If there's one thing I've learned from reading "bad experiences in gaming"-type threads, it's that "evil" campaigns can and often do go bad in a way that makes things unfun. I probably don't really need to go into it; it's the kind of stuff that leaves people at the table uncomfortable because some guy wants to play out the extracurricular activities of Basically Ramsay Bolton in detail, or because everyone's acting like the worst kind of Chaotic Stupid person they can be.

Obviously, games like Vampire or what have you feature that kind of moral relativism built in as a central theme. And a lot of PCs could probably be labelled as complete sociopaths even when they're trying to be nice. So I guess what I'm referring to is less of the stereotypical player callousness, and more of the "we are members of an organization or otherwise carry ideals that are in direct violation of anything that could be considered altruistic."

If... that makes any sense to anyone but me. ;)

Anyways, what I'm wondering is: has anyone here had good experiences with playing a villainous player character, or a campaign centered around that kind of thing? Share your stories if you've got 'em!
This message was last edited by the user at 06:15, Fri 28 Nov 2014.

While one of my best friends ran the Star Wars game that I played in for...well...most of my adult life, really...he did, every so often, shake things up a little bit, either by having us throw some new characters into the mix, or by starting up completely new groups as secondary games.  One of those had us playing an Imperial Destabilization team...our job was to go down to planets, create enough unrest that either the planetary government asked the Empire for help or the Empire looked like they were the heroes going in to establish order, and then fade into the woodwork.

We didn't play it for very long...a couple of the key characters belonged to players that lived out of town and it was really hard to get the group together consistently...but I grew very fond of my assassin droid (masquerading as a standard, generic protocol droid).  I don't know if this one really qualifies as 'villainous', however...as my friend pointed out, from the Imperial point of view, what we were doing was extremely heroic.  That was part of what made it fun to play, though...

I've played in quite a few.  Some bad, some good.

I think the thing that sets the good ones apart is the roleplaying "maturity" of the players involved.  People do things for reasons, even 'evil' people.  Evil psychopaths don't kill on a whim, they have their own "reasons", though they don't always share them.  Talk to any profiler.

If the characters in the 'Evil' game have been set up with background and reasonings behind why they do what they do, the game will be a step ahead from the get go.  The games I was in that made it, the PCs had backgrounds that fleshed out why they made the choices they did.  The ones that didn't make it, those had characters that did evil for evil's sake and the game disintegrated into silly one upmanship of evil acts.

Think really hard on what would have made a person that way.  What would they have had to go through, what horrors would they have had to experience to make them that callous?

As for the specifics, I'm played quite a few over the years.  I usually stay away from fantasy and especially D&D, so I get away from the alignment silliness easily enough.

My characters tend to develop their own personality as I play them, I may start the process, but they aren't nearly complete when I start to play.  I develop the character as I play them.  I had one in a Shadowrun game, complete cliche.  Purposefully so, done for fun to jest at the cliche itself.  The infamous "I was born and raised as an assassin." type.

He was trained to be dropped off at the door to a building on on the roof and kill everything.  He just never got picked up one day and someone else found him and put him to work.  The guy knew literally NOTHING outside of combat.  Was told what to do with all his time, etc.

The results of this was that he had two answers to everything.  Either follow the previous order or kill.  Pretty much had three emotions, the calm satisfaction of a well pulled trigger or used knife, open subservience, or utter blind confusion (which usually was replied to with violence).

Needless to say, the character was pretty much unplayable.  I think he lasted 3 or 4 sessions before a group consensus (including myself) was reached that the character needed to be killed off, which he was during his next horrendously violent reaction to some minor occurrence.

The point of that all was to show the "reasoning" that the 'Ultra-killer' character's people often make might well have.  That kind of person that was "trained from birth" to do nothing else BUT be a killer, would know only two things.  Killing and blindly following orders (because anything else would have had to result in close to fatal beatings).  They wouldn't KNOW there was any other way for them to react.  People that acted otherwise would be like a person walking through a wall to you.

ANY sort of threat, even perceived, would be responded to with lethal force unless it came from an authority figure, then it would be accepted like you accept the sun rising.  Even a simple stare would be met with a bullet.

This is the kind of thing I talk about when I mean figure out WHY and HOW your character is the way they are.  What made them that way and what are the ramifications of it.  Is the character suffering from some sort of anti-social personality disorder, and if so what and the cause?

Well, I had a character who I insisted was Chaotic Neutral, but people kept insisting I radiated just a HINT of evil most of the time.  I was a sorcerer, and let's just say that the party soon learned to hold my character's hands (literally) and cover her mouth whenever we were asked something or given a task or challenge, because the answer my character inevitably gave was "fireball."

Everything from "trolls are attacking" to "could you help me carry my groceries" to "you awaken in a small dark room with a locked door."

To this day, I am still amazed I never killed a party member or got arrested by a guard, although we all did have bounties on our heads at one point.  Miraculously, it wasn't my fault, either!

