Evil PCs?

[Celebrim]

I frankly have never seen it done well. Well, there is one exception, but it hardly counts.

The only time I've ever seen it work is 'reverse dungeon' slightly humorous campaigns for bands of all evil humanoids.

First of all, I've never met a person who played an evil character who was a half-way decent roleplayer. I've never seen a complex evil character. Perhaps it is that you have to bring some maturity to the table in order to play evil well, and most mature players have lost interest in the shock value and novelty of an evil character.

Secondly, most people who try to play 'nuanced evil' miss the point. There are no end of quotes in this thread of the sort, "Evil is the alignment that isn't afraid to rape, kill, or steal when it serves a purpose." I believe these posters mistake nuetral for evil. It is the nuetral character who in extremity, in order to protect his interests, will do something evil. You would never say of a good character that they in extremity in order to protect thier interests would protect the innocent, act charitably, and serve justice. Evil is the opposite of good. Just as good must do good even when its interests aren't obviously served, even when it means a certain amount of trouble to do so, so evil must do evil even when its interests aren't obviously served and even when it means trouble to do so. Evil is the alignment that revels in doing wrong, and you are out of character if you pass up an oppurtunity to kill, rape, and steal whenever you can get away with it - and sometimes even if you can't. I'm sure that you can have a complex interesting evil character, but you don't get to that complexity by being less evil, any more than being a complex interesting good character means being less good.

Thirdly, a truly evil party doesn't do the sort of things that heroes do. Villians don't act like heroes. It isn't in thier nature. I can scarsely think of a story of a group of evil beings having an adventure together. Greedy thieves pulling off a crime maybe, as in the Sting or Oceans 11, but its usually pretty clear that you are dealing with something less than evil here, with a measure of honor, for which theft is just a trade they practice to get by and maybe get rich and murder is a bit beyond the pale. But evil? They don't go off and attack monsters. They attack children. They attack the most helpless than that they can find. (Not to bring politics into this, but when's the last time you heard of a shooter busting into an NRA meeting or a serial killer that target MMA champion's or SpecOps or whatever.)

I said that I had once seen a well played evil campaign. It lasted all of 15 minutes. It was highly entertaining, but the characters took longer to roll up than the campaign did. The most powerful character demanded tribute from the second most powerful character. The third most powerful character played the toady. When the second most powerful character refused to yield to the most powerful one, a lethal fight insued (initiated by a surprise attack by the weaker character) but with some lucky dice rolls, the stronger character defeated then raped and looted the body of the victim. Down a party member and injured, the lead character died to the first wandering monster at which point the campaign ended when the toady made off with everyone's possessions. I couldn't fault anyone's roleplaying. Maybe that's why villains in the stories surround themselves with weaklings and don't tend to act in groups.

 

[Gort]

In my sig is the comic of an evil campaign that's been running for years. Evil campaigns can run very successfully. I don't think I've played in a better game, to be honest. However, they do have a lot of potential for going wrong if the DM doesn't guard against it. As someone else said earlier, evil is mostly motivated by fear and greed. With players being very rich in magic items and gold and so forth, intra-party theft and murder is very lucrative. Thus, it's very important to make sure fear over-rides greed enough to prevent that.

Basically, in order for your evil party to stick together, you have to make sure they all know they're on the same side. In our campaign each god in the Greyhawk pantheon had a nation of followers in the world, and the good and neutral gods had allied together against the evil ones, who couldn't get on with each other enough to work together. Thus the evil nations were facing destruction, and formed an alliance of their own to fight back. The players were a party of elite warriors who were assigned missions by the evil overlord, who was obviously powerful enough to kill them if they got too out of line.

One important part is the idea of a leader. One of the players was favoured by the evil overlord, so he gave the orders for the most part. When he left the campaign, (moved out of town) the DM continued to run his character, until he got charmed by an enemy. My character then seized the opportunity to kill him and take control of the party, which was successful. From then on, my character was the "leader". However, it's very important to realise that in an evil party, you're only a leader because the others profit from you being so. You get the right to yell things like, "Minions! Slaughter them all!" but you can't constrain the other party members at all, really. You find yourself forced to play it fair, and do your job in the party to your utmost. Make friends with other party members. Make sure they need you around.

After all, if you kill a players character for no reason, they can just make a character that kills yours, and nobody wants that cycle to start.

Edit: Oh, and agreed with the person who says a lot of people mistake evil for neutral. NEUTRAL characters will murder, maim and plunder if it benefits them the most. They'll also do good things if that benefits them the most. EVIL characters will murder, maim and plunder just for the sake of it, just as GOOD characters will do favours for people without expecting anything in return.

Don't water down evil by pretending it gives you more options, having an evil alignment means you shouldn't be doing good acts ever if you can help it.