Lago_AM3P at [unixtime wrote:1162084643[/unixtime]]
Disregarding the dumb and narrow-minded sweeping generalization, bullshit. 'Good' PCs do the exact same thing. Only they justify thefts of ancient tombs by claiming that they'll need the gold and experience for a later combat and they justify their killing sprees in the name of a greater good.
Why don't you look at a book of notable PCs for, say, Dragonlance or Faerun. Very, very few named characters, even on the side of good, just randomly go around helping people. Holding PCs to a different standard is dumb.
Well, they have thier own motives, but they are primarily good and varied motivations. The problem with evil characters is that they're inherently selfish (that's what evil means after all) and thus dont' do anything that doesn't further their own power gain. Neutral characters at the very least do stuff for friends and coutrymen and stuff, good characters try to help out people just because.
Yeah, it's pretty narrowminded, I admit, but that's the way I've seen evil played most of the time, and it's just not worth it. Evil characters just don't strike me as being very interesting characters in general. They make nice villains but certainly not good heroes.
The thing with being evil is that there really isn't any conflict or character development. You've already made your choice. You're bad to the core. Either you're just plain selfish, heartless and coldblooded with a singleminded desire to aquire power, or you eat babies and rape people for fun. Either one isn't a particularly interesting recurring character. Part of good storytelling is conflict and blackguards just don't have that.
Playing the descent into evil can be cool, playing a character's redemption can be cool, or playing a character's continual struggle to retain morality can be fun too. Pure evil on the other hand gets old after a couple sessions as it's entirely one dimensional. Yeah, it's cool to play a blackguard for awhile, but he just isn't great for a long term game at all.
This isn't to say people can't do evil things from time to time. It actually makes for a good story when the circumstances get one of the normally good fighter characters to torture somebody for information or when someone goes into a rage and slaughters a bunch of people. But you just can't do that all the time, otherwise it becomes really worn out and becomes just plain lame. It's just not all that fun to play a villain in D&D.
So what do you think of Shadowrun / Paranoia / World of Darkness / Warhammer? Are those games boring because they don't constantly give the point of view of the white hats?
Never played paranoia or warhammer, so can't talk about those.
Shadowrun generally portrays the PCs as the white hats. They're fighting against the evil megacorporations, even though in a somewhat chaotic way. They're stereotyical chaotic goods and chaotic neutrals most of the time.
World of Darkness, Vampire specifically, is designed around the concept of moral degeneration. That is characters gradually become more and more evil. In fact, when you hit absolute evil and your humanity goes away, then you become an NPC. Yes there are paths that arne't humanity based, but they're designed for NPCs, the same way that evil alignments in D&D are.
Vampire also has a setup that lets people be evil without the game at some point devolving into the PCs killing each other. There are so many social repercussions that it works out well. Inevitably, D&D evil games are held together by the metagame fact that you can't kill your allies because they're fellow PCs. D&D is the law of the jungle and there's nobody policing you. You can very well slaughter your party members while they sleep, and take their items and nobody is going to know you did that, or probably even care. After all, if people are letting you get away with raping babies and pillaging villages, they probably won't care if you offed the rest of your wicked band of villains. They'll probably be glad you did. And that's not good for a game, it strains suspension of disbelief.
Vampire handles that situation quite well because you've got a whole vampire heirarchy who care if you start offing other vampires. Evil has a civilized society in that game and that lets it behave and cooperate together to some degree.
D&D is effectively a lawless wasteland, if you don't have morals keeping you from killing your comrades, eventually you will.
... yes, I pretty much quit any of his games after that. He's one of my friends, but.. I really seriously avoid RPG debates with him)
