I can't help but feeling like exciting things are happening every time I log onto this site - I see things I take for granted from a new perspective all the time in this forum, and its always cool how seemingly disparate points of view can intersect in interesting ways and turn out to be more familiar than I expected.
I've been thinking of that idea for a while in terms of reminding DMs that "the players are part of the storytelling team, and should never be left out of the process...." I felt like that was a great and revolutionary idea when I thought of it, but these independent ideas expand that advice in ways I would never have dreamed of on my own, and I'm nowhere near the first person to have tought of it.
Things like this always gives me food for thought, and cause me to look back and re-examine my own ideas in a whole new light.
And yes, if I haven't already said it in this thread, I'll +1 to what Centauri said: toss alignment out. Alignment is a poor, poor, counter-productive substitute for roleplaying an interesting personality.
Trying to solve out-of-game problems (like cheating, bad attitudes, or poor sportsmanship) with in-game solutions will almost always result in failure, and will probably make matters worse.
Gun Safety Rule #5: Never point the gun at anything you don't intend to destroy. (Never introduce a character, PC, NPC, Villain, or fate of the world into even the possibility of a deadly combat or other dangerous situation, unless you are prepared to destroy it instantly and completely forever.)
Know your group's character sheets, and check them over carefully. You don't want surprises, but, more importantly, they are a gold mine of ideas!
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." It's a problem if the players aren't having fun and it interferes with a DM's ability to run the game effectively; if it's not a problem, 'fixing' at best does little to help, and at worst causes problems that didn't exist before.
"Hulk Smash" characters are a bad match for open-ended exploration in crowds of civilians; get them out of civilization where they can break things and kill monsters in peace.
Success is not necessarily the same thing as killing an opponent. Failure is not necessarily the same thing as dying.
Failure is always an option. And it's a fine option, too, as long as failure is interesting, entertaining, and fun!
"Broken or not, unbalanced or not, if something seems to be preventing the game from being enjoyable, something has to give: either that thing, or other aspects of the game, or your idea of what's enjoyable." - Centauri
'The point is that the setting reacts to the players'
Yeah, that's not-so-much an evil campaign as an open-ended one. I've run a few of those, but it takes far more work than some of the more traditional styles of play.
Rather than prepping a series of adventures or plot arcs you have to be ready to run with nearly anything the PC's do as a quest line. Thus usually have to have a lot more material at your fingertips. I don't recommend it unless you are willing to take meticulous notes and come up with information on the fly. That said, it it a style that I enjoy running and playing in.
My current campaign is very much a plot-based 'good guys' one though. Heroic destiny, fulfilling prophesy, all that... and the players seem to really be enjoying that as a change of pace from open-ended. Partly b/c open-ended tends to make it harder to give each PC a chance to shine in some ways and partly b/c certain types of players do dumb stuff if given several open-ended campaigns in a row.
The players went from a pirate crew in the last open-ended campaign, to destined saviors of the nation in this more ummm prepared one. It's not that the players have no choices, they could ditch the main quests and strike out on their own if they want to, but if they do the villainous plots will keep progressing while they are away. Also I should clarify, rather than focusing on 1 major plotline I usually do 3 major plotlines to provide a variety of choices as well as giving the campaign world some depth. Over time these may involve hundreds if not thousands of npcs and monsters.
That is one way to look at it. By brainstorming their evil scheme the players do absorb a significant amount of responsibility for creating the world. For instance, say the players want to use an orphanage as a recruiting ground for the future thugs of their gang. Well, the orphanage didn't exist until they suggested that they'd like to have one for that purpose. Now, poof, there it is!
We do this already with typical character backstory, typical session zero mumbo jumbo. But those things usually only pertain to the specific character or cross section of PCs and where they came from. The difference in an evil game is that now we're starting to talk about things the PCs haven't necessarily interacted with yet. Now we're getting into the arena of building the location. In this case you do end up with the DM yielding a lot more influence and control over the details of the setting to the players.
