Is it possible to run an evil campaign without the players going either super edgy...

Is it possible to run an evil campaign without the players going either super edgy, or descending into their most depraved magical realms?

Yes. Just play a regular D&D campaign.
Run-of-the-mill murder-hobos are evil enough as it is.

Yes.

Players will end up evil as long as they are playing D&D

Impatience and a feeling of powerlessness and ennui will drive them to greater feats of depravity.

I've noticed this.

I keep wanting to do evil things in my campaigns.

All the fun stuff seems to be evil.

It's a game where you're rewarded XP and GP for killing shit. The game is inherently evil.

>Just rewarding XP for killing shit
>Not rewarding extra XP for using the path of least resistance
That's your problem.

My DM always gives XP for creative solutions though.

>All the fun stuff seems to be evil.
I thought this too for a time, but that was an immature time in my life before I learned how fantastic it feels to do good things, how virtue is its own reward, and the many real benefits that come with treating people decently. D&D kind of encourages players to see goodness in terms of meaningless, arbitrary restrictions instead of moral ideals, which compounds on itself when existing players and DMs pass those attitudes to newbies.

I think that reading heroic literature helped me learn to love it. It helped me see a little further past the stereotypes and deeper into the heart of what heroic ideals are all about.

It also can help to find some kind of moral passions or drive in your life, perhaps a strong motivation to protect other people from something you experienced firsthand. Before you have that, it doesn't seem quite obvious why people try so hard to be nice or follow ideals. But when you have that kind of fire in your heart, it's easier to see that in your characters and know why they do the right thing even if it's hard sometimes.

Everything your character gets for XP are tools to either exploit, steal from or murder people more effectively.

Play a game where the premise of the action is to act immorally.

Players are a group of thieves
Players are a group of assassins
Players are a group of scientists that experiment on the unwilling
Players are a group of people who do something that benefits them but somehow hurts/damages/deceives others

It's not that hard folks. Just have the players act in their own self interest, and make sure it involves taking advantage of the unwilling in some way.

Those are all noble things, but an RPG is one of the few places where you can be a bit rotten without consequence. Not even ferociously evil, just "not a nice person".

>start fights
>steal something that makes you powerful
>lie and betray to gain power and riches
>kill some jerk who picked a fight with you and empty his pockets
Pretty standard murderhobo fare.

Doing great feats of goodness can be amusing (ie, having the power to right great wrongs you're powerless to address IRL). But there's nothing more mature or noble about... it all disappears when you get up from the table

>But there's nothing more mature or noble about... it all disappears when you get up from the table

Well, first off, I didn't say anything about that. Doing dickish things in RPGs can be pretty fun, I'm not denying that. Enjoying nicer heroes does not preclude enjoying meaner ones.

Second, I don't know about you, but I feel warm and fuzzy inside when I think about the good deeds my character did, the ways he improved the lives of fictional people instead of preying on their suffering and misery. Scoring 50 gold by being an asshole doesn't quite fill my heart with the same mirth as unexpectedly giving 50 gold to help people rebuild after a monster attack.

Again, you are not me, you don't have to like all the same things that I like. I'm not trying to call you an idiot teenager for thinking differently from me. Not right now, at least.

Give them a clear goal that would suffer from doing random acts of violence.

man you fa/tg/uys are really passive aggressive

>possible to run

No. Discussing the concept seems harmless enough, but the real world tends to be hostile to proactively depraved edgelords. So if your GM is letting you RP malignant sociopaths for "fun," that is literally magical realm. You should all stop trying to normalize your sad perversion and seek professional help.

Isn't it fine if they don't do it IRL?

Yes.

wut? What kind of horribly unstable people to you play with? Vampire is pretty much purely evil PCs.

Nah, just that guy is being a huge douche.

Veeky Forums didn't used to be this way

I blame /v/

Funny. The more I read heroic literature, the more the heroes come across to me as arrogant and stubborn, and the more I experience real people, the less I care about what happens to them.

That's part of why I like role playing heroic characters. In game, I can be a hero who isn't a hypocritical asshole, saving moderately appealing characters who actually make me want to save them.

Beowulf was a huge fucking prick

As someone who spends equal amounts of time on /v/ and Veeky Forums, people tend to scapegoat /v/ like a motherfucker.

Now don't get me wrong, /v/ is a shithole on the best of days unless it's a thread laughing at something failing like MN9 or NMS or the new Metroid game, but after going between both I notice that it's the exact same shit no matter where you go.

/v/ has console wars, Veeky Forums has edition wars, /a/ has dubs vs. subs, /co/ has DC vs. Marvel, etc.

All in all, Veeky Forums as a whole are comprised of assholes it's silly to blame one board for being the cause of everyone being an asshole when everyone would still be arguing over stupid shit whether /v/ existed or not.

>people tend to scapegoat /v/ like a motherfucker.

It's literally like one guy. I think he's insane.

Yes, if you have a group of mature players. In other words, no.

what's the context of this image

True evil.