Author: Melody

It’s funny how things in your life can dovetail so nicely when you’re working on a project. I just finished rewatching Episode III of the Star Wars saga, and it really hit the nail on the head regarding perspective having everything to do with alignment. Especially near the end, where Anakin is so certain that he is out for justice and peace and to save the life of Padme… and yet, he’s just slaughtered younglings in the Temple, single-handedly executed the separatists, and assisted the Dark Lord of the Sith in turning the Republic into an Empire seated in the hand of the Dark Side of the Force. Evil? All point of view at that point, isn’t it?

While we’ve talked about Evil in rping, playing and playing alongside compromised characters, really it’s the GM in the hot seat whenever someone decides to play a character that doesn’t “play well with others”.

When an compromised character is in the mix, it opens up a whole other realm of solutions and courses of action that your general vanilla characters wouldn’t dream of doing. As a result, you have to be a bit more prepared for the creativity and the consequences of that wider battery of choices. The same scene that would leave principled characters scratching their heads are nothing for a character who has no compunction about “aggressive negotiations”. It does tend to keep a GM on his/her toes.

Sometimes over the course of a game, a character might start out principled and, through events and experiences, take a turn for the worse. I’m not much of a babysitter of alignments as a GM. I’m just really big into consequences. I’ve also made it a habit of lobbing the phrase “You can be bad, and you can be stupid, but bad and stupid get you dead.” And sure enough, evil characters who make stupid choices find themselves quickly in tough situations or reconsidering that alignment or getting smarter by the minute. But no… I figure characters are like people. They make their choices, they have their consequences, then they either stay their course or realign. As a result, I don’t fret much over it.

When I have dealt with alignments, it was primarily in relation to classes such as clerics and paladins who had to curry favor, or when experience was tied to roleplaying a character well. My favorite way of dealing with alignment in all cases save cleric- and paladin-like classes is to let the players do what they will for a few games and then assign them their alignment based on what I’ve seen them do. But if you’re going to be rigid about it and pick an alignment and base your character around that alignment… well, I’ll make you live up to it.

I don’t like characters knowing anything about each other in advance unless they have concurrent histories that precede game time. We don’t get that special treatment in real life, and frankly, it’s just too much fun to watch the principled characters do something to trip up the unprincipled ones (and vice versa). Makes my life far less difficult when the conflicts and challenges are self-created within the player troupe.

What I do find I have to do regularly with Evil player characters is get them to cultivate some depth to their creation. The psyche of a diabolical or even simply selfish character is a landmine map of places you just don’t want to step. There’s always a lot of potential for both intimate development and later redemption, should the character end up on that kind of path. But because we rarely get to exercise our Evil sides in real life, there’s tendency to play Evil characters rather flatly (or as I mentioned above, rather stupidly), and that gets boring quickly for both player and troupe and GM.

I don’t think I’ve ever restricted someone from playing an Evil character. Like I said, I’m all about consequences. From a GM’s standpoint, an Evil alignment isn’t a carte blanche for mayhem and madness. And I will certainly allow the other characters to take your ass out without even a NPC “Maybe we shouldn’t…” to mitigate their lynching urges. It’s a risk you take when you play out of bounds. But then, that’s why a lot of folks play Evil characters anyway. It’s a walk on the wild side.

My job as a GM is to show you just how much of a jungle is still out there.

So, I’ve been a bad, bad girl about my blogging lately. I’ve not been flogged yet — not that that would motivate me one way or t’other — but damn if I don’t have a bunch of stuff to post about. However, that’s just adult life, isn’t it?

It was so much easier when I was sans l’enfant, and free to ring someone up on any given night and say “Hey, feel like killing shit?”. Can’t really do that anymore. God forbid, I actually have to SCHEDULE my entertainment time. That’s about as bad as pencilling in a date for sex. But we won’t talk about that.

I suppose I miss the days when things were a little less hectic. At the same time, roleplaying in my adult years seems more… necessary to me than it did when I was young. Back then, gaming was frivolity, something just cool to do, another bit to throw out there about my personality that (in all honesty) was great for attracting smart and geeky and imaginative guys. Now, though, gaming is serious fun, total down-time from all the responsibilities that come with the whole adult-with-kid-and-job-and-mortgage shebang. I think I enjoy it more, maybe just in a different way.

A local rping group just tagged me to come along with them. Old AD&D. Gotta see if I have time. I was thinking about running a “Winter Blues” parlor game campaign for the cold months with some friends. That’s the other thing about being an adult… damn if you don’t have to choose what’s worth your time and what you just can’t manage.

I’ll be back on the posting horse this evening.  Reverse cowgirl and all.  I promise.

It’s one thing to go head-to-head with an Evil being. And still another to play an Evil character. But what happens when you’re minding your own damn business and someone else in your troupe decides they don’t want to be Mr. Nice Guy? Now, that’s a real dilemma.

