Evil aligned campaigns.
Have they ever worked?
After four or five sessions my players have recognised that their characters are not the paragons of virtue they were intended to be. We've decided to just embrace it, but I've heard terrible things about evil aligned parties. What am I getting myself into?
>2016
>Still using alignments
Just let everyone play their characters and forget alignments exist, they're the worst thing to come out of DnD and do more to hinder actual roleplaying than they contribute to the game in any form.
Even putting strict alignments aside these characters are total assholes, and that's incongruous with the original story I had planned (which isn't very good, to be honest). If their motivations change I'm going to have to change the whole story to match.
Right now letting them "play their characters" runs contrary to the original "save the world ye valiant heroes" story I had planned.
^This times ten quadrillion billion
Alignment sucks and its original meaning has almost been entirely thwarted as there is a lot of evidence to suggest that Gygax intended for alignment to be more akin to religion.
Its garbage and it only confuses new players and starts fights.
Now running a campaign for evil people/doing bad shit. Thats very doable, ive done it. The key is to not let the party become just "rape the town torch the inn" but put them in situations where their unrestrained greed and cruelty works to their advantage rather than detriment as it is with most heroic games.
The mistake that I feel most DMs make with evil campaigns is that they try to run it more or less the same to a regular campaign but try to make the players feel bad for doing evil things, as though an evil campaign should be one where the players are constantly hiding their villainy.
Now sometimes pretending youre not a horrible fuck is fun, but the best evil campaigns allow the characters to be truly evil and glorify villainy. Just like you want to feel heroic in a heroic game, you dont want to feel like a bad person for being evil, if you understand my meaning. In the end players just want to have fun and in most evil campaigns thats just them letting loose and being evil, not many players (including me) want to stomach gut wrenching and terribly sad descriptions of the tears of the poor widow or the screams of the children they abandoned in the flames. They just want the reward of being dastardly, no need to take it to 11.
Bank heists, robbing the church, infiltrating a senatorial meeting disguised as senators to disrupt peace agreements, agreeing to to fetch some ancient relic just to nab it and pawn it off.
Evil campaigns are fine.
You just gotta make sure they are all working towards the same thing.
> agreeing to to fetch some ancient relic just to nab it and pawn it off.
Petty evil is the best evil.
And yeah, torture porn kills evil games.
That's kind of the thing we're going for. More petty villainy. My picture was chosen for a reason.
Just make sure you don't have any chaotic stupid players who will try and murder their own party at the first sign of disagreement and you should be fine. Those sorts tend to kill games (and piss everyone off) just by "acting in character".
Emphasize to your players that party cohesion should be a priority, even if they're shitty to everyone else. If you have to (unless your party enjoys player vs player I guess) introduce some sort of plot device to make sure they have to get along (like a curse or something, I don't know).
Then it can't fail
Somebody make a Sunny rpg quick
I've played a neutral evil character that ended up being beneficial anyways
He just stole an airship and ran off with the treasury after saving the kingdom.
Honestly a lot of Its Always Sunny episodes would be pretty good frameworks for adventures lol. Like trying to get into a baseball game for free, just make the stadium a colloseum or play where the PCs have to get in to meet with someone and let ridiculous disguise and knockout stealth highjinks ensue.
I find that evil works really well when paired with comedy and a light game tone, wacky NPCs ect. It helps offload some of that tension which can build up to some really edgy and uncomfortable situations, or just take the piss out of already edgy and uncomfortable situations.
I'll keep it mind, thanks. There is a sort of logic to the dickish behaviour of all of these characters, though, so I think it'll be fine if my players can commit to that logic.
That's basically what we got here. The Paladin is literally Mac. It's kind of spooky. The player claims to have never seen the show but I don't believe him.
Someone should try that. I don't know if I want to make the parallels that explicit.
Thats actually not a bad idea. A curse binding them all together, or maybe theyre all political outcasts/outlaws wanted for a crime. Or they've been caught and jailed by the same damn goody two shoes Paladin marshall, but now they've escaped. That sounds fun.
I ran a (relatively brief) game where a sorceress and a warrior took a job to evict a wizard from his tower - the warrior ended up breaking his furniture then throwing him out the top story of the tower. After that they took it over for themselves and conscripted a bunch of goblins and terrorized the road it was on.
I didn't have any big problem with it. The warrior had the habit of smashing people's tables and chairs when he got into any disagreement, but it was a good laugh.
