Antiheroic
Best part of this image is the Chaotic Good teacup. “Look, Mama! I’m bathing in the blood of tyrants! Tee-hee!”
And the kettle’s all like, “Get back here, young man! Have you any idea how much scrubbing it takes to get bloodstains out of table linens?”
Exeunt stage right.
As we watch the china disappear into a puff of public domain fairytale nonsense (or legally protected parody, depending on the advice of our lawyers), I would like to direct your attention to Succubus’s facial expression. That is the constipated look of Evil ignored. Not vanquished. Not foiled at its schemes, defeated in battle, or even beaten in a fiddle contest by an upstart antebellum bard. Rather, this is Evil overlooked. Swept under the rug. Treated like a fart at a fancy party: embarrassing to be sure, smelly as The Beast before bath day, but pointedly unacknowledged. I would argue that this is a bad thing, both for Evil and for your game. Allow me to illustrate with an example.
When I was a young GM, one of my first ever games was a Warhammer Fantasy mashup. The party was a mixed bag of cutthroats and weirdos, and they had no business partying with one another. There was a black-hearted skaven assassin. A pious Sister of Sigmar. A wandering Bretonnian knight, a recently-turned vampire spawn, and a big dumb orc. Anyone familiar with the setting can tell you that this was an experiment doomed to failure. Yet it’s the orc rather than the party dynamic that I’d like to talk about today.
I described him as “dumb” before, but that’s underselling the situation. Dude was driven out of his WAAAGH! for being too dumb, and that should tell you everything you need to know. He liked eating rocks and hitting things, and that’s about it. All of which made him a bad choice for the mission du jour: helping to defend a besieged monastery from bandits.
I’d imagined Seven Samurai in my head. A bunch of disparate weirdos band together to help save a community. Some do it for coin, some for honor, some because they want to hit things and eat rocks. It was a classic quest hook for a mixed party, so I figured it would work.
“You have a day to prepare before the bandits return. They’ll be expecting their tribute. What do you do?”
Most of the party behaved themselves. The Sister of Sigmar tended to the wounded. The knight trained the few meager troops. The skaven and the vamp had a competition to see who could out-edgy the other, poisoning sharpened stakes and ‘taking sustenance’ from the mortally wounded of the town. The orc decided to cook.
“You said dey waz hungry, right?”
“The handful of defenders do appear malnourished. It looks as if the bandits have taken most of their supplies, and these people are on the brink of starvation. Would you like to try foraging?”
“Yeah. Someth’n like ‘dat.”
Dude proceeded to find a big iron kettle, fill it with water, and start to simmering.
“Yer said ‘der were bodiez everywhere. I grab some uv im.”
It was at this point that I realized hijinks was afoot. It was also at this point that my inexperienced GM brain kicked into “save the session” mode.
“Oh,” commented the abbot. “Your friend has elected to help with our sanitation problem. We’ve had no time to see to our dead properly. I must say, he is an uncommonly helpful sort of orc.”
“I’z not be’n subtle ova ere,” says the orc, shoving a load of murdered villagers into his cauldron.
“Everyone is too busy with their defense preparations to notice what you’re cooking.”
“Ere yer go, Abbot. How’s ‘dat taste?”
“Where ever did you find wild boar at this time of year? I’d thought the countryside picked clean!”
This would have been all well and good if I’d intended a comedy bit. But the fact is that I was outright ignoring the commotion my orc player meant to cause. Sure it’s a bit disruptive on the player’s part. That’s his prerogative though, and I should have enforced appropriate consequences. The party should have been kicked out of camp, witnessed the sack of the town from a distant hillside, and possibly had the opportunity to save a refugee or two fleeing from marauders. Instead, I get to live with the sad puppy-dog eyes of my orc player for the rest of my life: “Yer mean ta say no wun notices dey’re eat’n people?”
Not my finest hour. But it’s not so uncommon as you might believe. Anyone who’s ever been in an unexpectedly bloodless pirate game can relate. Same deal with thieves’ guilds that skew unexpectedly Robin Hood or assassins expected to befriend the target mid-assignment. Discovering that the world wants you to be a good guy is a weirdly off-putting experience, and has a way of undermining an Evil player’s agency.
