When evil characters make friends :3

[Stormsparrow]

The character must be witty... there must always be a good reason for the action.

Gold is stolen and put aside as a special donation to a charity. The evil character may even set up a phony charity to donate to, and convince other characters to donate too. Yes, I had done that and gotten away with it.

If you kill someone, it was for a valid reason. That innocent looking farmer may have been a terrorist in hiding, or may have been a wanted person. I had an evil Cleric that would cast commune with dead spells and relay fake messages back to the party. Being in an evil group, I suspected that they were lying to me too.

Soon enough even the densest player will catch on that maybe all these evil actions are not a coincidence.

While playing the classic thief or sociopathic murderer can be fun, I have a soft spot for complex characters suffering from internal conflict.

Certianly the template of the evil character has plenty of room for inner struggle. Think of the adventurer whose heart has been turned to ice through trauma. Perhaps she suffers from a revenge fueled tunnel vision.

Or, and this is my current character idea, a young girl who grew up surrounded by dark magic and dreadful secrets, and never formed the moral compass given by mainstream society. As a result, she has constructed her own convoluted ethical framework that borrows heavily from the stories told to her by necromancers and power hungry scholars of the arcane.

She might have a good heart, and maybe her interactions with a good party will change her for the better, but she would certainly be lawfully evil.

It seems to me that if you allow your character to reject the system of right and wrong proposed by a god like Pelor or Avandra, then they can construct their own, leading to incredibly interesting roleplay situations.
I can't remember the name, but there was a society in Frank Herbert's "Dune Messiah" that would, without fail, leave a path of escape open to its victims. Something like that would be really thrilling to incorporate into a character.

But that's just me. Sorry for the long post.

 

[arscott]

In my experience, things work out best if the players know that the character is evil, even if the characters don't. This sort of thing can be pretty fun unless the players are complete failures at keeping player knowledge and character knowledge separate.

 

[Fraisala]

Like others have said, it depends on the group.

In my experience though, being evil does not have to mean being incapable of working with others. It doesn't even have to mean being on the "evil" side of every imaginable conflict.

An evil character might not give about altruism, but he might not want to ruin his revenge plot by cutting himself off from the most effective murder weapon he can think of: the rest of the party. The goody two shoes brigade may be annoying at times, but they're your best chance to put the most effective hurt on your arch-enemy, mr BBEG. You bide your time, try to blend in. Besides... those plucky rascals are starting to grow on ya. Even evil guys can have friends, ya know. When you take over BBEG's kingdom, you should totally give them their own titles and some of your land to manage The paladin gets the stinky little undead-infested swamp everyone hated slogging through so much, of course. heh! Should you tell him before you do that about how you didn't exactly kill the lich that lives (unlives?) there so much as you just ticked him off really, really badly and made your escape with the artifact? Nahh, he'll figure it out eventually...

of course if there's reason to believe the party might be threatened by that before or during the final fight, you might want to say something, but you already know that