Some of it is the freedom that comes with role playing. Folks are like, "I can haz rat bastards as PC?" You see it in video games a lot where open worlds begun and folks do awful things to NPCs. Part of it is simple guilty pleasure in engaging in things typically out of bounds by game design limitation or social contract. Once that initial experience is out of the way, people typically mature beyond it. ITs the folks that never get enough that is a different story...
It
is worth noting that, consistently, statistics from video games indicate that, for most games, players overwhelmingly (like more than 4:1) favor "good" options over "evil" ones when they're put to the choice. Good example, there's a dog in the
Dragonfall campaign of
Shadowrun Returns, and he belonged to the PC's friend who perished in the opening. He sometimes comes to you for comfort, as a dog missing his human would do. You can choose to be mean to him or nice to him.
For about 2/3 of the game, that's all it is, the occasional scene where you can be nice to a dog. Then, when your home base is under attack....it turns out he's half-hellhound and can kick some butt. If you were more nice to him than mean to him, he'll help fight. He's not particularly strong and can't wear most equipment, being both magical (which makes augmentation difficult/harmful) and not humanoid. But he
is helpful. The efficient option, for min-maxers, is to be mean to him so you can fight him and get more XP. Something like ten times as many people have the achievement for recruiting him than those who have the achievement for killing him, even though a single game can easily accommodate doing both things without restarting.
That's far from the only example, it's just one where I've seen the data with my own eyes. Every time data of this kind gets reported, the pattern remains strong.
Yes,
some people see the freedom of the TTRPG space as a chance to "cut loose" and do all the hedonistic, violent, selfish, horrible things they can't do IRL. But the vast majority, backed up by
actual statistics and analysis, genuinely strive to be good people, perhaps even
better people than they are/have been IRL.
"People" is a distribution, there will always be some in the extreme tails, and the bigger the population, the more extreme outlier examples you expect to see. But it turns out, video games actually reveal that most people want to do good by others, even when the rewards actually do favor being evil.
