J.Quondam
CR 1/8
Mostly it comes down to the setting, and my anecdotal experience (which is only like half-a-dozen players, if that).
First, I chose "they're all murderhobos anyway" - I generally don't use alignment, just because evil isn't really a check box on a driver's license. (Except when it is, as in settings where good/evil are little more than elemental substances.) In a hack and slash or gonzo games meant for muderhobos, the PCs all go nuts, anyway, so trying to map their behavior onto a single term is a lost cause. Which is fine, because tracking that mostly irrelevant to the nature of the that sort of game.
Second, I chose "they're edgelords/wangrods" - I don't actually fully agree with this, because the those terms are way too loaded. But it's the closest to my feelings on it, which just comes from personal experience. IME, PCs actually are not murderhobos for the most part, at least not in campaigns where that's not the intended mode of play. In such games, the few players I've GMed for/played with who insisted on evil characters:
- either ended up being disruptive (because they were "it's what my character would do!" -type of edgelords/wangrods);
- or else decided early on that they didn't really enjoy playing evil, because of (surprise!) in-game consequences.
In other words, these players simply had no idea how to play "evil" in any sort of interesting or enlightening way, session after session.* The jerkwads, of course, got uninvited. And as for others, not grokking "evil" is fine, because for most of the people I've played with, brutally honest examination of the depths of human depravity is not a thing we've really wanted to explore during fun time. For those who've wanted to play out a redemption arc, or struggle with vice, or whatever, those things have been perfectly doable without playing a fully corrupted soul.
Now I know there are groups and campaigns for which evil PCs work fine, and that there are players who can be mature and insightful about it. It's just that I personally have never seen that; and it's just not important enough to me to waste perfectly good game hours waiting to see it work. So I just axe it straight away, and save everyone the frustration.
* "But what about the GM??" The way I see it, the GM doesn't necessarily need to be especially good at "doing evil." Their job is just to provide bad guys for the PCs to deal with. For the sake of just having fun, it's fine that those villains be caricatures, just like an action movie bad guy. They don't need to be complexly lacquered with pathos and vileness; they just need to be frustrating enough to be a satisfying and gloat-worthy victory for the PCs in the end. Now my preferences are lean to short campaign, so the miniseries or movie-trilogy model of relatively shallow bad guy works fine. For very long term campaigns, I can certainly buy an argument favoring lots of depth in an arch-nemesis.
First, I chose "they're all murderhobos anyway" - I generally don't use alignment, just because evil isn't really a check box on a driver's license. (Except when it is, as in settings where good/evil are little more than elemental substances.) In a hack and slash or gonzo games meant for muderhobos, the PCs all go nuts, anyway, so trying to map their behavior onto a single term is a lost cause. Which is fine, because tracking that mostly irrelevant to the nature of the that sort of game.
Second, I chose "they're edgelords/wangrods" - I don't actually fully agree with this, because the those terms are way too loaded. But it's the closest to my feelings on it, which just comes from personal experience. IME, PCs actually are not murderhobos for the most part, at least not in campaigns where that's not the intended mode of play. In such games, the few players I've GMed for/played with who insisted on evil characters:
- either ended up being disruptive (because they were "it's what my character would do!" -type of edgelords/wangrods);
- or else decided early on that they didn't really enjoy playing evil, because of (surprise!) in-game consequences.
In other words, these players simply had no idea how to play "evil" in any sort of interesting or enlightening way, session after session.* The jerkwads, of course, got uninvited. And as for others, not grokking "evil" is fine, because for most of the people I've played with, brutally honest examination of the depths of human depravity is not a thing we've really wanted to explore during fun time. For those who've wanted to play out a redemption arc, or struggle with vice, or whatever, those things have been perfectly doable without playing a fully corrupted soul.
Now I know there are groups and campaigns for which evil PCs work fine, and that there are players who can be mature and insightful about it. It's just that I personally have never seen that; and it's just not important enough to me to waste perfectly good game hours waiting to see it work. So I just axe it straight away, and save everyone the frustration.
* "But what about the GM??" The way I see it, the GM doesn't necessarily need to be especially good at "doing evil." Their job is just to provide bad guys for the PCs to deal with. For the sake of just having fun, it's fine that those villains be caricatures, just like an action movie bad guy. They don't need to be complexly lacquered with pathos and vileness; they just need to be frustrating enough to be a satisfying and gloat-worthy victory for the PCs in the end. Now my preferences are lean to short campaign, so the miniseries or movie-trilogy model of relatively shallow bad guy works fine. For very long term campaigns, I can certainly buy an argument favoring lots of depth in an arch-nemesis.
