Evil PCs?

[Nifft]

I've (briefly) played Evil characters, and the key IMHO is to have a reason why you're adventuring with the group. (This may be more general advice -- non-evil PCs should have some reason why they're bothering with each other.)

Evil people can have friends. You're not required to betray everyone... you just know it's one of your options.

Cheers, -- N

 

[Andor]

Two years later in a different city with a new set of friends I start to GM again. One of my conditions was that Evil PCs would not be allowed. Furthermore, when a PC turns Evil he becomes an NPC. The players accepted that and we had fun. Some years later in a new city with a new party, I laid down the same law and everyone agreed. Fun was had by all. In my most recent game I laid down the no Evil law and the players agreed. However in the course of the game one of the players kept running his CN character in Evil ways. I reminded him that his character would become an NPC once he became evil. But he kept on committing Evil acts and the other players would 'turn a blind eye and a deaf ear' regardless of their character's alignment. I quit the campaign. Life is too short to play with people who don't respect you or the game.

Did you try declaring his character evil and taking it away from him?

 

[Vague Jayhawk]

I used to play in a gaming group where most of the people in the group were "evil". Evil in a Dr. Evil or an Anne Rice Evil way. I guess what I am trying to say is that the evil that they played was either a little bit comic or just rather dramatic and goth.

I never really liked playing evil characters. Funny thing is they were evil in name only. My neutral characters were more "evil" than they were.

 

[AbeTheGnome]

i once came in halfway through an evil campaign as a replacement player. it was a large group, and most of the players were LE or NE, but there was one CE character as well. the CE character was causing all kinds of problems for the DM and the rest of the group. after i sat in on a session, i rolled a character: a NE assassin, an enforcer of the international thieve's guild, and a worshipper of Mask. after the DM approved my character, he subtly suggested that i poison the CE character because his actions in particular were making things very hard on my PC's organization. i agreed, the CE character died an agonizing death after a meal one night, and we all continued the game without him. eventually, the campaign went into epic levels. the other PCs attempted to commit deicide (on Mystra, i think), and my PC was once again asked to intervene. fortunately, the Pcs turned on each other before my character was forced to kill them all, and the campaign was resolved. my point here is that after the CE character was out of the picture, the campaign held itself together for another 14 levels before the PCs became so power-hungry that things started breaking down. a campaign with nothing but LE characters, and maybe NE characters, can be quite fun.

 

[wildstarsreach]

Evil is okay but only if you are willing not to commit it against the your fellow PC's. Yes this takes the bite out of the truly evil but saves a lot of inter party conflict. I have even been guilty of killing entire parties because it was no holds barred. It isn't fun even from the victor's viewpoint. It has lead to loss of more than one gaming group and other then conspiring OOC to kill my victorous PC.

Unless you make these provisins, evil is not workable.

 

[Vanuslux]

I don't normally allow evil PCs, but I occasionally make exceptions for people I've gamed with a lot. For one campaign I allowed a whole party of evil/neutral characters and that turned out to be great fun but it was with a group of my friends that I'd played with for years. A Lawful Evil human death priest, a chaotic evil orc barbarian , a neutral evil human sorcerer, chaotic neutral halfling rogue, and a neutral human druid (the goody two-shoes of the party in that she didn't actively do anything evil but she didn't do anything to stop her companions from doing anything as long as it didn't mess with anything she cared about). It was surprisingly easy to keep them on track as long as I appealed to their greed and sense of self-preservation and other than the evil's picking on the neutral's a lot they worked together fairly well.

 

[mmu1]

Like many of the people who posted so far, I find it depends a lot on how mature the players are.

I think it really helps to keep it in mind that (as Nifft points out) evil characters are not required to act evil at all times - there's a huge difference between being evil and being a psycho or sociopath - and also that being evil doesn't mean that every single aspect of your personality is disagreeble.

Most notably, not every evil character needs to be unpleasant, rude and bullying - those tend to be the traits that make for far more inter-party friction than the occasional barely-justified killing spree.

 

[Shemeska]

Well, the PCs in my first campaign started out as various shades of good and neutral. By the end of the campaign the CN npc that was with the group had gone CG, the NG celestial PC had fallen to TN, and one of the neutrals was strongly flirting with evil. The exposure to evil they had over the course of the campaign was pretty stark and brutal, and they were sullied by it on some level, and were forced to cope with it in their own ways.

However despite some darker tendencies at points they might have picked up, virtually nothing they could have done would have pulled them into the same catagory of OMFGEVIL that they were fighting.

My second campaign I have some PCs of... questionable morals. I've got an NE tiefling involved in a love triangle with a half-fiend and a greater yugoloth, and they're in the same party with an NG cleric and his LG cohort. Things get interesting at times suffice to say, but the PCs know each other, they're friends, and they've faced enough things to unify them despite their differences in how best to approach things at times. But it's much more difficult to run than a party that's more homogenous in alignment.

 

[sckeener]

Since the entire issue with running a game of some or all evil characters is a player issue, I have no problem running such games. My only rule in my games is no backstabbing other players. Everyone is there to have fun and I don't know of anyone that enjoys a good backstab except the person that did it.

If the players have issues with each other in the game they should resolve it outside the game and play nice in the game. The 'good' players should help the 'evil' players outside of the game to come up with reasons why they are all friendly in the game. The 'evil' players should make sure to stay under radar of the 'good' characters which should limit some of the blatant excesses.

some of my favorite players were evil.

 

[Illirion]

First of all: I don't get why people need to desperately have evil characters all the time.
Second of all: I would not play a campaign with only a portion of the party being evil with my players (I know one or two that would try to kill each other). I believe the mixed alignment party only works if you have very good players (especially the ones with the good alignments). An all evil campaign could be fun for a one-shot, but I can't imagine having an ongoing evil-campaign without someone getting bored or frustrated.

Cheers,
Illirion.