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

[Curmudjinn]

I find that evil campaigns, ran properly, tend to be just as successful as good campaigns, will plans coming to fruition more often even.

A problem with many evil games is how the players play them, and how the GM allows things to play out. Most games consist of evil and neutral players(and NPCs) that all operate within the Chaotic Stupid alignment. Nothing has meaning, nothing has substance, aside from greed and murder, which is just laughable and untrue, yet that is what is normally allowed in evil games. Evil characters are not warp-spawned possessed space marines, acting against wisdom with wanton malice and bloodlust.

Evil characters do many of the same things good ones do, and many more evil follow laws far more strictly than good-doers, however with less morals in their enacting of those laws. If done right, they are some of the most intriguing and emotional games(for a player), as a good DM can force a player to deal with actual repercussions and bring impulse actions down to deal with humility and skewed morals. Not all evil characters think killing is such a great thing, and others might not believe it is acceptable at all, preferring to ruin others through greed and character defamation.

The box created in many minds on what an evil campaign looks like is very, very small. At least in practice. When there is no reason it should be.

 

[Minigiant]

One of my favorite evil games was one where the Good Guys won and we were the survivors of the various bad guys' armies. We had to team up to find a new patron and kill the Giant Good Hero Guys. Drawing attention of the high heroes would be suicide and killing each other meant we would be easier for the GGHGs to off us. Blackguard, death cleric, assassin, necromancer, and warlock. We eventually got a very powerful boss who corral us from ever trying to backstab each other.

Lots of stealth and hiding bodies. Lots of pretending to be good guys.
Lots of corrupting people and hiding agents.
Lots of backstabbing allies and henchman who were no longer useful or failed us.

Bad times. Bad times.

 

[Mad Zagyg]

Running an evil campaign is totally doable. You just need a group of mature people who are interested in the concept for the right reasons. If you have players that want to play evil characters so they can torture and kill everyone they encounter and backstab their buddies, the game will certainly be short lived. This sort of cartoonish evil is how kids might view the concept.

From a realistic standpoint, the themes that are possible to explore with a group of black-hearted adventurers, who as a group aspire to wealth, power, and conquest, can make for a fantastic game. This notion that bad guys don't/won't/can't have friends or work together as a team is silly. Bad guys do that all the time! Remember when the Empire Struck Back?

In the same way that your good guys aren't ALWAYS good, bad guys aren't ALWAYS bad. Look at any top ten list of people's favorite villains and you'll notice that there are some qualities in these characters that we find admirable. The movie "Unforgiven" gives us several great profiles of bad men. We root for Clint Eastwood in that film, but he is a man prone to violence (or at least, he was) and bad temperament. Gene Hackman's character is a bad man in charge of keeping the peace in his town. He is not above torture and employs such tactics two or three times in the course of the movie. And yet, in a few scenes, we find him affable and friendly.

If people are interested in trying this type of game but have had difficulty in the past, it's possible your group isn't the type that can handle these themes. One suggestion might be to try giving the party a built-in goal right from the beginning. Be up front with the players. Tell them that you aren't interested in running an evil campaign where the party backstabs and steals from one another. An evil character can realize just as easily as a good one that creating discord within his group will not further his or her goals.

Even a band of evil characters that considers themselves a mercenary group for hire can recognize that they are part of a team. They can easily understand that they are working together to get a job done. The difference between this group and a "good" group is that they will use any means necessary to accomplish their mission.

Except... "No disintegrations."

 

[AmpsterMan]

it seems to me like the issue may not be Evil PCs themselves but perhaps Chaotic Evil PCs. All you need is one Chaotic player that's bored that night to use his "I'm Chaotic Evil, I betray the party for the lolz"

Of course, I'm simplifying and building a strawman so you can see my point of view, but damnit doesn't it make sense?!

 

[Dausuul]

it seems to me like the issue may not be Evil PCs themselves but perhaps Chaotic Evil PCs. All you need is one Chaotic player that's bored that night to use his "I'm Chaotic Evil, I betray the party for the lolz"

That's not a PC issue at all. It's a player issue. The alignment is just the player's excuse.

 

[pkt77242]

One of my favorite evil games was one where the Good Guys won and we were the survivors of the various bad guys' armies. We had to team up to find a new patron and kill the Giant Good Hero Guys. Drawing attention of the high heroes would be suicide and killing each other meant we would be easier for the GGHGs to off us. Blackguard, death cleric, assassin, necromancer, and warlock. We eventually got a very powerful boss who corral us from ever trying to backstab each other.

Lots of stealth and hiding bodies. Lots of pretending to be good guys.
Lots of corrupting people and hiding agents.
Lots of backstabbing allies and henchman who were no longer useful or failed us.

Bad times. Bad times.

That is an awesome idea.