And so, for today’s discussion, what do you say we share stories of Evil PCs that didn’t quite get to do their thing? How did circumstances (and GMs) conspire to turn you Neutral? Did you feel like your bad guy never quite got to strut their black-armored stuff? Tell us all about your own bad intentions frustrated by good deeds down in the comments!
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I remember being in one campaign with an all-evil party once, but since everyone involved was too inexperienced to handle it properly, it was short-lived. The rest of the party fell into a complete mess of pointless backstabbing and puppy-kicking, enough that my Chaotic Evil vampire priestess of a murder god had to tell them to tone things down. Of course, that’s not the game thwarting my evil plans so much as the other PCs making mine look like a goody-goody in comparison, but it still turned me off playing bad guys until I could figure out the party cohesion issues.
I haven’t had any notable evildoers forced into heroic roles since then, although I think that’s more my GMs vetoing them from the start rather than trying to convert them in-game, which is admittedly a better way to handle it. I’d still like to give evil characters another shot some day, though, now that I know more about how best to play ’em.
> pointless backstabbing and puppy-kicking
Your face when: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/puppy-kicking
Succubus’s expressions makes me think she’s either traumatized by the notion of doing good, is uncertain if she’s discovered a new kink, or is just freaked out by mistreated animated furniture.
Yes.
Off-screen, Necromancer is raising an ‘animated teddy bear’ and/or surrogate husbando.
Tale as old as time. O_O
In college, I witnessed my CN fighter/thief (designed as the broody, shadows-stalking bounty-hunter type) become the CG voice of decorum as the rest of the party descended into plot-abandoning shenanigans session after session. It became an exercise in Wrong Genre.
As a DM, I had one planned recurring BBEG and his right-hand minion eventually just stop appearing after their 3rd or 4th ill-fated appearance. My son suggested that behind the scenes, the minion pointed out to his boss that revenge was expensive and (so far) fruitless, while laying low and exploiting the RAW of creating *robes of useful items* to amass a fortune in gemstones while selling the slightly used robes was PURE PROFIT.
> exploiting the RAW of creating *robes of useful items* to amass a fortune in gemstones while selling the slightly used robes
That’s just buying up ladders to sell 2 x 10 ft poles, but with more steps!
Enough steps that it’s not obvious you’re exploiting the weird economies of a game world! It’s foolproof!
(Disclaimer: Not all GMs are fools.)
I find like the opposite happens more often – the acts of goody goodness are kind of brushed off.
Got an example for me? Are we talking about Paladins being shat on for trying their best?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/unhallowed-rites-part-5-for-love-of-evil
Can’t speak for Zarhon, but PCs being treated as basement-clearing errand-boys clearing higher-CR basements after they’ve done great acts of heroism is something I’ve seen occasionally (and seen parodied/joked about more often). You know, the baron continues to give the party orders to Go Do Adventure even after they slew a dragon that was threatening the entire kingdom.
It’s a Thing that happens sometimes, often when a campaign’s status quo lasts long beyond where the campaign should have ended.
Most often it’s cases where world-saving heroics and general risking of ones neck is utterly unrewarded or not given its proper respect dues by people benefitting from it.
Alternatively, DMs having issues figuring out how to make good deeds influence the game, treating them as one-off things or something that only matters to the PC doing the good deed.
Spending 5000gp to open a puppy shelter, for example, might get you exp rewards or a pat on the back before the adventure continues as normal.
Another way to look at it is: it’s much, much easier for a DM to give PCs bad consequences for their actions (whether the actions are good or bad), than it is for the PCs good/selfless actions to produce fittingly good consequences or effects on the game (beyond adopting Boblin the Goblin and such).
How often does a Paladin or Cleric see a town change for the better from their noble actions/presence? They have to work overtime just to prevent the town from being torched by evil forces, most of the time.
We were supposed to play an evil party in a less known Hungarian rpg system. I don’t really like to play evil characters, but I thought I give this a go. I rolled up the equivalent of a chaotic neutral character, while everyone else were flaunting their neutral evils. Or so they claimed, as they more tended to play Cruelly Thug instead, as the extent of their evilness was to flay someone alive just because he was there.
Anyway, we arrived to a small town, where for some reason the local assassin’s guild wanted to press us into investigate a series of local murders. Only they didn’t have anything on us, cause we played midlevel characters who could probably singlehandedly eradicate the whole town, and then some. Not that that thought occurred to the other players.