Probably one of the biggest difficulties is that being forced to play with/hang out with an Evil character TOTALLY doesn’t mirror real life at all. Someone treats you badly in real life — you know, steals your money, slices your brake lines, sticks a knife in your back — you get the hell away from them! You can’t exactly do that in a gaming group. I mean, I suppose you could, but who wants to roleplay a bunch of solitary characters that have little interaction because they can’t share a sandbox? Yeah, no fun. So, you find yourself in a situation where you have to play with someone that, under normal circumstances, you wouldn’t let within spitting distance.

Another real challenge has to do with the separation of “player knowledge” from “character knowledge”. Do you KNOW that their alignment is Evil? If you don’t, then no worries. You’ll figure it out and it’ll happen in character, and you will be justified in what you have to do to them (that is, if you don’t join their cause). But if you do happen to know they’re Evil-aligned, well… hello! Time to see just how good a roleplayer you are. Can you leave what’s written on paper alone and separate yourself and your knowledge from your character’s knowledge? Harder than it sounds. And really, I prefer for players not to know each other’s ethical center. That’s not something you get in real life. We don’t run around with ethical “mood rings” on letting each other know if we’re a right bastard or not. But sometimes it happens. And it’s hard as hell to leave that knowledge out of play once you know it. See it all the time… suddenly everything that player does is suspicious, though it was fine not half an hour before. Yeah, real challenge. Better you just don’t know.

Then there’s the challenge of working someone with ulterior motives into an overall greater scheme, the residual doubt in what s/he has to say or do, the heightened tension wondering if the knife’s going to come from the back or the front… it can be downright harrowing. And exciting!

Because Evil characters provide tension and extremism, they also offer the opportunity for experiential character development for the other players in the troupe. Not all experience is in points and money. Character experience — what shapes and defines who your character is and how they go about making future choices — has to come from successes and failures in decisions and relationships. And truth be told, there are few things that will change a character’s fabric faster than dealing with someone not nice. One encounter can wither an idealist, birth a cynic, and give a realist concrete shoes.

Have you ever played with an Evil character in your troupe? What kind of experiences did you have? Did you know their alignment while you played? How’d you feel when you found out?

Or… did you try to save them? Cause that never works. 🙂

Now that we’ve had a bit of introductory discussion about Evil, let’s move into the most intimate placement of Evil in a game: within the Character.

An interesting comment was made regarding whether or not an Evil character knows that what s/he is doing is wrong. Are Evil characters simply misguided?

The idea of “misguided” is actually a crucial key in developing the background to an Evil character. We are the sum of our experiences, good and bad. For a character in a game, there is a dividing line between their experiences: all that will come from roleplay, and all that came before and made your character who s/he is. Just like real people, well-developed characters had things occur in their pasts that changed them forever. And, also just like a real person, the characters’ perceptions of these events in their pasts usually makes all the difference. Creating a compelling history of how a character wandered down a darker path gives a character a sense of realism. And really, it’s realism that makes an Evil character frightening. To see traits you have yourself magnified, to see how easy it could be to slip away from the Light.

Playing an Evil character presents certain challenges. For one, chances are you can’t make your intentions known. Troupe play tends to require a certain amount of togetherness, and face it… if you’re serving a dark overlord and running around with a paladin bent on making the world safe from jerks like you, chances are you’re aware that honesty is not your best policy. So that presents a challenge to act true to your character’s intent, but not end up as a meat ornament on someone’s lance. For two, chances are your character is not much like you. Anytime you play a character that’s not like you, it can be a stretch to get into the role. Worse, because of the need to keep your wicked wiles on the hush-hush, you tend to be forced into a playing a character not like you with required subtlety. Let me tell you, subtlety when you’re trying on an ill-fitting character is hard as hell. I will also say that the best Evil characters aren’t the wild megalomaniac ones. They’re the ones that are finessed to the point that you find yourself emotionally or mentally wound up with them. Nothing is quite so evil as making someone abandon their own ethics in favor of yours. Except making them love you.

I have played one Evil character in my life, and it was some of the most rewarding roleplaying I’ve done. My character was a Doppleganger, and it was an obvious suicide mission. The GM warned me that my character was likely going to die once her cover was blown, but we’d see how far we could get. I had someplace to lead the party, a certain thing to filch out of the pack items, a relationship within the party that I had to wither in order to make it work. Everything I did in the game was calculated to my ends, I lied when I needed to lie, I found ways to pass their truth tests, and there were some close calls. However, I did manage to get the party to where they needed to be to get their asses kicked, and I did, indeed, get killed by one of the other characters when I revealed myself.

Perhaps I shouldn’t smile so much looking back at that game, but there is a certain satisfaction of watching betrayal hit the faces of people you’ve been gaming with for months. One person was so angry at me they had to leave the room, one almost cried. The one who had to kill me called for a break so he could “deal with it”. The entire party (once they survived their encounter) was radically shaped by that betrayal. They didn’t trust ANYONE after that, and that in and of itself tarnished their ethics and ideals. Once you’ve been used, it can become far more easy to be corrupt and to use others. I guess the interesting thing to me is that people STILL remember that game and that character, even better than I do.

