other in the back, then playing an evil party gives them a gold-plated excuse to do so. If you have problems with intra-party quarrels already, your evil party is going to be a murder-fest, and there's not a lot you can do to prevent that.

However, let's say your players are generally non-backstabby sorts, who don't need prodding from the DM to play nicely together. In that case, an evil party can work fine. Just encourage them to have some kind of personal bond. Being evil--even chaotic evil!--doesn't mean you backstab everybody. Tribalism is a very human thing; the same warrior who's willing to give his life for his brother-in-arms may think nothing of committing horrific atrocities on civilians who cross his path. Shared goals are also very helpful. One of my most entertaining campaigns was a standard "evil god, locked away for centuries, seeks to rise again and conquer the world" storyline--except that the PCs were the ones seeking to free the evil god and lead his armies to victory.

 

[Scripture]

I have no idea what this means or how it is relevant. I presume you're talking about tv shows?

Yes. About "evil" groups. In one case, corrupt cops and the other a motorcycle gang. There is plenty of material as to why these groups stayed together for so long. Probably the most relevant is surviving against a greater "evil" force at play.

I don't see evil as the reason why groups fold. I think it's the perceived chaotic aspect. As long as there's a goal, which every campaign should have, there's really no reason to turn inward.

 

[soulcatcher78]

Evil for the sake of being evil or evil because that's the only way they can survive? Binding them tightly to each other will allow them to avoid in fighting but if all they want to do is wipe out villagers they'll be living in a cave somewhere pretty soon when the whole world is after them.

Read "The Black Company" for options on how a less than good group of characters interact with one another and the world around them.