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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crawdaddy's Boy" data-source="post: 6978280" data-attributes="member: 6871169">I've always found that evil characters can easily participate in groups, if they're designed to. I myself almost always play lawful evil, because I find it the easiest to role play, especially when I'm playing a wizard. And my Gray Elf, Lawful Evil, Wizard and our group's Mountain Dwarf, Lawful Good, Cleric were the best of friends. Why? Because rather than getting caught up on the words good and evil, we looked at each other's motivations. We also didn't play the alignments too over the top. Just because you're evil doesn't mean you are entirely self serving. That's only CE. LE, especially, can get along well in groups because of the lawful. Have part of your law code be 'be loyal to those who are loyal to me', or something like that. Just because you're evil doesn't mean you have to treat everyone like dirt. It just means you have to be willing to do what would be deemed morally wrong by most other people. I didn't go around blasting everyone out of my way, but I would never sit back and take anything. There was one time that an npc insulted my wizard several times, and I set his hand on fire. The reasoning was "the burned hand teaches best. I'm an adventurer, and a wizard to boot. I demand respect." In most circles, burning off someone's hand is considered pretty evil to do, even if it was only his left hand, and while the cleric was very angry about it, he understood why I did it. For any of your players who wants to try playing evil, or any other alignment they're not used to, just remind them not to go too far. It's the same with LG. Lawful good doesn't mean Lawful stupid. They don't have to charge off without thinking for any and every village woman with a sob story. The descriptions that most places have for the evil alignments are pretty extreme. They were written with DM's designing the villains in mind. A DM's first couple of villains are pretty cartoony, because that's what's easy. That's the way I did it, and it's the same for anyone else I've talked to. A character they're  planning on playing for a full campaign needs to be far more complex than the villain you meet just before the final battle. Also, tell them to think, "how could I design my evil character to be motivated to cooperate in a group?," rather than leaving it up to you as the DM, or their fellow players to come up with.</blockquote>

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