So, while not actively evil, my character did have a certain disregard for the safety of others (and herself) that is usually shown by Chaotic Stupid characters.  But she didn't actively seek out opportunities to do wanton slaughter.  She just always perked up when an explosive ball of fire was, in fact, the solution.

On a more properly "evil" note (in the selfishly evil manner), I had a rogue character in a Rollmaster campaign who would be the one to open the chest on the other end of the trapped corridor.  One that she got to with the entire party contributing equally for the entire dungeon.  But she was alone at the end with the chest, so she'd start looking at the contents and then pocket what she thought was good before bringing the rest back and claiming "this is what I found."  The GM eventually wrote down a list of the loot and I'd take it and start making check marks before I'd make a series of rolls to pocket it, then the GM told the rest of the party to make X number of perception checks to notice.

The one time I was caught, I had enough time before being confronted to swap the mithril coins out with silver in the pouch and used the excuse, "I didn't think anyone would miss a few silver out of the whole thing" before tossing it to the DWARF who caught me.  I should mention this was a Middle Earth setting, and my HUMAN ROGUE managed to swindle a freaking dwarf by swapping mithril coins with ordinary silver ones.

Proudest moment of gaming right there.  I was so happy when the party played along.

Villain campaigns should be considered very careful. Why would multiple villains gang up as one? What's their incentive to work together? Just how evil ARE they?

I've played in an evil campaign where the players were all evil in nature, but only because of how others labeled them. For instance, a necromancer who doesn't want to kill living people, but instead wants to protect the undead from the living. He sees the undead as persecuted and despises humans that seek to kill undead. Taking them under his wing, he sees himself as a hero to those who would otherwise be hunted like animals.

Another player in the campaign was an assassin. He had the motto "It isn't my job to know why someone has a bounty, it's my job to collect it." As you can tell, he didn't care who had a bounty, good or evil. If someone had a high enough bounty, he'd make an attempt to assassinate them, no questions asked.

Those are just a couple of examples of evil without the vile attitude of truly villainous beings. This is a great way to do evil campaigns, because they still see themselves as 'doing what they consider the right thing', even if they're evil in the eyes of the majority.

Now if you want a truly vile villainous campaign, you need to find some common goal they would all want to accomplish. True strength, infinite wealth/renown, unending authority. Determine their desires, and play on them as a group. Bind them in ways that they bind themselves to each other. Most villain campaigns end with the players fighting over something, but the truth is they're just not seeing something as mutually beneficial. A good GM will seek ways to make rewards for everyone, without making the party over powered. Instead of big magical mcguffins, smaller but more numerous magical mcguffins so everyone gets something, and they can work out who benefits most from what. The rogue would do best with the elven slippers, the warrior could benefit the most from that belt of giant strength +2, and that +1 bow would do well on the ranger. Nothing super powerful, but all making tiny benefits to the party as a whole.

Finally my favorite villain campaign, the almost-no-combat intrigue game. This one is the hardest to pull off as you need to constantly have new NPCs to interact with, and the party all need to agree that combat is a last option. This is good for parties who have little combat potential, but great dialog/non-combat skills. Good for parties without warrior types, like a Rogue, a Necromancer, and a skill-monkey of some sort, this type of game also works well as a sandbox. Make a town governed by an evil entity, and players could try to take over the town by winning over votes, or they could scam their way through wealth without becoming well known at all. This is good for RPing too because it focuses more on the interactions between players over just constantly rolling dice.

Those are some examples to make a villain campaign work well.

I've played a couple and run a couple and what Sleepy says is true. The most important thing is to give the players a reason to be working together. Whatever that reason it is, it needs to be built into the game in such a way that everyone gets into it on the assumption that cooperation is the name of the game.

The most successful evil D&D campaign I ever ran had the PC's as part of a larger organization. They were an assembled 'cell' and their cooperation was enforced by their superiors.

It worked a treat.

I've run quote a number of successful Vampire Chronicles. Mostly by crafting a tight, focused frame story that gives the players a strong reason to be together and work together.

And, of course, like most games that are more complex than 'You're all in this tavern and...." the maturity and commitment of the players is a big part of the game's success.

I've been kicking around the idea of a game involving Orc PCs all from the same clan, though I'm not sure whether I'm brave enough to try running it.  The common thread can be: "These other orcs are family, and whether or not you like them, they're still family". Orcs have always worked in groups, and they've always struck me as very family and clan oriented.

Yep, hust cause someone is evil doesn't mean they can't have friends.

Also, logically speaking, cooperation and niceties can have major benefits (if usually subtle), it would thus be interesting to see a character that is generally evil, but doesn't reveal it very often due to recognizing the benefits of being seen as a "good" guy, and mostly revealing their evil nature in subtle ways, such as never taking prisoners and using torture joyously.