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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barasawa" data-source="post: 6217168" data-attributes="member: 44909">I've been in many campaigns that either allowed evil characters, or were evil campaigns specifically. It can work very well, but more often than not it doesn't. When if fails, it tends to go freaking nuclear meltdown.Evil campaigns have many become slaughter the town frenzies as the players begin to kill everyone not in the group. If it happened once or twice, it could be shrugged off, but once it starts, it seems to only get worse. It's rather hard to have any real campaign or storyline when the pcs response to most things is kill everyone, and talk to dead later, but only if we have to.Worse is having the evil pcs. By itself, it can be a great story enhancer. I was even in a group where a CG wizard and a LE wizard were best friends, that were always risking their lives to aid the other. Unfortunately though, in my experience, most of those playing evils are just doing it so they can screw over anyone, especially the party, whenever they feel like it using the excuse of "I'm evil...".  That's almost a guarantee when they wanted to play chaotic evil. (Same with chaotic neutral if evil is banned by GM.) Causing party dissent or otherwise screwing up the group is not story building, nor is it usually fun for the other people. If you are really intent on that kind of antisocial behavior, you should be playing solo adventures.There is a tendency in fantasy for the adventurers to be heroes, and those are almost never evil. As I've stated, in my experiences, it also doesn't work for keeping a game going, except in rare circumstances. You also have to take into account publicity. RPGs don't seem to be under attack at this time like has happened in the past, but these things come in waves, it will happen again. Being able to say that evil characters is an optional thing in a separate book for the GM to base his villains on (every hero needs bad guys to defeat) is a good way to deflect a nice chunk of that criticism.So it should be available for the GM, who can then make it available to the players if deemed necessary. For the most part, it would be really redundant. After all, what's the difference between an evil warrior, and a good on. Same with that mage? For almost all things, there is virtually no difference between them other than how they act. Sure, there are some mechanical differences, but for the most part, they are so simple to figure out, one paragraph in the DMG should deal with 90% of it. For example, the spell Protection from Good. Let's see, to figure out the effects of the Protection from Evil spell, swap all instances of the words 'good' and 'evil' with each other. There, that was simple. Does the Protection from Good spell need any other changes to it's mechanics? No. Even the antipaladin can be treated in a similar fashion, since after all, it's merely the evil mirror of it's good twin. (Yes, there is a tendency for designers to try and out-cool the old stuff, but that tends to overpower the new stuff, and isn't really an opposite anymore, now is it.)Anyhow, I hope I've explained my viewpoint clearly (probably as clear as mud), but what it really boils down to is that there are plenty of reasons to have the 'evil' specific stuff be in the GMs books, as the rest of it is superficial anyways.</blockquote>

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