So we went out looking for some clues, which we obviously didn’t find much, and those were quite useless too. So I called the others together, and said (in character): “Look, I’m bored with this shit; it’s not like they can hold us up with anything, and I’m not gonna do someone else’s job without actual payment, so I’m just gonna grab my horse and get the hell out of Dodge. Who’s coming?”
The others considered this for a minute, then all said yeah, let’s just go. So we did. The DM sent some thugs after us to change our minds, but we practically oneshotted them all, and rode into the sunrise
A good DM would take the loss, rearrange the events, and let us meet the plot somewhere else with a better incentive, tailored for the characters. A great GM would have been able to motivate even an evil party to stay and finish the job.
Our DM decided to spend two hours explaining what would have happened and what was he planning in the adventure . I went to the kitchen to have dinner after 5 minutes.
> Our DM decided to spend two hours explaining what would have happened and what was he planning in the adventure.
To paraphrase a saying about yo mama, “If DM ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”
Gotta say, this is how most (reasonable) evil PCs in a party feel. 99% of adventuring is just killing things for, ostensibly, the greater good.
You happen to loot every corpse along the way, and who can blame you, really? The goblins had the genocide coming.
Yeah, like, the only real difference between most good and evil adventuring groups are the people they’re murdering, usually
> 99% of adventuring is just killing things for, ostensibly, the greater good.
Kind of makes you wonder what a soup-to-nuts pacifist run would look like. Could you 100% a campaign without killing anything?
I’ve been dying to try a 3.5 character with vows to “Harm None.”
Feat tree: Extend Spell (Sleep, Hold, etc.), Elemental Substitution, Nonlethal Substitution, Born of the Three Thunders (optional)
Merciful magic weapon
All for the very same question: would it work? Could you finish a campaign?
Not unless the rest of your party was on board with the plan. And also the DM.
Though now I want to prank one of my GMs by secretly arranging with the other players to spring an all-pacifist party on him…ideally my brother, but I’ll take other GM-pranking opportunities if they arise.
Depends on the system too. In Pathfinder/3.5, stopping mindless undead and constructs usually requires beating on them, and they crumble at 0hp (no rescuing them from the brink of death at negative hp). But, does that count as killing?
How about when you ‘kill’ a demon and it just returns to its native plane?
I love Succubus’ “dear in the headlights”-look of confusion and horror. 😀
Where’s Necromancer? 🙂 Is she as conflicted about this as her teammates? She started out as a heroic adventirer, and Paladin sacrificed his grace for her, so I’m curious to see what she’s up to.
Slow fade in on “Creep.”
“…What the hell am I doin’ here?
I don’t belong here…”
In my 5E career I’ve played two evil PCs: An LE Githyanki (It’s always weird that Githyanki are LE, shouldn’t they be LG since they’re Yankees? Githrzdoxx should be LE.) Psi Warrior, and a LE Hobgoblin Artillerist Artificer. If I ever play a comedic one-shot I want to play Wario as a CE Barbarian with the unarmed fighting style.
Lex’raa Dri’guezz (All Githyanki have names that are Klingonized names of actual Yankees) was for a Christmas one-shot. He was a good team-player who protected his teammates, but he was acting for entirely selfish reasons. Thanks to his rampage Santa’s Village would not have been in a good state if we had actually succeeded rather than getting killed by the Krampus. (Which is why Christmas 2021 was cancelled) He was actually planning on claiming Santa’s village for the Githyanki and taking it over.
My Artillerist Hobgoblin is probably lower-case e Lawful evil. Like most Hobs he’s exceedingly polite and a great team player. He’s also a war-criminal who believes in public disproportionate retaliation to send a message to anyone else who would mess with his party or people.
If you’ve played any of the Wario Land games (Get that Warioware shit out of here. Put him in his yellow and purple.) you’d recognize that Wario is a great CE protagonist: He’s selfish and violent, and thinks that rules shouldn’t apply to him, but he also can be counted on to do the adventure if treasure is involved, and fight worse bad guys who would threaten his treasure.
Wario as a role model? Now there’s the kind of unrealistic body standards I can aspire to!
