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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wombat" data-source="post: 5707597" data-attributes="member: 8447">I have a few serious problems with Evil Campaigns.  I have run two or three  (depending on how you are counting -- see below) and played in one other; in addition, I have watched/heard of innumerable others in my 30+ years of gaming.  I'll try and articulate my problems.As a GM and as Player, I prefer my heroes to be generally good.  No, not Goody Two Shoes, for many have been flawed, dark, and even wrenching redemption story types, but at the core it is simply easier to play a character (or run for characters) who is positive in nature.  Having said that, I did run a campaign with a group of good characters where one took an arc towards irredeemably evil.  This was huge for the game and left everyone drained by the end of the arc, but drained in a good way -- they knew that one of their own had turned ultimately against them and was gone forever.  Wow, talk about amazing roleplaying!  Yeah, that one was worth running.As for the ones where I set out to run Evil campaigns, one turned primarily towards dark paranoia and creeped out my players so much they asked me to stop.  The second started off fine, but a new players joined in who was of a mindset that I will describe below and this brought the game to a crashing halt.  The final one I attempted is hard to determine -- I was running an old school Star Trek game (TOS) where the players were Klingons.  Were they evil?  Hard to determine; they certainly were not likable.  That one ran fairly well and came to an acceptable conclusion.The one I played in, I found I was the only person playing a seriously Evil character.  I left after four sessions as I found the whole thing pointless.Now here is my major problem with Evil campaigns.  Most people do NOT play Evil when they are in Evil campaigns.  They run Chaotic Idiotic, they play Bad Puns, they play "Hee hee hee, I killed a kitten", but they do not actually get into the skin of being Evil.  They are more like Deadpool or Cesar Romero's Joker than Hannibal Lecter or American Psycho.  They play what I refer to as Disney Evil -- more naughty than vile, big on the jokes, and never either dealing with (or seriously justifying away) the cruelties, selfishness, and general vileness that is evil.  Yeah, that character sheet may have Evil written on it, but aside from being able to pickup certain magic items and prestige classes, they are no worse than most Good PCs.And this is not just true for D&D -- I have had the dubious pleasure of being around people playing Vampire: the Masquerade and they are constantly like this.  They play individuals who only continue to exist by ripping the lifeblood of others away from them, at the very least Assault and Battery and often Murder.  How do they deal with this?  They skip over most of the bloodsucking attacks ("That's boring.  We already did that.  Do we have to play it out all the time?") and then get involved in low-rent pseudo-Machiavellian political maneuvers, with a machine-gun chorus.  The closest they come to dealing with evil is justifying that somehow they are nicer than the other vampires, but without ever mentally/emotionally facing, especially as players, the damage they cause to the world simply by continuing to exist.If someone were to run a Really Evil game in my presence, I would applaud them.  I doubt such a campaign would last very long, though, if the players really thought about what they were doing.</blockquote>

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