Evil player characters in Ravenloft: A Dissenting View

[Strahdsbuddy]

Alignment has always been an issue for me, and i even stopped writing it on character sheets as early as 2nd edition. As a guideline I suppose it has merit, but a good roleplayer can justify his actions in the moment and deal with the repercussions later. In fact, a good roleplayer will actually ACKNOWLEDGE the repercussions later! My WoW group, most of whom I knew in real life) were always hounding me to DM for them. I asked them what they thought of Ravenloft and got the usual chorus of "how long til my guy grows a tail" complaints. One guy (a friend of a friend of a friend) went on to tell me about all the crazy stuff he did to his own party in a Ravenloft campaign, justifying it all with "Hey, I was Chaotic Evil!" While I understand that as written it is an important part of the game, that sort of abuse seemed to be just silly. Did this character also have an INT score of 4, meaning that he would never think his actions may have consequences? Shades of gray are more important to the PCs than to NPCs, and I'm happy to give my players some leeway if they are willing to roleplay properly. I've had characters that were michevious but not outright mean, and characters that were noble but not blindly gullible, as well as characters who certainly operated by a code of laws, even if they did not match the laws enforced in a kingdom. What are their alignments?

[The Giamarga]

And I'm not sure if I'd ever allow a full evil party. One character slipping from good to evil or redeeming himself from evil to good, or dancing on the edge could make for good drama. A whole party of them could quickly get silly.

Aren't the FoS characters and the old Kargatane with their stories great examples of all evil parties. Granted they never were true pnp groups but still you can see how you could handle it in the stories. Of course it would need mature players and an excellent dm to pull this off.

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

And I'm not sure if I'd ever allow a full evil party. One character slipping from good to evil or redeeming himself from evil to good, or dancing on the edge could make for good drama. A whole party of them could quickly get silly.

Aren't the FoS characters and the old Kargatane with their stories great examples of all evil parties. Granted they never were true pnp groups but still you can see how you could handle it in the stories. Of course it would need mature players and an excellent dm to pull this off.

Hmm... an excellent point, though those examples show exactly the sort of silly I was speaking of. (Not a knock on the Kargatane or my fellow FoS members, all their characters and ours are obviously deliberately somewhat tongue-in-cheek).

I suppose a serious all-evil party might work if the members are part of mostly lawful evil society, to provide them a reason to stick together. But that tends to take away from the inner struggle, doesn't it? None of the Kargatane or FoS characters (unless I'm forgetting someone) are trying to redeem themselves at all. If they did, they would quickly turn on their fellows or vice versa.

[Tenebris]

And I'm not sure if I'd ever allow a full evil party. One character slipping from good to evil or redeeming himself from evil to good, or dancing on the edge could make for good drama. A whole party of them could quickly get silly.

Aren't the FoS characters and the old Kargatane with their stories great examples of all evil parties. Granted they never were true pnp groups but still you can see how you could handle it in the stories. Of course it would need mature players and an excellent dm to pull this off.

Hmm... an excellent point, though those examples show exactly the sort of silly I was speaking of. (Not a knock on the Kargatane or my fellow FoS members, all their characters and ours are obviously deliberately somewhat tongue-in-cheek).

I suppose a serious all-evil party might work if the members are part of mostly lawful evil society, to provide them a reason to stick together. But that tends to take away from the inner struggle, doesn't it? None of the Kargatane or FoS characters (unless I'm forgetting someone) are trying to redeem themselves at all. If they did, they would quickly turn on their fellows or vice versa.

Yes when we do run an all evil campaign, the evil nature is treated almost like an inherent curse more then an ethos to be reveled in. Ultimately its just another way to get the pcs into the gothic mindset. Such campaigns tend to be very dark as the pcs are doomed not just by their environment but by their very natures. However, such a context makes atonement and redemption, however ephemeral they may be, all the more heroic.

[DilisnyaRevenge]

And I'm not sure if I'd ever allow a full evil party. One character slipping from good to evil or redeeming himself from evil to good, or dancing on the edge could make for good drama. A whole party of them could quickly get silly.

This is a very interesting discussion! While I think both sides that have presented have given some valid points, I'm going to have to side with Gonzoron on this one. Having one or two evil/struggling/anti-hero characters seems to have a better dramatic effect for me. It gives the party a more dynamic flavor. In other words, the "good" characters give the "evil" ones more contrast. It also gives the party more interesting choices. What do the "good" characters do when the "evil" one is actually right? Can the "evil" ones get their way by leaving the "good" ones in the dark on some of their more base deeds? Once the "good" ones figure out what has happened, will they be willfully ignorant to the "evil" characters' actions because it makes their lives easier and "the ends justify the means"? Etc.

Ultimately though, it boils down to a matter of taste...

[Tenebris]

It's never one or the other as I allow pc's to play any alignment they choose, it's just the way I work all evil parties--should all players choose an evil alignment, within the Ravenloft context. In my opinion it works far better than heavy handed alignment restrictions, or worse, saying that person A or A and B can roleplay an evil alignment whereas person C and D cannot.