I look back on a long ago FR campaign where my NE Red Wizard of Thay became the Dalelands party’s moral compass. He was assigned to the propaganda arm of the nearby trade enclave with orders to “be heroic”, and was given a pamphlet on “Basic do’s and don’ts of heroism”. Leading up to our party of heroes deciding to wipe out an innocent village for “reasons”. My poor Red Wizard was left trying to explain to the party of murderhobos why they were not supposed to kill the villagers, with only a vague familiarity with Good morality and a six page pamphlet to guide him…
I’ve always considered ‘neutral’ to be more dangerous than ‘evil’, with say LE, or even CE, you pretty much know what to expect; with a character played ‘neutral’ to a ‘T’, you never know if they’re suddenly going to decide that ‘good’ has won too often and some balance is needed. Anikin/Vader DID ‘bring balance to the force’ when he chopped it down to two Sith and two Jedi…I maintain that Vader was TN 🙂
I had a somewhat similar experience but on the opposite side of the spectrum. A friend convinced me to join an open table he was in at our local game store. I had a CG cavalier who was a knight of the unicorn, basically, they were what happens when a frat/sorority decides they want to be adventurers. Well, the party had a decent number of kid players and I ended up getting dm permission to swap because the kids were…murderhoboey and skirted the lines of evil a lot. So I ended up with one of my favorite characters to date a chaotic evil bard. The problem was despite the fact that she would shank a child if it benefited her, she was pragmatic and realized the good guys got away with more stuff. So my chaotic evil manipulator ended up being the party conscience. I mean she still ended up having the mayor of a small town executed by mob rule and set up a puppet regime, but a lot of that was undercut by her having to tell the party that lighting people on fire is obvious and the guards would be called
Note to self: Pitch a comedy campaign where the players are wannabe evil overlords who keep stumbling into situations where their attempts at villainy are constantly interpreted as heroism.
Most of my gaming group lies on the spectrum of “enjoys playing villains” to “murderhobo,” and they like games they don’t have to take seriously. It’s a perfect fit!
I’m just here to say that the “bloodless pirate” image made me laugh an unreasonably long time and I’m still snickering about it. Now I want to make some sort of pirate character who comes across such a thing and becomes an absolute monster after ripping their hair out.
“That’s… not… what that MEANS!! AAARRGHLBLGHBLGHARGL!!”
I was that evil PC and I loved every single of it. I played an evil elf wizard (that I might have talked about before?) in an all evil pathfinder campaign. Basically a mixture between Lucious Malfoy and Belloq from Indiana Jones. He was a classist and a racist. One of my first actions as him was ruining some poor guy, whom the rest of the party had just terrified, artwork and tell him that it was garbage and that he was never going to make it as an artist. Something that had the antipaladin, the murder for hire and the woman who had torture orgies all vote him to be the most evil member of the party.
What made him fun to play was the fact that he constantly failed. Every combat, and I do mean every combat, started with him getting shot by someone and downed in the first turn. Everytime he tried to do some villainous plan, I would succeed on the dice until the last moment where I would fail spectacularly. Every time I would try to pull upon connections or resources, my DM would go “You mean your Fathers connections and resources, that he has told you to keep your hands off?”. His daughter, whom I was constantly critical off, was basically a YA protagonist who constantly foiled his plans. His arch nemesis was gnome Indiana Jones, whose whole deal was that he was not only better then me, but that he was also a completely self-made man.
Their rivalry escalated because my character blamed him for killing my wife. What actually happened was that my character found some ancient artifact in his backstory, the gnome tried to stop me, I didn´t listen and when it went out of control it killed my wife (Whom I had decided to bring with me to the ancient trap-filled tomb). Clearly the gnome was to blame.
What made someone as vile as him work was both because of the misfortune on my dice rolls, but also because the DM was constantly ready to go “Alright, that is what you expect to happen in your megalomaniacal mind, but here is the reality of it. After I retired him (Due to me failing at one of the worst planned assassination attempt on the rest of the party in the history of the game) my DM asked me to build a dungeon for him, that the party could explore. It included a shark room, and many traps. When we finally went through it we discovered the sharks were dead (Because he would totally forget to feed them) and that most of the traps were over engineered pieces of garbage. It was amazing.
Yeah that sounds like warhammer apart for all the otherwise hostile to each other co-operating rather than having a free for all. But as for evil PC’s I once ran a 3.5 campaing with players being minions for the dark lord. Yeah the first city they interacted with would have made Goblin Slayer seem tame. Good thing my skin was thiker than my players, bad thing is it kinda escaleted… In my defence I don’t believe side that commits warcrimes can complain when they are targets of those *cough*soviets*cough*
Can’t complain, I ment to say.