I’ve only touched on a couple of challenges with rping an Evil character, but I’m attempting to prompt discussions, not write dissertations. So I’m interested in hearing about others’ experiences with playing Evil characters, the challenges you faced, what you enjoyed about it or not.

And if you’ve never developed or played an Evil character, I invite you to give it a try if the situation presents. It will challenge your character creation skills and your actual non-mechanical rping skills. You might even develop an appreciation for why “wicked” means ‘incredibly cool’.

Comments really are the sweet spot on a blog, aren’t they?  I get such great ideas from someone bouncing off a post I’ve written and before you know it, you have a chain reaction of kinetic ideas.  The hardest thing is ALWAYS remembering all of the great “You know, I should write about that” topics.  Because I am, on occasion, as wise as I am intelligent, I started keeping a pen and paper (a WORKING pen and something NOT a bill envelope) next to the computer.  It has paid off. 

Alignment is a wonderful discussion topic for any gamer or gaming group.  Roleplaying — the process of bringing characters to life and giving them “experiences” — presents very unique challenges not found in other entertainment pursuits.  When you watch a movie, you aren’t concerned about religion or ethics any more than what is presented to you.  In rping, the script is written by you, for characters that must have some reading on a moral compass.  I don’t believe you could dissect a character from their ethics.  Our entire formative years are based in categorical classification:  light, dark; soft, hard; right, wrong.  No matter what you do, we’re going to analyze and try and fit ourselves in on a spectrum.  And I’ve yet to see a player create a character that didn’t have any moral center.  It’s just something we feel we automatically must have.  Which is scary.  Because the other thing that we swear we have to have but can’t lay hands on is our soul.  Another debate topic entirely.  *smile*  Do characters have souls?  Hrm…

In rping, we encounter new and vastly different worlds where the ethical footprint doesn’t resemble the tracks we leave in our real lives.  This is part of the excitement with rping… to take a foray into something different, do things we might never do (or that we would do given the opportunity but are either afraid to admit or don’t like to admit).  And despite the stickiness of the discussions that alignments and ethics entail, an ethical stance with a character is one of the EASIEST risks we can take.  Playing the opposite sex is actually one of the hardest things you can do because you have no frame of reference for that experience.  But being self-serving, greedy, heartless, cruel, nasty, angry, vengeful… oh, we’ve all felt those.  Those emotions and thoughts aren’t reserved for one sex or the other.  It truly is one of the easier paths for experimentation in the gaming world.

All the traits I listed above — self-serving, greedy, etc. — are those really, truly EVIL, though?  Stop yourself before you answer that question and ask whether or not those are selfish traits or is the classification of them as EVIL something handed down through a religious or social institution in THIS world.  As background in THIS world, modern Satanism would count all of those traits as “of the flesh” and not evil at all, but rather self-preserving, making the most of Prometheus’ gift to mankind.  On the other hand, these things are eschewed by modern dominant religion, seen as being “of the Devil”, and thus here you go.  Things that serve the flesh and the body and the self are inherently evil.  That’s the dogma and diatribe of THIS world.

But in rping, we’re playing in a new world, one with different cultures and mores.  Granted, we often take the strictures of this world and apply it to that one as a basis for the ethical ebb and flow of a game.  No one wants to reinvent the wheel, and truth be told, how many players can play such a paradigm shift off the cuff?  Not many.  However, redistributing the traits along the axis of good and evil is one of the best ways to make a normal-to-the-eye world seem alien, indeed.  What if sexual conduct was considered public and private sexual displays were considered heathen?  What if one must kill the parent of the same sex when one reached a certain age as part of population control?  These are wild extremes, however, we have just altered the entire fabric of the world and the realities of those coming into that world by changing the moral axis on which that world spins. 

I think it’s important for a GM or a writer to define the boundaries of the world for the players, many times before the players make their characters.  If Good shines a light into the darkness, then there are depths of shadow to be explored.  However, I might also make this statement.  A light in the darkness is still a light, and unless that light goes out entirely, there is no place in total darkness.  Translation:  as long as you have Good in your world, nothing will be ENTIRELY Evil… you will only have deepening shades of it.  Something is always, ALWAYS worse.  A fact that your players should be kept aware of.  A fact that YOU should be prepared to elucidate for the player who thinks they are the epitome of Evil.

So, I think that’s enough to chew on for now regarding Evil, what it is and isn’t, and the importance of defining in your game.  I’ll be continuing this run by tackling the topic of evil from various perspectives:  as a rper playing an Evil character; as a rper who has someone running an Evil character in their group and has to interact with that character; as a GM dealing with an Evil character; and the prospects of running an entire campaign of compromised characters.  There are challenges and rewards to be found in all these potential situations, and we all can relate.

As I said… villians, aren’t we all?