Evil Player Characters

So today I feel like whining about Evil Player Characters. I’m not a fan of them, never have been. It might have something to do with my want to play these games as a form of heroic escapism to avoid the horrible reality that I see in the world around me. That’s probably some type of psychological problem I need to have looked into, but meh. I’ve got RPGs to work that out.

Everyone has at one point or another played an evil character just to explore something new. That’s cool and perfectly acceptable. That’s not what I have a problem with. Hell, right now I’m probably playing one the most evil characters I’ve ever played by a traditional 2-axis alignment system. Karrak Seaborne isn’t exactly a nice guy, he’s a pirate who has faked his own death, killed people he really had no personal reasons to even raise arms against, and conducts raiding, pillaging, and burning of various native and colonial powers localities while framing another faction for the raids while amassing support to create his own Pirate empire. These aren’t the actions of a “Good” or even “Neutral” character, but he’s a fleshed out character with real motivation and perfectly good reasons for doing what he does.

And I sidetracked myself…

Anyways, the point is that it isn’t the occasional anti-hero or rare occasion evil PC that I have an issue with. My issues are with Players who insist on playing nothing but Evil characters, players who play cartoonishly evil characters, and those who play evil characters in a completely disruptive manner. Each of those have various problems associated with them and all of them stem from portion of the player’s own personalities generally having to do with the need for some sort of attention.

The player that plays a cartoonishly evil character is the least offensive of the three in my opinion. These tend to be people who have either never played an RPG before or are inexperienced role players playing one of their first evil characters. These are easy to get under control as a GM. You basically make the real world come crashing down upon their antics. These characters either get craftier and more subtle or they get killed/captured/indefinitely disposed of. It’s just a short term annoyance that will temporarily disrupt the party. (The last time I saw this was in a gaming group that loved to talk about how awesome they role played their characters. The general extent of this was that they forced people who played Bards to actually sing in order to use their abilities as well as rendering all social related skills 100% useless by not allowing them to be used for any type of interaction and then penalized you for not being able to be a silver tounged rogue like your character should be because you’re an awkward nerd who isn’t very good at dealing with people.)

Those who play a disruptively evil character, in my experience, are doing it because they crave some type of attention. Any attention. These players are playing a character that is generally acting like a dick to other party members or generally being difficult to play with. I’m not talking about people who are playing a character that’s secretly evil (waiting to betray the party at the right moment), an anti-hero, or an evil character who is teaming up with good characters for the sake of taking on a far greater enemy. The ones I’m talking about are the types of guys who play a blatantly evil Cleric while the rest of the party is generally good or there’s a Paldin or Good Cleric. They play a Sith while the party is mostly Light-side. They tend to perform certain acts for shock value or to push for a fight within the party, typically with a player that they are personally trying to antagonize. These are the players who aren’t there to enjoy the game. They are there to be disruptive jerks and have their own fun at other people’s expense.

The Disruptive Evil PC is a little bit more difficult to deal with, as their actions are on purpose dickitude. The only truly effective cure for this tends to be exile from the gaming group. It’s boring for everyone at the table to be around these guys. It ruins the fun you have and is a waste of time. The older I’ve gotten and the fewer and further between the gaming has been for me I don’t have time to deal with that kind of crap anymore and have lost all patience for it. So if I see it happen I’m giving one warning, or I’m nixing that character concept from the start.

The last type of Evil PC is played by the guy (always a guy) who does nothing but play evil PCs. I really don’t like it. Something about it rubs me the wrong way. It’s like the person playing it has such a bad attitude towards reality and life that they can only lash out at everything in a harmful way, even in their own imagination. The problem I have here is a collision of individuals and their different visions for our mutual hobby of fantasy fulfillment.

A person who continuously plays a single class, alignment, or personality type annoys me on a fundamental level when it comes to these games. There’s just something wrong about it to me. The player who does nothing but play Evil PCs disrupts the potential story that can be told. They must always be planned for separately and tend to drag a group down.

As a GM this is disappointing on many levels. I don’t know if I can really put it into words properly. There’s just something sad about it. It’s like the player is trying to do something in a fantasy world to make up for their inability to do something in the real world.

I play RPGs for the escapism. In the real world I pay attention to politics, economics, and world events constantly. I read stories about some of the worst aspects of humanity on a daily basis. I vent about these things on Facebook in general and try my best to keep them out of the few blog entries I write here. This is because I try my best to keep my political junkie and activist habits out of my gaming hobby. Gaming is a place where I can be away from the real world and handle the problems put before me, or enjoy the ride through a story. It’s a pleasant distraction.

The problem with people who consistently play Evil characters though is that they bring in the suffering of humanity and the evil of the real world into our fantasy world and force it upon the world themselves. It ruins one of the things I like about it by thrusting a piece of reality directly in my face.

It’s also boring to see someone play the same thing or a similar theme over and over again. I just don’t get the appeal.

There's not much constructive thought here, I'm just bitching.