[Hogan Van Monsterband]

But if everyone on the team is going through the same struggle, it's a bit too World of Darkness for me.

This is kinda my attitude as well. You could conceivably have evil Ravenloft PCs, but there are other games out there that do it better. If I want horrible-people-doing-horrible-things-to-one-another (which is a pretty cool game, really), I'd go for Vampire or Unknown Armies.

[Cole Deschain]

One of the best Ravenloft campaigns I was ever part of was an all-evil party,

We were a mixed bag of Falkovnian war criminals, amoral scum from the Mordentish-speaking domains, and one particularly shifty and untrustworthy Kartakan bard.

We were brought together by your friend and mine, Rudolph von Aubrecker , and used as free-willed muscle in his shadow war with D'Honaire. The problem, of course, was that as bunch of treacherous scumbags, we must immediately have spiraled into backstabbing and Eeeeeeeeeeevil, right?

Not so much.

Because another plot element was that our Mordentish wizard had a daughter he'd been unaware of, and a major part of his character arc was protecting her from the backlash from his own actions. And a few of us, seeing this as our last chance to do somethign worthwhile with our lives, tried to help him.


Always remember- Player versus player violence that's part of the overall campaign plan is not necessarily a bad thing.

The only ones to get out alive were the Kartakan (his player left, so the Brain sent him to another area) and one of the Falkovnians, who took the kid and ran while everybody else duked it out.

[alhoon]

Cole? Long time no see!

Anyway: Evil characters aren't out for me, if they agree to not stoop to crappy acts like going out of their way to kill commoners just because they can, and if they agree to not kill each other in their sleep.

[Strahdsbuddy]

Cole? Long time no see!

Anyway: Evil characters aren't out for me, if they agree to not stoop to crappy acts like going out of their way to kill commoners just because they can, and if they agree to not kill each other in their sleep.

"Because they can" seems like an inane justification for anything, and doesn't seem to be based in alignment at all. Any 2nd level fighter CAN kill a commoner. Why they don't probably has little to do with them being good or evil. Is someone who doesn't murder people because the risk outweighs the reward really acting "good?" Or are they just as selfish as anyone else? And is the appearance of benevolence more important than the existence of it? These philosophical questions don't really have a place in-game, but they do serve to show the flaw in the alignment system if it is adhered to too closely.

It is the same as the discussion on Professor Arcanus elsewhere: Does one unforgivably horrible act define his entire character, or is he more complex than that? Drakov is purely evil, we get that. A good PC should be fun to play, regardless of his motivations. That's a call that's gotta be made on a player-by-player basis, i think

[Zettaijin]

Archetypal D&D brand of evil (but really, just extremely sociopathic) beaviour aside, I'd be curious about a band of outsiders being labeled evil due to differing views on morality based on "cultural" differences.

Mind you it goes against the very Euro-centric and almost always anachronistic D&D heroic fantasy notions of good and evil, and maybe even against the "gothic" flavour of Ravenloft, but it would be interesting nonetheless.

[Zettaijin]

"Because they can" seems like an inane justification for anything, and doesn't seem to be based in alignment at all. Any 2nd level fighter CAN kill a commoner. Why they don't probably has little to do with them being good or evil.

I'd go as far as saying it has little to do with the character's motivations but more with those of the player. As I've stated before, role playing games are a wonderful exutoir for the little sociopath inside all of us.

Players enjoy "stupid evil" (that is to say extreme sociopathic behaviour, and even downright psychotic behaviour) because they can, or rather because it's a game and there are no consequences save ruining the game (assuming said game was not planned with players acting like sociopaths or psychopaths in mind). It's not inane, its quite reasonable actually: this isn't real life, you're not hurting anyone or anything - it's a game.

Well ok, you might hurt a player's feelings ("You IDIOT! You just killed my beloved Ragnar the Handsome! I spent 5 sessions flirting with greasy Bob, our DM here, to establish that my character was a total womanizer! No offense Bob, you're a stand up guy, but I ain't spending another 5 sessions pretending you're a buxom lass with rapier wit".). You might annoy the DM beyond belief ("That guy was one of the most important NPCs in my game! And you just off him like that? No drama, no story, just because you didn't like him? Well aren't we mr.anti-climatic."). Yet, save for the possibility of all out brawl at the gaming table, you're pretty much getting away with murder... literally.

Which is cool. I mean, we all have moments in life when we'd like to punch someone in the nose really hard, but we don't. Maybe because a little voice inside of us makes us feel bad about it. Maybe because another little voice tells us that we'd get punched back and it might hurt us more than it hurt our intended punching bag. Or maybe because a voice tells us our girlfriend wouldn't want us punching people and we'll end up sleeping on the couch. Or maybe...

Well, you get the point by now.

It's all meta, and it's ok, so long as it's consensual. I mean, the vanilla game tells us we should slaughter intelligent sentient creatures just because "they're evil" for crying out loud!

And you know what, I'd be quite interested in seeing a small group of psychopathic characters and seeing smart players playing a game of cat and mouse with the DM. Think of it as a reverse Ravenloft game.