 

[Desdichado]

As fun as it can be to DM games where the good guys save the day, I do wonder what it would be like for the PCs to be ruthless, black-hearted scoundrels who would drown a box of kittens if the price or cause is right. What would be a good setup for an evil party that would not immediately devolve into in-fighting or disrupting the entire story?

I'm not quite sure why this is a thing. I've done plenty of evil campaigns, and I've never once seen it immediately (or even eventually) devolve into in-fighting or disruption. I can only assume that when people play evil campaigns, for some reason they subconsciously also jettison the notion of the unspoken social contract that keeps a group of players (as opposed to characters) working together.

It sounds like the main thing that needs to be done is to reaffirm to the group that just because their characters are rogues and scoundrels--if not even outright villains--that that doesn't change your expectations of how the player group dynamic will work.

I mean, after all--it's not like the Mafia immediately devolves into catastrophic infighting or disruption of all of their activities. Nor does the IRS.

EDIT: In fact, if they're struggling with what it means to be "evil" then maybe you need to give them some kind of material example. Watch The Godfather before starting the game, and tell them--see that crime family and how they work and how they operate and what their goals are? That's what we're doing. Except in D&D instead of 1970s New York.

 

[DMZ2112]

it seems to me like the issue may not be Evil PCs themselves but perhaps Chaotic Evil PCs. All you need is one Chaotic player that's bored that night to use his "I'm Chaotic Evil, I betray the party for the lolz"

Of course, I'm simplifying and building a strawman so you can see my point of view, but damnit doesn't it make sense?!

It's not just Chaotic Evil that's the problem. In a predominantly Lawful Good game, properly run Chaotic Good characters can be equally as disruptive, and vice versa.

That's not a PC issue at all. It's a player issue. The alignment is just the player's excuse.

That's not entirely fair. If a dungeon master lets a player roll a Chaotic character in a predominantly Lawful group, they deserve what they get. A properly played Chaotic character is just as devoted to free agency as a Lawful character is devoted to order. There is a divide between those two cardinal points equal to that between Good and Evil.

In my evil campaign, I was very clear that the setting was Lawful Evil and that the further characters got from that baseline the harder it would be for them to integrate. I believe the phrase I used was that Lawful but not Evil characters would be more likely to find trouble but less likely to have trouble find them, while Evil but not Lawful characters would be more likely to have trouble find them, but less likely to find trouble themselves.

I had a player insist on being Chaotic Evil (and not just Chaotic Evil, but True Believer Chaotic Evil), and I explained to him that the only way his character would survive day one was if there was a stout collar around his neck and the party leader was holding the chain. He agreed and we never had any trouble. The party learned to appreciate his destructive tendencies, and when he got out of hand he was whipped to within an inch of his life.

Everyone else in the group opted for Lawful Evil or Neutral Evil, and the campaign is still running smoothly.

It's important to remember that just because an alignment is at an "extreme" of the compass rose doesn't mean it's necessarily "extreme" in play. There are /levels/ of Chaotic Evil the same way there are levels of Lawful Good. It's difficult to imagine a hardcore-take-no-prisoners approach to Neutral Good, but not impossible. Those people are out there, heedless of the wills of others, concerned only with helping those who cannot help themselves.

Every Lawful Evil character doesn't have to be an illithid slavelord, and every Chaotic Evil character doesn't have to be a mad-eyed berserker slick with the blood of his allies. Alignment may be absolute, but people certainly aren't.

 

[amerigoV]

The Savage Worlds setting Necessary Evil is built as an evil campaign. Its a Supers campaign where all the Good Supers get tricked by and then eliminated by Aliens. The Aliens then invade Earth. Only the Villains are left to save humanity - hence the name. Its a rather popular setting amongst us Savages. I have not played in it myself (its one of the few Supers games I would like to play in)

I think there is a good lesson here if you are going to run an evil game - just because you are evil it does not mean you will be on the side of evil. Its ok for me to oppress my people, but its not ok for someone else to oppress my people.

 

[Desdichado]

That's not entirely fair. If a dungeon master lets a player roll a Chaotic character in a predominantly Lawful group, they deserve what they get. A properly played Chaotic character is just as devoted to free agency as a Lawful character is devoted to order. There is a divide between those two cardinal points equal to that between Good and Evil.

You're right; it's not entirely fair. Part of the problem is that the law/chaos axis of alignment doesn't make any real sense when it comes to people's actual motivation and morality and ethics. It's a nonsense code that people are trying to interpret in play, but because it's nonsense, they can't really do it properly.

My most successful "evil" campaigns were usually when I specifically told the players that I wasn't using alignment as a mechanic at all, and there wasn't any point in assigning yourself one. Then I told them that the the theme was pirates, criminals and scoundrels.

Interpreted after the fact into D&D, they'd no doubt have been evil characters. But we didn't really try to do that, because we didn't care.