More on Evil Campaigns
This party of evil adventurers are straight from the Steet.
I recieved a lot of great comments on my post about evil campaigns, including a great blog post over at the Power Word: Blog, where Kevin talks about the subject.
He mentions that in the end, most evil groups will implode due to one thing: self-centeredness.
I think this definitely was also true in that Dark Side one-shot. No one really had a reason to work together.
Terrifying, to say the least.
This is easily solved with the solution Kevin gave: a strong motivation to stay together, usually being a “frighteningly powerful master”. That’s why the Godfather game worked out. They all had Don Corleone to work for, giving then direction and purpose. No one wants to piss off the Don.
I did appreciate Chgowiz’s idea of the Emperor knocking them all down a step. I would definitely have implemented that if I had thought of that back then.
And Swordgleam’s comment: “I think part of it is that many players equate evil with lawless jerkery. Evil characters usually don’t kill puppies at random. Why? Because killing puppies does nothing to advance their goals and might cause situations that will slow them down. But evil PCs will kill puppies at random, because it’s the opposite of what heroes do, and they think that’s all there is to evil.”
We were only about 16-17 at the time of the Star Wars game, so there was a lot of immaturity there. I think if we ended up trying this type of game out nowadays, it would have gone much differently. Back in the day, everyone’s vision of evil was just, as she said, “Lawless Jerkery“.
Just a few things I wanted to mention. Anyone else have anymore to contribute to this discussion? Leave a comment!
We often have one or two evil characters in an otherwise normal party as we enjoy the risk of a solid backstab in our gaming. We do use a ‘code’ the evil player has to follow, the bad ass move must be motivated from the characters goals, make sense and not be something personal. The judge over this matter is not the GM but the victim, although the GM has something to say just like anyone else at the table.
Confrontations are usually timed at the end of a campaign, for maximum drama and minimum fuzz if someone looses harsh as it’s the end anyway. It often provided cool and unexpected twists to our adventure endings and usually created a lot of interesting tensions between characters before the ending got close.
And yeah, we are a mature (30+) group who know each other over a decade. That helps too.
I’m currently playing in a rather ambitious 3.5 Ravenloft Campaign. The DM is running two distinct parties operating separately. One party is made up of characters that are good or neutral, the other party is made up of characters that are evil or neutral.
I’m on “team evil”, and so far, it’s worked out pretty well. We’re currently sort of acting as mercenaries, completing jobs for money. For the sake of the game, a few of us have had to remind the other players that we are working for a greater evil. They just want to kill every one of our contacts after we finish a job, and take the stuff and the payment.
We’ve had one game where we were hired to work with the good party. They were on a rescue mission, we were supposed to keep them alive (and steal some jewels in the process). Not sure where the whole thing is going to go, but it has been fun so far.
.-= Mike´s last blog ..Supertrash January 15th, 2010 =-.
Yes, this is how an evil campaign was ran for a little while.
Firstly, we had a powerful master who shows up and outright blasts another very powerful evil guy into nothingness for failure. This powerful master then tells us that he wants us (the evil guys) to go out and do X. This established the very beginning that whatever ambitions we had are gone out the window because failure and squabbling will result into being blasted into nothingness.
Secondly, as players, we knew that we were playing an evil campaign and we know that the dynamics that evil feeds on itself; however we had a gentlemen’s agreement to simply not attack each other. I know that it can sound unrealistic, but the idea is for evil characters to have a purpose above themselves. Nothing stopped us from being evil toward NPC’s and monsters, but we just refrained from giving into our sociopathic psychosis on each other. It’s similar to Grand Theft Auto in a lot of missions. If you kill the persons you’re supposed to be working with, mission is over, but nothing is preventing you from running down bystanders, blowing up cars, go into a rampage shooting everyone or doing whatever you want in Liberty City.