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KnotKnormal
2014-05-04, 12:33 PM
Alright, I'm running my first ever evil campaign, I'm a fairly experienced DM but once again this is my first evil campaign. I have a setting, a plot, and a plethora of shinys to dangle in front of my players. however how do I combat the players that don't want to hop on the plot train, or fall into the "Chaotic Stupid" category? I imagine it will be kind of like herding kittens, where i need to find what works in order to lore each player toward the end goal. Any advice?

Thanks in advance.

Grim Portent
2014-05-04, 12:41 PM
First and foremost you'll want to speak to your players about what each of them has as a goal/personality for their character. Encourage them to make characters who can fit into the plot and be part of a group.

Evil games tend to have problems associated with people thinking evil = randomly murderous, so if you can get that nipped in the bud before it becomes a problem you'll save a lot of derailment and headache inducing issues.

Try to avoid using powerful NPCs to force them into things too much, it breeds resentment and makes people inclined to lash out IC with wanton acts of rebellion. It's fine to use fear to motivate every now and then, but it should be on a 'when needed' basis.

Rhynn
2014-05-04, 01:06 PM
players that don't want to hop on the plot train

That's a problem with any and all games, and the answer is always the same. It's also the same as the answer to this one:


fall into the "Chaotic Stupid" category?

You make your players create characters with goals* and motivations, and you make them create a group that hangs together. You can help by structuring the campaign around whatever they decide (maybe they like the idea of being an evil cult or cabal, or whatever).

You can't force players to go along with anything; evil PCs has nothing to do with it.

* Edit: I'm talking very concrete, clear-cut goals, and not just one; preferrably a progression of goals outlined into steps ("1. Become grand vizier; 2. Dominate the sultan; 3. Start war with neighboring state; 4. Conquer them; etc."). They need both immediate goals that can help direct play right from the start, long-term goals that will guide them throughout the campaign, and goals that keep them together with the other PCs.

Doug Lampert
2014-05-04, 03:28 PM
Alright, I'm running my first ever evil campaign, I'm a fairly experienced DM but once again this is my first evil campaign. I have a setting, a plot, and a plethora of shinys to dangle in front of my players. however how do I combat the players that don't want to hop on the plot train, or fall into the "Chaotic Stupid" category? I imagine it will be kind of like herding kittens, where i need to find what works in order to lore each player toward the end goal. Any advice?

Thanks in advance.

IME a large number of alleged "Good" parties are indistinguishable from an actually Evil party.

They make judgments in life and death matters based solely on race, they feel free to enter people's homes and kill them to take their stuff without specific knowledge of any actual crimes by their victims. The term "Murder Hobos" was coined for a reason. Hobos because they don't spend anything on luxuries, but Murder because that's what they do.

Basically, most GMs I see and hear discussing campaigns seem to have evil parties all the time but call the characters good, then when they actually LABEL a party as evil everyone insists on acting worse than usual, which does in fact mean chaotic stupid because you simply can't get much more evil than lethal home invasion to steal everything not nailed down without hitting stupid evil.

Thus I think the problem with most evil parties is that the people playing and GMing them often have no experience of running a good party, they've always run evil and have mislabeled it. If you label the "normal" campaign correctly, based on actual behavior and the actual alignment rules, then everyone will likely have experience of running evil characters or alongside evil characters long before you decide to run an explicitly evil campaign.

So I disagree that goals are particularly important in running an evil party, they're no more important than for any party. What's particularly important is to be clear that if they just don't exercise much care about what random strangers with green skin and fangs they kill then they are evil, and that killing people to take their stuff is evil, and that they've probably been doing this for years.

Then you can ADD evil goals and plots, but the players are used to the idea that evil people have friends and associates and are capable of understanding that there are advantages to ganging up.

TriForce
2014-05-04, 04:19 PM
Possible problems you might face as a DM:

1: players who think "evil" also means "kill everything that disagrees with you, even if they are party members"

2: players who think that playing evil is the same as playing good, just with less whining when you kill a npc.

