Games Where Player Characters are the Bad Guys

[Ulfgeir]

In the game Neccessary Evil, you play the supervillains. All the heroes were killed off by aliens who invaded Earth, so now it is up to the villains to form the resistance and to kick some alien behind.. You do need to have characters that actually can function together though.

 

[Battlemaster]

Definitely judge dredd games. The judges are fascists, nothing more.

If RAHOWA were actually playable,(thankfully it isn't.) you'd be playing bad guys, literally Nazi bad guys.

There was a game called 'dogs in the vinyard' where you basically played Mormon religious law enforcers making sure no one dissented from the faith, by any means necessary.

Sufficiently advanced was a sf game where you played galactic IP enforcers,who might have to take away or destroy technology people needed to survive if they had jt in violation of IP laws.

 

[MGibster]

From certain viewpoints, dungeon fantasy as a genre is "home invading spree-killers looting subterranean homes"...

Not from most points of view, at least not in my experience. Even in the old days with adventures like Keep on the Borderlands, it was usually made clear in the adventures that PCs were kicking doors and clearing out bad guys. i.e. The default assumption of most of those fantasy games isn't that the PCs are bad guys.

In the game Neccessary Evil, you play the supervillains. All the heroes were killed off by aliens who invaded Earth, so now it is up to the villains form the resistance and to kick some alien behind.. You do need to have characters that actually can function together though.

Necessary Evil is, by necessity, a game where the PCs are most definitely villains. My group made over-the-top villains in the vein of the silver age of comics.

Definitely judge dredd games. The judges are fascists, nothing more.

Having read a lot of Dredd comics, I'll have to disagree at least in part.

1. At great risk to himself, Dredd went out of his way to avoid killing a citizen suffering from future shock who was going on a rampage.
2. He used his discretionary budget to provide a dying girl with a robot body so that she might live. He was under no legal obligation, but did so out of a genuine desire to help her. When she later died anyway Dredd was devastated.
3. He went out of his way to save the life of a citizen who mutated into a spider creature and placed her somewhere where she couldn't do any harm until doctors found the cure. When she broke into Mega-City One in later issue asd a nearly mindless spider, Dredd went out of his way to capture her unharmed in the hopes that she might be cured.
4. When Dredd had doubts as to the legitimacy of the Judge System, he lobbied the Council of Five to allow the citizens to vote on whether they wanted democracy or to keep the system. Most Megacity citizens couldn't be bothered to vote one way or the other.
5. From the age of 5-20, Dredd was in training to become a judge. That's some child soldier brain washing material right there.
6. When the city had to face a grave psychic theat, the head of the Psi-Judges elected to send himself to face it on the grounds that it was a death sentence and he couldn't in good conscience order anyone to do something he wasn't willing to do himself. (Most facist leaders would happily throw their underlings at the problem.)

I'm not saying the Judge System is good, there are plenty of instances where people got the shaft for breaking a minor law that nobody really knows why is on the books, but I can't classify Dredd himself as a villain. I think he's more complicated than that.

 

[Battlemaster]

Ever read dredd's "America"?

 

[TheSword]

I think it's fair to say that the majority of table top role playing games operate under the assumption that the player characters are the good guys. But now that I've typed that out, what does it even mean to be the good guy? To start with, it doesn't necessary mean that the PCs are paragons of virtue free from moral ambiguity. In some games, like Cyberpunk Red, the PCs are most often criminals but are they the bad guys? Well, no, I wouldn't say so. The PCs are usually going against violent gangs and mega corporations that toy with millions of lives in an effort to raise the price of their stock a few points. In my experience, PCs are more likely to protect a food co-op in the inner city from corporate interest seeking to kick them out so they can turn the building into a condo. For the purposes of this thread, I'm going to define good as leaving things better than you found it without harming innocent people. This may be a bit simplistic, by philosophers are still debating what is good and we're probably not going to come to a satisfactory answer in a thread on En World.

How many roleplaying games out there exist where the PCs are the bad guys by default?

Vampire the Masqurade is the best example I can think of. In Vampire, the PCs are, well, vampires, who literally have to prey on other humans to survive (though a PC could theoretically live on animal instead of human blood). Especially in 5th edition, it's only a matter of time before a vampire hurts or kills a human being and this includes those the PCs love. The PCs are monsters.

An early release version of Blade Runner is available for those who backed the Kickstarter. Based off the 1982 movie of the same name and the recent 2017 sequel, characters are blade runners, police officers tasked with hunting down rogue replicants and retiring (killing) them. These replicants are nearly indistinguishable from human beings making Roy Batty and company runaway slaves. In Blade Runner, player characters make their living tracking down and killing runaway slaves. You might argue that Roy Batty was a dangerous murderer, but a slave rising up and killing his oppressors is perfectly natural in my book.

What other games are there were the PCs are bad guys by default? Feel free to disagree about whether the PCs in Blade Runner or Vampire are "bad guys" if you'd like. I can't control you guys and it'd be foolhardy to try!

Way of the Wicked is an evil adventure path for Pathfinder 1e. Published by Fire Mountain Games…

..well, by it’s lying, cheating, $40k thieving, Kickstarter-ghosting author.

It’s actually a really good AP. First time I ever DMd a party from 1st to 20th level.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

There's a Kickstarter right now for a print run of Wicked Ones, a Forged in the Dark game where you play the monsters that raid the humans and then defend their dungeon from adventurers:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/banditcamp/wo-ua-hardcover/description

The campaign is doing well, and includes an expansion/rework of the game where you play undead horrors.

 

[Battlemaster]

In 'black crusade' you play chaos worshippers in 40k. They tend to be pretty bad types.

 

[Battlemaster]

Hey aramis, have you seen 'dreadnoughts breaking ground' yet? It's a storyline detailing the earliest days of the collapse of modern America and the creation of the judge system.

 

[Darth Solo]

Vampire = evil.

DnD adventurers are normally good-natured characters. They kill evil monsters not everyday people. If your party kills everything in sight that party is evil by definition.

 

[aramis erak]

Hey aramis, have you seen 'dreadnoughts breaking ground' yet? It's a storyline detailing the earliest days of the collapse of modern America and the creation of the judge system.

I have (had?) a version of that story from the 90's...
The Judges there are not evil.
By the definitions in 5E, they're LG. Paladins. By AD&D standards, on the border of LG and LN. With a few NG folk, like Cas Anderson.