The point is that the setting reacts to the players, whereas typically the players react to the setting, which is essentially what iserith is advocating. I think we're approaching the idea from the same angle. It works for all games, but it usually isn't the default that groups start from. So actually calling it an evil campaign can help you "practice" this approach, by providing a concrete motivation for trying something new.
Yes, that's it, though I think the setting rolls along on its own even if the PCs don't cause it to react. That's the difference between sandbox and location-in-motion. And any excuse to get people to move back to this way of doing things is just fine by me. I think this is a "rediscovered" design process, one that was lost around 2e when plot-based adventures hit the scene hard and set the tone for the next 20 years (unfortunately). I've written plenty of plot-based campaigns. It's only when I started to go back to location-in-motion design that I saw what D&D can really do. Really, what it's meant to do and 4e plays particularly well in this design because of its more abstract nature.
We've forgotten how good it can be, I think, if we just stop writing the story before we sit down to play. Done right, it writes itself and there are all sorts of interesting side effects like player engagement and improved group dynamics.
No amount of tips, tricks, or gimmicks will ever be better than simply talking directly to your fellow players to resolve your issues. Reduce DM Prep & Increase Player Engagement:Don't Prep the Plot | Structure First, Story Last | Collaborative Roleplay | "Yes, and..." | Prep Tips Games I'm Running on Roll20: Island of the Frog | Vanguard of Dis | Star*Juice | Tesseract | The Crucible | Fimbulvetr | The Delve | Draj, City of the Moon Follow me on Twitter:@is3rith
'The point is that the setting reacts to the players'
Yeah, that's not-so-much an evil campaign as an open-ended one. I've run a few of those, but it takes far more work than some of the more traditional styles of play.
Rather than prepping a series of adventures or plot arcs you have to be ready to run with nearly anything the PC's do as a quest line. Thus usually have to have a lot more material at your fingertips. I don't recommend it unless you are willing to take meticulous notes and come up with information on the fly. That said, it it a style that I enjoy running and playing in.
I would refer to this as "sandbox," which is definitely not what I'm advocating though I admit it's a fine line. When I refer to a location-in-motion, I'm thinking in fairly small terms. A campaign world itself wouldn't be considered a location-in-motion. But the mysterious island, sinking temple in the swamp, or the dark forest would be. It's a little more finite and manageable. When you're done with one location-in-motion, you move onto the next one.
A location-in-motion is good for evil characters because they can go in there and run amok however they like, making deals, killing rivals, subjugating indigenous populations - go nuts. As Yronimos has pointed out, "playing evil" really means "I have more narrative control." If you give them that narrative control by default through the structured freedom of location-in-motion design, the urge to be evil goes away in a lot of cases.
No amount of tips, tricks, or gimmicks will ever be better than simply talking directly to your fellow players to resolve your issues. Reduce DM Prep & Increase Player Engagement:Don't Prep the Plot | Structure First, Story Last | Collaborative Roleplay | "Yes, and..." | Prep Tips Games I'm Running on Roll20: Island of the Frog | Vanguard of Dis | Star*Juice | Tesseract | The Crucible | Fimbulvetr | The Delve | Draj, City of the Moon Follow me on Twitter:@is3rith
There's a ton of great advice in this thread, thanks a ton guys. To clarify my problem in particular: my players are intionally playing evil characters with my permission. It's not a case of turning evil from boredom or lack of power. That said, most of what I've read here is still useful.
As long as they, as players, remember that this is group thing, you should be fine as far as group dynamics go. Evil characters often team up for survivability.
The hardest thing to remember is that all actions have consequences beyond the immediate. For example: Sure, that rogue just managed to steal a gem from the jewelry store, but it will be noticed later. A simple divination may be enough to see who did it. Next time that character is in town, the guards may notice him and have a 'few questions' if he would be so kindly as to follow them.
Just as good guys get famous as they adventure, bad guys get infamous.
There's a ton of great advice in this thread, thanks a ton guys. To clarify my problem in particular: my players are intionally playing evil characters with my permission. It's not a case of turning evil from boredom or lack of power. That said, most of what I've read here is still useful.