3: players who think playing evil means "i have to do something evil every single minute" (the chaotic stupid evil) even if they have nothing to gain from it

as for solutions:

1: remind your players that people have simpler and more effective solutions to problems that do not involve murder, and that not everyone with a evil alignment is a psychopath. also, to avoid interparty conflict, you need 2 things, namely, players who have a certain degree of maturity, and a common goal. the first you cant help, but please make sure you steer your party towards the 2nd, preferably, let your group create their goals, not you. a plot train is possibly the worste thing you can make, since it will only encourage the players to derail it.

2: let your players know that playing evil usually means that THEY are the ones starting the story. good characters react. evil characters do. they should be the reason good characters get off their seat, they are the necromancers creating the unstoppable undead army, they are the wizards conducting the most amoral experiments and they are the rogues planning on stealing the golden chalice from the treasury of the king. they are the ones who make the plans, who decide "lets do this" and whose name alone will cause other people to look around worried. you as a DM should set the framework, you should give proper responces to their actions, but you should never be the one who gives them quests imho. that might work for a while, but the whole fun in being evil is being the bbeg, not the nameless henchmen.

3 evil people are still people. they have goals, wants and dislikes, and they dont do things without reason. make sure your players realize that. killing a random guy might be evil, its not something someone does unless hes insane. character depth is important here. what made their character what he is today? what motivates him/her? why does he do the things other people find amoral?

veti
2014-05-04, 05:01 PM
I think the biggest single challenge is "holding the party together". There need to be solid in-game reasons why these evil PCs don't just spend most of their time and effort on PvP.

One possible option is "external pressure" - people, serious people whom they can't hope to beat, hunting them hard. The PCs should feel they need all the help they can get (i.e. each other) just to survive to the end of the session. However, this is dangerous - sooner or later, one of them will figure they can get free and clear by sacrificing their teammates.

Plot-based reasons are another option. You've probably seen the film The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, where two characters each know a part of the location of a treasure, but neither knows the whole secret? You can do that on a larger scale, so that all characters need each other. However, that's a surprisingly fragile equilibrium: sooner or later, someone will talk them into giving up their portion of the secret. Or one of them will think "screw the McGuffin, I've got my own plan right here".

What I recommend is some DM-mandated reason why there exist in-game bonds of loyalty. I once played in a party where all PCs were sisters (or half-sisters), belonging to the same ninja clan. Betraying the clan would have been the ultimate dishonour, so no matter what we did to outsiders, we treated one another with loyalty and even, occasionally, respect.

Red Fel
2014-05-04, 08:33 PM
Same advice I offered in the other thread (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?346215-Evil-Campaign-for-Dummies). Included by reference (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?346215-Evil-Campaign-for-Dummies&p=17416359#post17416359) herein.

MonochromeTiger
2014-05-04, 09:38 PM
2: let your players know that playing evil usually means that THEY are the ones starting the story. good characters react. evil characters do. they should be the reason good characters get off their seat, they are the necromancers creating the unstoppable undead army, they are the wizards conducting the most amoral experiments and they are the rogues planning on stealing the golden chalice from the treasury of the king. they are the ones who make the plans, who decide "lets do this" and whose name alone will cause other people to look around worried. you as a DM should set the framework, you should give proper responces to their actions, but you should never be the one who gives them quests imho. that might work for a while, but the whole fun in being evil is being the bbeg, not the nameless henchmen.

while the players deciding the goals can be true at times it's not always the case, occasionally they don't start from scratch and become the horrors parents use to scare their children into behaving well, sometimes they get their start in an already existing organization and their end goal is marked by the highest part of their particular subgroup of that organization that they can reach. and evil campaigns are rarely about being the BBEG, the BBEG so often ends up with a sword through his skull so the hero can look good. don't make things easy sure, but don't make them impossible to keep the "good triumphs in the end" view or they might as well just be playing the bits of xp they cut through in a good aligned campaign.

