# How To Be Evil



## Morrus (Jun 27, 2013)

My favourite villain was an 8-yr old girl called Alice who didn't know she was a villain.  She was sweet as pie; but she was also the literal embodiment of evil.  The PCs (especially the paladin-like ones) didn't know whether to protect her or destroy her!  That campaign never reached a conclusion, but I had ideas of the (good) PCs fleeing the established good agents of the world with the embodiment of evil in tow.  I'm not sure how I'd have resolved that one though.


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## Quickleaf (Jun 27, 2013)

Mirroring is a great word for it! Sadly, it mostly depends on having players who are more pro-active and willing/able to define their characters (rather than fill in the race and class bubbles and roll for stats). After all, a mirror of a Question Mark is a Question Mark. I say sadly because most of my players over the years seem to be of that variety. 

Still I tried to do something that, in retrospect, maps to this idea pretty well. At the outset of a campaign I gave everyone the following ultimatum about character creation: _"You all really don't like the Evil Prince in line to inherit the throne, so much so that you'd take some level of action to oppose him." _I had my own notes, roughly a 3-pointer, about what the Evil Prince wanted to achieve, but I also tweaked and adjusted based on feedback from the players at the start of the campaign:


Artificer - his uncle was locked in the Prince's dungeon
Barbarian - her people had been forced out of the kingdom to marginal lands by Prince's army
Bard - opposed Prince's tyrannies and race discrimination on moral grounds and was fomenting resistance
Invoker - had a vision that the Prince would cause bad things to happen if he took the throne (I added this)
Paladin - investigating Prince's hiring mercenary monsters (I added this), the same monsters that destroyed his order
Rogue - hated the Prince's right hand man, her wicked rogue mentor
Swordmage - her parents were betrayed by a sorceress lover/ally of the Prince
This helped me establish that the Prince had *military support (redshirts)* which he was using in small theatres to control the kingdom and root out "undesirables", as well as a *secret dungeon* where he was putting dissidents who challenged his right to rule. The Prince was a big flaming *racist* who wanted a pure human kingdom and was creating racial ghettos and prejudiced weapons-bearing and travel-permit laws; in response a burgeoning *resistance* was forming. However, because he was still accruing power and didn't have the throne yet, he had resorted to dealing with unsavory types: a *master thief* to help him with some assassinations, blackmail, and forgery of a will, as well as * hobgoblin & bugbear mercenaries* to do dark deeds he couldn't command those units of soldiers loyal to him until he took the throne. Finally, the Prince was seeking out his bastard son who he'd learned fulfilled a *prophecy* of a rebuilt kingdom after a time of strife from his * sorceress lover*; the Prince himself put little stock in prophecies, rather he intended to leverage his bastard to manipulate the public eye. 

Et voila! A villain was born who lasted for 10 levels of gaming.


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## I'm A Banana (Jun 27, 2013)

These villains sound awesome. 



			
				Quickleaf said:
			
		

> Sadly, it mostly depends on having players who are more pro-active and willing/able to define their characters (rather than fill in the race and class bubbles and roll for stats). After all, a mirror of a Question Mark is a Question Mark.




You should have them pick a PC goal a la last week's article! They're meant to take care of this precise problem


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## Quickleaf (Jun 27, 2013)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> You should have them pick a PC goal a la last week's article! They're meant to take care of this precise problem



This was 2008, before your article!  Maybe I should shave provided them with a list? 

IME some players just don't role-play in the "getting into a character's head/story" sense; they just want to make bad jokes, eat snacks, and roll natural 20s. Ain't nothing the DM can do to get them to role-play, and it's a waste of energy to try. I learned to accept these sorts of players are far more casual than me, and my lower expectations increased my enjoyment of their small-mindedness


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## Janx (Jun 27, 2013)

Quickleaf said:


> This was 2008, before your article!  Maybe I should shave provided them with a list?
> 
> IME some players just don't role-play in the "getting into a character's head/story" sense; they just want to make bad jokes, eat snacks, and roll natural 20s. Ain't nothing the DM can do to get them to role-play, and it's a waste of energy to try. I learned to accept these sorts of players are far more casual than me, and my lower expectations increased my enjoyment of their small-mindedness




Let's say you're group is playing this "goal-oriented" D&D instead of normal D&D.  Meaning, it's in rules and on the character sheet.  You have to pick a goal (one of 5 choices), just like you have to pick an Alignment and a Race.

Would that sort of solve it?

Obviously, I don't see the problem.  I chose "Wealth".  In order to "win" I have to pursue opportunities for wealth that aren't stupid while also supporting my team mates as they pursue their goals.

It seems like any other game, I actually got to choose my goal, instead of being forced to race around the board until I have all the money.