It's not really the DM's job to motivate the players. That's the players' jobs.
And for them, motivation is easy. Whether we like it or not, we are all, at one time or another, "evil characters" - we lie, cheat, steal, fail to keep our promises, throw strangers or coworkers or even friends and family under the bus to save ourselves, and so on. Sometimes we know right away that what we are doing is wrong, and choose to do it anyway because the motivations to do evil things are powerful and difficult things to ignore. Sometimes, we do evil things because we've convinced ourselves or have been convinced that it is the right thing to do. Sometimes, doing the right thing is just too difficult or unappealing. The motivations for evil characters are easy - they are everywhere, and in fact, there are so many of them, that entire religions, governments, philosophies, systems of law, and so on have been built up to try to suppress or eliminate those motivations: a great deal of human effort, energy, concentration, resources, and lives are consumed every second in studying and trying to control or eliminate the motivations of evil people. The cynics among us will freely suggest that coming up with motivations for being evil people are far, far easier and more natural to us than coming up with motivations to be good people.
If the players are at all excited about and interested in their characters, and if the characters are three-dimensional, well-rounded, and detailed, then the players should be coming to the table each game session pre-loaded with their own motivations.
The players should be motivating their characters, and providing you with enough of their characters' motivations to help you fuel your plots and stories.
For whatever reason, your players are not doing their job, the job they started when they told you they were really excited about the idea of playing an evil campaign, and wanted to do that. That's an out-of-game problem: you should stop the game, sit down out of character together, and finish the job of figuring out who those evil characters are, what causes them to be evil, what their motivations for doing the right things are (yes, even evil characters want to do the right thing and have people who love them and look up to them and say "he's just misunderstood", "she's not really a bad lady, when you get to know her", "he makes the trains run on time", "he always seemed like a nice guy, but kind of quiet", and so on!) Find out what hobbies and interests they have besides kicking the dog. What the weaknesses are that drive them to do evil things, and how those weaknesses make them feel about themselves. What ambitions, hopes, and dreams they have, what they see themselves doing if their own weaknesses didn't keep getting in the way, and so on.
If you can't figure out any motivation for the characters, it's because you either didn't pay attention to the players' character sheets and the information they provided to you during Session Zero while brainstorming together on their characters, or the players didn't provide you with anything to work with.
You don't seem like the sort of DM to ignore the players, so my money is on the players failing to give you anything solid to work with.
Get those players busy making characters, instead of digging through a library of splat books looking for the most optimized munchkin-bait. If the players are truly unmotivated and directionless, they need to start doing something different: do their part in creating characters, rather than a collection of combat stats with "Chaotic Evulz" stamped on the top. Once they understand who their characters are and what they are underneath the generic black hat, the motivations should be easy to come up with, and you should have mountains of material to work with in creating your storylines, NPCs, and so on.
Trying to solve out-of-game problems (like cheating, bad attitudes, or poor sportsmanship) with in-game solutions will almost always result in failure, and will probably make matters worse.
Gun Safety Rule #5: Never point the gun at anything you don't intend to destroy. (Never introduce a character, PC, NPC, Villain, or fate of the world into even the possibility of a deadly combat or other dangerous situation, unless you are prepared to destroy it instantly and completely forever.)
Know your group's character sheets, and check them over carefully. You don't want surprises, but, more importantly, they are a gold mine of ideas!
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." It's a problem if the players aren't having fun and it interferes with a DM's ability to run the game effectively; if it's not a problem, 'fixing' at best does little to help, and at worst causes problems that didn't exist before.
"Hulk Smash" characters are a bad match for open-ended exploration in crowds of civilians; get them out of civilization where they can break things and kill monsters in peace.
Success is not necessarily the same thing as killing an opponent. Failure is not necessarily the same thing as dying.
Failure is always an option. And it's a fine option, too, as long as failure is interesting, entertaining, and fun!