Kalmageddon
2014-05-05, 05:26 AM
IME a large number of alleged "Good" parties are indistinguishable from an actually Evil party.

They make judgments in life and death matters based solely on race, they feel free to enter people's homes and kill them to take their stuff without specific knowledge of any actual crimes by their victims. The term "Murder Hobos" was coined for a reason. Hobos because they don't spend anything on luxuries, but Murder because that's what they do.

Basically, most GMs I see and hear discussing campaigns seem to have evil parties all the time but call the characters good, then when they actually LABEL a party as evil everyone insists on acting worse than usual, which does in fact mean chaotic stupid because you simply can't get much more evil than lethal home invasion to steal everything not nailed down without hitting stupid evil.

Thus I think the problem with most evil parties is that the people playing and GMing them often have no experience of running a good party, they've always run evil and have mislabeled it. If you label the "normal" campaign correctly, based on actual behavior and the actual alignment rules, then everyone will likely have experience of running evil characters or alongside evil characters long before you decide to run an explicitly evil campaign.

So I disagree that goals are particularly important in running an evil party, they're no more important than for any party. What's particularly important is to be clear that if they just don't exercise much care about what random strangers with green skin and fangs they kill then they are evil, and that killing people to take their stuff is evil, and that they've probably been doing this for years.

Then you can ADD evil goals and plots, but the players are used to the idea that evil people have friends and associates and are capable of understanding that there are advantages to ganging up.

This, so much.
The problem with running an evil campaign is that it requires the players to be aware what constitutes an evil act in the first place. It also requires the players to be able to think constructively even more so than in an good campaign. Good characters can just roam the land looking for baddies to kill and that's good enough in most campaigns. But evil characters need true motivations and solid goals to avoid turning into insane psychos that kill people at random because "evil".

Honesty, I think an evil campaign, in order to be fun and engaging and not just random, needs the very best players with a very firm grasp on morality and narrative. Otherwise it just degenerates in what looks like a black comedy with the plot written by a 10 years old.

Ask yourself if your players are able to handle something like this, if they usually play murder hobos the answer is oddly enough "no", otherwise you might give it a shot.

TriForce
2014-05-05, 08:17 AM
while the players deciding the goals can be true at times it's not always the case, occasionally they don't start from scratch and become the horrors parents use to scare their children into behaving well, sometimes they get their start in an already existing organization and their end goal is marked by the highest part of their particular subgroup of that organization that they can reach. and evil campaigns are rarely about being the BBEG, the BBEG so often ends up with a sword through his skull so the hero can look good. don't make things easy sure, but don't make them impossible to keep the "good triumphs in the end" view or they might as well just be playing the bits of xp they cut through in a good aligned campaign.

you are saying this, but i dont really get where you are coming from. yes a lot of evil people serve a greater evil organization, but we are talking player characters here. when they are the good guys, they are the heroes that save the day, when they are evil, well, the exact opposite obviously. yes the BBEG often gets killed to make the hero look good, but again, player characters here, they can make evil WIN, permanently. not every bbeg will lose in the end.

besides wich, for enjoyment perposes, being the lackey of someone happens often enough in good campaigns, im assuming people play evil so they can do something DIFFERENT from "follow quest A, then quest B and then quest C"

RedMage125
2014-05-05, 08:47 AM
Depends on what kind of Evil Campaign you want to run.

If it's Anti-heroes or Nonheroes, goals are less important. If it's Villains, then yes, I agree, they are important.

I've run 2 Evil games in the last 14 years or so I've been DMing. And they've both been pretty successful. For both of them, I had the players make characters that fit with the story, but there's a big catch here...

I did not make the story.

Heroes are reactionary. Villains must be proactive. I had the PLAYERS decide what their Evil Plot was going to be, and once everyone agreed upon one, they made characters that would be a part of that. In one, they decided they wanted to assault and defile the motherhouse of a paladin order. In the other evil game, they wanted to take control of a Thieve's Guild. For the first one, they all made characters that were devotees of my of of death and undeath, raised an army (composed of undead, mostly, but they also hired orcs and ogres), and the PCs slipped into the city and took the motherhouse while the city was under siege. In the second, all the PCs were members of the existing guild, and they planned a coup from within.