I feel "evil" campaigns work really well in superhero systems. The reason for this, I eblieve, is that you have a pre-existing force of good. The player starts burning down orphanages wantonly and Superman and his buttbuddies are gonna show up to push your shit in. Yeah, the players can do what they want, but the goal becomes not "What crazy evil thing can I do?" but instead "What sort of crazy evil thing can I do and get away with it?" Lawful Evil or petty evil works best here.
So assuming this is your typical fantasy game, I would suggest instituting some guards or paladins that are capable of taking the party on. Or perhaps Bounty Hunters coming to collect on the rewards for the crimes they commit.
Thats a good point. Evil playing breeds its own adversaries but I would say that its not in the best intention of the game to make it feel like a punishment.
Just because the characters are evil doesn't mean their adversaries have to be good. They can be dickhead self-involved capitalist opportunists with a flexible and self-serving set of morals and STILL be opposed to a lich, provided there's immediate reward for that opposition.
You probably just need an understanding with your players. You establish the idea "Rather than having a BBEG whose plans you need to foil, you've got Johnny the Paladin and his band of misfits trying to foil your plans instead."
Think of it like this, if you're a good guy and you march in to a lich's lair halfcocked, you're gonna get fired and turned in to a skeltal. But you're not being punished for being good, you're being punished for being stupid. Once, in a campaign, we came upon a town of scoundrels, thieves, and ne'erdowells, ran by the Red Wizards of Thay. After seeing just one too many murders in broad daylight I had enough, flew up in to the air in my flying cauldron, and as a 14th level witch in pathfinder, I rained fire and lightning down upon it until little else but rubble remained. Then, when we reached the town we were heading to, we found it burned to the ground, as well as maimed effigies of our party. If you can't stand the heat, you shouldn't poke bears.
The same rules apply to when you're playing evil. They can do whatever they are motivated to do but every action causes an equal an opposite reaction. I'm not saying the party should never be able to perform deeds of great villiany in broad daylight, I'm just saying it should be a goal and not a everday occurence.
Personally I've watching a bunch of Lupin for frameworks/stuff one might work into an adventure for a heist game and jotting it down onto an ideas page.
I'm currently developing the first few adventures I came up with, aswell as some of the players' personal ones, it's really nice to be able to develop the current future of the setting I've created in a bunch of spots too.
Oh yeah of course. Dragons are evil but I'm sure they would be tempted to kill one to protect their own hoard and to take his. But if you make a habit of killing bad guys and not good guys, then I would make the arguement that you are chaotic neutral anti-heroes, a la deadpool.
Even if they charged and extorted and leveraged for each one of those kills? It's not altruism if you vanquish evil for power and cash.
I don't know.
Honestly, what happens in my group is that a bunch of people roll some kind of neutral, and then the leftovers go good in order to prevent us from going off the rails more extremely than normal.
Our evil games were fun because we actually set out with the intent of working together for evil, not randumb backstabbing jamborees.
Charging money for a kill isn't evil, it just means you aren't a paladin. Good wants to serve others, neutral wants to serve himself, evil wants to be served by others.
In certain contexts it could be.
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>I agree with
Good means you do things because of your morals. Neutral means you do things for your own reasons, and still have somewhat of a code of beliefs, whatever those may be. Evil means you do things purely out of self-interest.
What class would each of member of the gang be?
Charlie's a bard, yeah?
>Implying Lupin ain't CG
>Good means you do things because of your morals. Neutral means you do things for your own reasons, and still have somewhat of a code of beliefs, whatever those may be. Evil means you do things purely out of self-interest.
This is an oversimplification that crossed into being wholly inaccurate.
An evil character may have morals which dictate that is correct to exterminate the lesser races that inconvenience and drain from the majority. Morals need not be good.
A neutral character may have no code, operating only on whim, or they may believe that they are the law and the law is not mocked.
Good characters DO have morals pretty much by definition, but all other alignments do not stand in contrast to this.
>implying any of them are competent enough to have a class and be PCs
Regardless, the classes they would choose...
Sweet Dee is a elf sorceress, beautiful, sexy, and can make everybody love her.
Dennis is a very very very vicious paladin that does not really understand lawful good. A high opinion of his own holiness, of course.
Charlie is a ratfolk bard with WIS 3.
Mac is a dwarf monk, without a doubt.
Danny Devito...perhaps a halfling rogue? Sneaking around and dick punching sounds like him. And of course, unethically obtaining money.
You give Dee a bit too much credit, but other than you nailed it.
It's about how they see themselves. They'd all just be commoners otherwise
Every well written character is a "hero" in their own internal narrative.
"Alignments" are trash because they assume some fixed perspective.
Pls refer to