I'm not sure how any group can be so casual that they fail to do that while trying to "bad jokes, eat snacks, and roll natural 20s"


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## I'm A Banana (Jun 27, 2013)

I think part of making the goals explicit, and tied to things like the quest-and-treasure cycle, is to make getting into the character's head a more natural part of playing the game. Yeah, not everyone likes to be totally in character, but they'll play a dwarven fighter or an elven mage and do all the in-character things that this entails (like attack monsters and cast spells).

Adding a goal is one way to make it very natural to do a thing. If your goal is Wealth, and you overhear a guy in a bar talking about a fabulous treasure guarded by nefarious traps, it should be pretty clear that Tab A goes in Slot B, even if you're not deeply in character. "Oh, hey, treasure? That's what my guy wants!" 

It's not too tough to make this more mechanistic, tying XP and GP and special abilities and magic items to this, either, to even drive it further home. 

I think my experience in playing with newbies who need a bit of prodding to do in-character stuff has helped shape my use of these rules. It's the stuff natural role-players kind of do anyway, but that people who've never played D&D before might not.


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## Janx (Jun 27, 2013)

Kamikaze Midget said:


> It can also be interesting to roll with the idea that the villain is successful, though this can feel like punishing the PC’s for not jumping at your plot hooks. If the PC’s come back from Grim Mountain and the Bandit Queen has taken over the kingdom, maybe their job just got that much tougher! As long as your players are clear about the consequences of their actions, they can make informed choices about what they want their characters to do – some would love to overthrow a successful bandit queen.




I think this opens up an interesting side debate about GMing.

Is the GM allowed to initiate or instigate trouble that the PC inherently have to resolve for their own good?
If yes, is there a limit to how extreme/often that can be used?

I don't think it's a controversial deal that if your goal is Wealth, I make a wealthy "villain" that will give you opportunities to take his money.  I'm just supplying content.

I think some folks object when their goal is Wealth, and I make a Villain who is intent on destroying civilization (your wealth included) which pretty much means putting your plans to rob the mayor on hold because the end of money is very nigh.

But the counter to that is that sometimes terrorists hijack a plane and crash it into a building that you were busy holding the most important meeting of your plan to negotiate a corporate takeover, so you don't get to role play that meeting, instead you get to race to the exit to escape a collapsing tower.

So what's a fair allowance for a GM to throw in his "unrelated" events/villains?

I am pondering whether a system or metric could be devised to limit/throttle how much trouble a GM can throw at a party at a time.  Like a budget per adventure and for the overall campaign.

As a player, I've seen the worst of it under an otherwise good GM, where the party had to deal with constant GM-instigated problems that made sense in the context of the campaign, but left absolutely no room for the PCs to pursue their own goals.  We had fun, but it got draining.

As a GM, if the players are initiating action, pursuing goals, then I think the GM should be making mostly opportunities that fit those goals (with challenges within them) and infrequent threats to their existing situation, (where the PCs must deal with problem or suffer bad things).  In my view, the players are being active, I don't need to "punish" them or distract from their goal.  After all, they are inspiring me to make content they will pursue.

If the players are being passive, just sitting around, that's when it may be more acceptable to instigate trouble that they need to deal with.  After all, they're not pursuing a goal or opportunity that fits the goal they claim to have.  they've effectively relinquished their right to control what happens next in the Macro sense.


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## Stormonu (Jun 27, 2013)

A lot of times in the games I've run, character backstories aren't there at the start, but they instead get built as the player becomes more attached to their character.  Likewise, I've had many an occasion where character's actions end up making someone into a villian with real reasons to hate the PCs, and a desire to make that grudge personal.

As for villians I've used, my favorite has always been Strahd.  But of course, several times that I've used him, he isn't brooding in his castle waiting for the PCs.  He's come after the party, brutally.  While he might not have the power to take the whole party on at once, he can make their lives miserable.  Dropping a cloudkill to creep in under the door of the room the party is sleeping in.  Turning NPCs the party got help from in the town into vampires and siccing them on them party.  Kidnapping a lone PC guard at night, mesmerizing him and sending him back with orders to await further instructions - and so on.   Basically, hitting the players where it hurts, and below the belt whenever possible - but, in a way that follows the game's rules.


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## LostSoul (Jun 27, 2013)

I think there's a slight tension between some XP systems and PCs vs. bad guy plots.  Sometimes the best way to disrupt a NPC's plot leaves you with little XP.  

For example: In my current 3E game (Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil) I wanted to give the players a lot of choice as to how to defeat the Temple's plot.  Which meant that I needed to actually give the NPCs things to do and avoid the module's linearity.  I knew that "smart" decisions - such as not fighting your way through hordes of flunkies - were actually poor ones because of how the XP system works.  (I think it even says in the module that the big dungeon is there to make sure the PCs have enough XP to face the temple's top brass.)  In other words, grind.

