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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scruffy nerf herder" data-source="post: 8557108" data-attributes="member: 7034614">When discussing this subject in different places, I've heard all kinds of responses. But the weirdest of the common responses is that playing evil characters is bad, and if you want to play an evil character you are a bad player.It's really the most bizarre thing. I mean they do understand that the DM enjoys RPing villains, right? It's a fictional universe for Pete's sake, the players all already are something they could never be in the real world, and their characters also often have beliefs and motivations that they themselves don't have.We have this weird segment of the D&D culture that appears to think either playing an evil character means you want to cause trouble, e.g. steal from the party, and that PvP is inevitable or your character leaving the party is inevitable. Or, they think that you are interested in playing an evil character because you want to RP a lot about stabbing people's eyeballs or routinely RPing other gruesome or edgy stuff.Have we really become so pigeonholed into oversimplified ideas about alignment that we can't divorce our preconceptions about D&D from the way we understand villains in literally every other fictional media we're exposed to them with?Villains are so interesting because they're doing wrong, everyone can see they do wrong, but they're still people. They're every bit as three dimensional as the protagonist. They have just as much reason for their worldview and ethics as the protagonist. It's not satisfying to fight a villain for no other reason than that's the encounter you were given. The protagonist has to have real convictions about his/her actions and say "damn it, I'm going to stop you because you're wrong".Somewhere along the way we've stopped short of that super cool and satisfying aspect of fiction, and turned villains in tabletop role-playing games into "that villain is so repulsive he must die". The villain is a caricature built to get a rise out of you, to provoke a visceral reason by doing very nefarious things.It's incredible to me how most avid lovers of TTRPGs are big into fantasy fiction, but they don't really seem to like villains (except perhaps when they enjoy hating a villain), and especially hate the idea of a villainous party member. Villains are literally the bread and butter of fantasy and a big part of what sets the genre apart.</blockquote>

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