If someone who murders peasants, steals their food and torches their fields, brings in women to be raped, commits incest, and throws children off of towers is not evil to you, I shudder to imagine what someone has to do in order to be considered evil.
Well, yes, these are all morally reprehensible things to do. But you have to put things into context, not that I'm excusing these things.
There's a reason we don't (at least in my part of the world) judge premeditated the same way we do crimes of passion. Or that we don't judge children the same way we do adults, or that we consider mental illness to be a factor in determining someone's intents.
What Jaime Lannister does, most of the cast of the show would have done (or actually have, or enabled it indirectly). In many ways, the book series is a commentary on the social and political system of the middle ages. But in my opinion, being born in such a system and having to partake in it is bad, but there's understanding that society builds itself and forces the individuals inside it to act in a certain way. Soldiers fighting a war are not inherently evil, yet they do evil things.
Jaime is raised in a system where it's a
us vs
them mentality. We win or they win. It's family before anything else. The
most important thing is to save your family. And he acts accordingly to that system.
There might be a linguistic factor is (english not being my mother tongue), my understanding of the word
evil might not be as deep as yours. Evil in french could be translated as "mal", which is also used as a word for
wrong and
mad. But evil to me, is something done out of malice, out of wanting to hurt others to hurt them.
Once again, that doesn't excuse the actions themselves. But excusing and understanding are not the same. But one is important to how we judge these things today.
I have done this once or twice before for small little mini-campaigns. Didn't make much difference, but it did, to me, remove a bit of the "feeling of playing D&D".
