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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5752087" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm not sure that the two are really comparable.As a DM, I'm not self-identifying in any way with an NPC.  As a PC, I'm almost always self-identifying with the character at least to some extent.As a DM, my relationship to any particular NPC is transitory and ephemeral.  Not only is it unlikely that I'll spend much time bringing any one NPC to life, but I'm likely to bounce around between characterizing NPC's even within the same session.  It's hard to form an attachment to an NPC under these circumstances, and its hard to adopt a mode of thinking or behavior on this basis.  But when you play a PC, you'll often spend 100's of hours in the character's skull (as it were), thinking like that character so you can figure out what they would do.I'm not saying that there is something inherently wrong with playing an evil PC, but I do find something bizarre about playing for team evil exclusively or enjoying without reservation characterizing an evil PC.  Even the most empathetic, charming, evil character tends to make you feel sick inside after enough time passes if his evil is anything more than a hat he wears.   In my experience, most people neither play particularly evil nor particularly good characters in the long run.  Most players make considerations based on 'winning' the game, a very little else.  This tends to produce a sort of casual brutality that most players don't dwell on much, and which doesn't really hit them much because they don't spend much time thinking of the characters in the game as more than game peices to move around.  That is to say, you aren't killing orcs, you are 'killing' a miniature, or reducing down a pile of numbers.  So conversely, most people playing 'evil' are not engaging the world at a level deeper than that either.  It takes quite a bit to shock your average player - especially an experienced one - out of this mode of thought.</blockquote>

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