I estimated how long the dungeon crawl grind would have taken, then I gave the NPCs tasks to complete that would take about the same amount of time.  Then I set XP amounts for disrupting those events equal to the amount of time the PCs were taking away from the NPCs (based on the grind metric).

So far it's worked out: the PCs have avoided fighting for the most part, instead choosing to disrupt the temple's activities and setting them against each other.  When the temple's brass took notice of them, they had enough XP to deal with it.


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## Hand of Evil (Jun 28, 2013)

I think it is important to remember there are villains and there are EVIL villains.  Not all villains and bad guys are evil, they are just people or groups that oppose the "quest" in a story.  An example of this is Rene Belloq from Raiders, treacherous, dangerous and willing to let people die but did not like his hands dirty.  

Evil villains cause a fear in others, they do not have limits in what they will do to get to a goal or stop the quest.


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## Neonchameleon (Jun 28, 2013)

I'm trying to remember which RPG it is where one part of Chargen is answering the question "Why does [Villain Name] hate you?"  And one of the things the GM uses for the campaign is the villain made up from the answers to those questions.

But great villains in D&D?  Acecerak.  Bargle.  Palatine (and the rest of the Dragonlance "We can't allow Good to win" brigade).  Kender.


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## Hand of Evil (Jun 28, 2013)

Another option is that the evil bad guy can be part of an evil group, this way you can have an evil manifest destiny that the bad guy follows (at least in part).  Mafia, CIA, Cartels, Chaos, Hydra, The Man, etc.


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## Quickleaf (Jun 28, 2013)

Janx said:


> Let's say you're group is playing this "goal-oriented" D&D instead of normal D&D.  Meaning, it's in rules and on the character sheet.  You have to pick a goal (one of 5 choices), just like you have to pick an Alignment and a Race.
> 
> Would that sort of solve it?
> 
> ...



There are two types of casual gamers where this whole concept breaks down. Don't get me wrong I like goals, it's very Shadows of Yesterday-esque. Just pointing out there are player dynamics situations it will not resolve.

*Reactive players* are a subset of casual gamer who don't mind and perhaps prefer railroading, rarely have strong opinions about where the party should go next, and have character personalities as interesting as cardboard. They might pick an alignment/goal or what have you, but basically they're playing their character as an extension of themselves or whatever the spirit of the group dictates, and quickly forget about their alignment/goal choice (not to mention most plot details). Such things aren't important to them because D&D is a group game, and they're content to let other players steer the direction the game takes.

* Gold, Ale, and Wenches Players* are a subset of casual gamer who basically have the same Conan-esque character type every time. Their goals are always the same and utterly boring, and no matter what alignment they pick they end up being played suspiciously close to neutral evil. They'll pick an alignment/goal, they may even pick a name besides "Biggus Dickus", but they really just are waiting to starting killing monsters, securing more than their fair share of treasure, and then act like jerk-offs to every NPC (especially quest givers). Story and character development mean nothing to them because D&D is about enacting their own power fantasy with gold, ale, and wenches.

Btw I'm not saying either of these is bad. Just that a DM shouldn't expect that introducing some system of goals is going to dramatically change how one of these casual gamers approaches D&D.


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## I'm A Banana (Jun 28, 2013)

Quickleaf said:
			
		

> Btw I'm not saying either of these is bad. Just that a DM shouldn't expect that introducing some system of goals is going to dramatically change how one of these casual gamers approaches D&D.




It's true, goals and villains won't bring reactive players out of their shell or bring hedonic players into some sort of character. Nor really should they -- those players wouldn't really have fun like that! But they're pretty good at keeping reactive players active enough to keep the game moving even when they're holding the calvinball (so that the game keeps moving and their choice remains as memorable as their class choice or race choice), and they're pretty good at giving hedonic players a direction to jump in to get to the monsters (so that you have them stirring the pot where you, as a DM, like them to stir the pot, and not just making trouble for being rowdy in the tavern). 

Ain't gonna change their personalities, but it can keep some of the less constructive traits of those type of players from de-railing things too much. Assuming they're well-intentioned players, anyway. And it can lure players who have one of those traits as dominant but another trait lurking beneath the surface into exposing that subsurface trait a bit more. A reactive player might just need a mechanical fob to remind them (like their race mechanics). A hedonic player might just need a goal that lets them carouse and brawl ("Pleasure" is totally a great goal!). 

But if your emotional goal in D&D isn't related to the narrative of the thing, it's not going to MAKE you care. It's just going to make it easier for the DM to be like, "Hey, Eddie, the whorehouse is being driven out of business by a corrupt politician that you KNOW you've seen there before, why don't you go smash them?" or to be like "Sarah, that orphanage that burnt down can't be making your character happy, can it?"


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