I think you DMed well.
Consequences (punishment) for doing evil can also be „nobody noticed your evil scheming! muahahah“
Nice story, but i think it was you two fault. You didn’t knew what your player was intending, neither them convey it properly. Isn’t that much different from a certain “I know thaumathurgy too” 🙂
Nice story, but i think it was you two fault. You didn’t knew what your player was intending, neither them convey it properly. Isn’t that much different from a certain “I know thaumathurgy too” 🙂
Nah, he admits his inexperience led to him just ingnoring it. But let’s be honest here a moment, cannibalism is hardly a foreing thought in the countey sides of Empire. I mean, the vampire counts get their ghouls somehow. sonthe abbot being willfully ignorant and others not thinking where they got meat, does make some sence to those who know lore.
I do feel bad for the orc player though, a fellow mad bastard and one who knew how to be a “Propa Ork”
Does Unnamed-Furry-Tyrant share any relation with Gestalt?
Yeah… mostly a bunch of pirate characters in games advertised as “playing pirates” and then the GM pulls the rug out from under us and makes us the good guys.
Well I also played an undead servant in a Drow society game. But when *everyone* is evil… your own evil doesn’t really stand out.
They were, in addition to a servant of another PC also a servant of Kelemvor, so they weren’t even as “evil” as the other PCs. Aside from the fact that they did consider a valid Plan C for “take note of as many people who die and how” in this society to be “poison the water supply or something so everyone dies and I know exactly how”.
Not that the game lasted long or it was particularly likely they’d ever try to enact such a plan outside of a lack of other reasonable options to fulfill their divine mandate and somehow having the opportunity to do that.
There was one character I remember. She was chaotic evil, but she was also in a party with another character who was VERY chaotic evil. Whenever #1 tried to do some evil, #2 tended to upstage her.
It wasn’t that #1 didn’t get to do the bad things, but when presented beside #2’s evil, her actions were so mild that the party thought she was some flavor of neutral until long after the campaign was done.
Just want to be pedantic. That’s a teapot. The kettle is used to boil the water before pouring it in the teapot
I can’t think of too many times where my evil was upended, but I CAN think of times where my party of heroes took my Neutral actions and made them Evil.
I think I’ve shared this one before. For the whole campaign, my character had been collecting information on the cult of Lamashtu that’s causing problems in Rise of the Runelords. At a certain point, we entered a sanctuary to the twisted god, and I bluffed the guards, a pair of unusually massive Glabrezus, because my character had actually done enough infiltration of the cult to know what to say.
The party has none of it though and cuts short any further dialogue and plot discovery by getting to the cutting part. Ok, not ideal. I found out a few details, but maybe a third of what I’d hoped to learn.
After the mayhem, the party turns to my character and tells me in no uncertain terms that if I fall to evil, they will end me.
…I’d been investigating and bluffing cultists since the second session; we’d have been about session 15 or so at this point. I DEFINITELY had a higher kill count on Lamashtu cultists than *literally anyone else in the party.* I was gobsmacked.
I don’t say gobsmacked very often, but seriously, that was it.
Your acting was too good.
Weirdly, I find moments like these it’s a good idea to talk through your internal monologue.
“Because my guy is thinking, if we can just keep these demons talking a little longer, he may be able to get them to reveal XYZ.”
It breaks immersion, but it does convey your intent to the rest of the players, cuing them into the fact that “nod and wink” rather than “suspect treachery” is the appropriate trope.
Yeah, but the whole story involves times when I’d even asked party members to come with me to infiltrate cult meetings and rescue imprisoned townspeople and the like.
My suspicion… I know that I remember a lot more than most of my friends do concerning details and the like. Because some of those events happened near the beginning of the campaign, when we hit the mid point, came back, and picked back up on the Lamashtu subplot, I think they had literally just forgotten all that.
Additionally, there’s that whole ‘through the internet’ thing. But even that notwithstanding…. people do forget things. Even adventuring buddies in the world. And it could have been perfectly IC for them to be running in Paranoia mode.
It still caught me out though, and it colored the rest of the RotR *very differently than was intended* I’m sure.