"Broken or not, unbalanced or not, if something seems to be preventing the game from being enjoyable, something has to give: either that thing, or other aspects of the game, or your idea of what's enjoyable." - Centauri
I don't want to quote all of that, but I think you've hit on some critical points. I think the players were coming to the table without thinking about why their character might be construed as evil by most people and what motivates that. This is probably mostly my fault really, because the evil campaign that I'm currently running began as a one-off role reversal session just for kicks on Halloween but the players liked it, so it continued. That is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed, and getting more clear motivations from the players should clean up a lot of my problems in creating situations that provide interesting choices for them.
With that in mind I still think that the players could easily and justifiably create characters that may make that difficult, thus making the rest of this thread still valuable.
I don't want to quote all of that, but I think you've hit on some critical points. I think the players were coming to the table without thinking about why their character might be construed as evil by most people and what motivates that. This is probably mostly my fault really, because the evil campaign that I'm currently running began as a one-off role reversal session just for kicks on Halloween but the players liked it, so it continued. That is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed, and getting more clear motivations from the players should clean up a lot of my problems in creating situations that provide interesting choices for them.
With that in mind I still think that the players could easily and justifiably create characters that may make that difficult, thus making the rest of this thread still valuable.
It's not entirely your fault: it's a group effort, and as players and DMs we've all been there before - I know I wasn't immune to it as a DM or a player, and that in both cases I wasn't acting in a vaccuum
I'm not sure why it is, but with evil characters in particular, it's so easy to forget that characters are representations of human beings (even the non-human characters), rather than simply shadows of mood, atmosphere, and style.
Then again, good, neutral, chaotic, and lawful characters fall into the same traps, too, but for some reason it's sometimes harder to see it happening in some alignments than it is in others, perhaps because the good alignments tend to swim with the current of traditional heroic fantasy storytelling more than against it. That doesn't stop "Lawful Stupid" and "Stupid Good" style gaming from surfacing anyway, but by the nature of the game, it's the evil and chaotic alignments where it's naturally more obvious.
Or maybe I'm way off track tonight.
In any case, encourage those players to put a human face on those villains, because, when they are at their best, the villains are a reflection of who we are, what we aspire to be, and what we hope for, as much as they are a reflection of what we want to avoid and what we are afraid of or ashamed of.
Trying to solve out-of-game problems (like cheating, bad attitudes, or poor sportsmanship) with in-game solutions will almost always result in failure, and will probably make matters worse.
Gun Safety Rule #5: Never point the gun at anything you don't intend to destroy. (Never introduce a character, PC, NPC, Villain, or fate of the world into even the possibility of a deadly combat or other dangerous situation, unless you are prepared to destroy it instantly and completely forever.)
Know your group's character sheets, and check them over carefully. You don't want surprises, but, more importantly, they are a gold mine of ideas!
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." It's a problem if the players aren't having fun and it interferes with a DM's ability to run the game effectively; if it's not a problem, 'fixing' at best does little to help, and at worst causes problems that didn't exist before.
"Hulk Smash" characters are a bad match for open-ended exploration in crowds of civilians; get them out of civilization where they can break things and kill monsters in peace.
Success is not necessarily the same thing as killing an opponent. Failure is not necessarily the same thing as dying.
Failure is always an option. And it's a fine option, too, as long as failure is interesting, entertaining, and fun!
"Broken or not, unbalanced or not, if something seems to be preventing the game from being enjoyable, something has to give: either that thing, or other aspects of the game, or your idea of what's enjoyable." - Centauri
Power. To paraphrase Frederic Forsythe (The Dogs of War), power is the real reason behind most things. In the novel, the main character states that in a capitalist economy money is power, while in the communist world military strength is power. Evil characters would likely be motivated best by the chance to gain more power, whether it is money to buy stuff, or greater spellcasting, or whatever.
Another poster commented that sometimes the group wants to play evil so they can be proactive, because 'heroes' are usually reactive. I have had the problem of Dm's not letting me be proactive when playing the good-guy hero, not letting me get information to do things or plan things out. If the players are basically saying 'I don't want to do the dungeon crawl of the week, I wanna plan out and launch an attack on the evil army' then DM's should pay attention, because its a sign of dissatisfaction.