I make it clear to my players when I run an evil game that the burden of moving the plot forward is now on them, not on me (the DM). They decide on a course of action, and I create the scenario that will respond to their actions. From statting out the existing guild leadership to making a group of heroes that eventually challenge their power (the latter was for the first game).

I've played in an evil game where the DM made the plotline, and it wasn't very satisfying. Didn't feel like an Evil game, just a regular game of D&D with "evil" written on our character sheets. Let your players BE the villains.

That goes hand-in-hand with goals of individuals. If your players decide what KIND of evil game they'd like to play, they'll all be more likely to make characters that are pre-disposed to see that goal succeed, and less likely to just randomly stab each other when resting.

JohnnyCancer
2014-05-05, 09:06 AM
I think the easiest evil games to run are criminal enterprise games where the characters are intrigue-heavy burglars and assassins, as they impose a lot the challenges on themselves in the form of not getting caught and covering up their deeds. Reavers plundering the countryside only seems to work if everyone is on the same page, one person going further than the others are comfortable with can be enough to derail the whole thing.

MonochromeTiger
2014-05-05, 10:19 AM
you are saying this, but i dont really get where you are coming from. yes a lot of evil people serve a greater evil organization, but we are talking player characters here. when they are the good guys, they are the heroes that save the day, when they are evil, well, the exact opposite obviously. yes the BBEG often gets killed to make the hero look good, but again, player characters here, they can make evil WIN, permanently. not every bbeg will lose in the end.

besides wich, for enjoyment perposes, being the lackey of someone happens often enough in good campaigns, im assuming people play evil so they can do something DIFFERENT from "follow quest A, then quest B and then quest C"

where I am coming from is the fact that while evil campaigns do often get labled as sandbox more than good campaigns that doesn't mean every group will work well with "ok you made your characters, now you tell me what you want to do", nor does every evil adventure consist of being on your own with no infrastructure to speak of.

when they're the heroes they often go from place to place doing good things for good and neutral people, when they're evil they often go from place to place doing evil things to absolutely everyone for the sake of achieving their goals, giving an organization that they are part of at the start doesn't change this it just offers a simple reason why they are working together to avoid "me evil me stab friends" syndrome and get them to start thinking evil.

being the BBEG is something I consider bad just on the basis of what the term means, it is the BBEG that exists for the purpose of the heroes defeating them and saving the day. 90% of the time their plans are absurd, their powerbase dependent on no one looking too closely and seeing the massive flaws, and their entire existence hinging on giving the heroes something to fight against. the opposite of heroes is not BBEG, it is villain, the same role for a different side and just as capable of self advancement and being part of a larger cause.

for enjoyment purposes it depends on the players, the campaign, and how long they stick to it. as I said "being the lackey" as you put it might just be the initial thrust of the campaign to get them used to the idea of playing evil characters, it is not the campaign in its entirety nor is it the overriding theme. but where you're confusing it is thinking "do quest A then B then C" is just a good aligned thing, you are mixing evil and sandbox, which while sometimes valid since villains ARE capable of more freedom of action is not necessarily true.

KnotKnormal
2014-05-05, 05:46 PM
Depends on what kind of Evil Campaign you want to run.

If it's Anti-heroes or Nonheroes, goals are less important. If it's Villains, then yes, I agree, they are important.

The Campaign setting is the general, forces of good vs. the forces of evil. they will start as part of the military force of evil. in general I plan to let them do what they are going to, but point them in a direction in which to do it. It's pretty easy to get them to go in a general cardinal direction but I'm not sure how to keep the party toward the front lines where all the entertaining stuff is.

FreakyCheeseMan
2014-05-05, 06:53 PM
My notion of how to approach this is four rules:


Your character must be sane.
Your character must have a defined, pragmatic goal.
Your characters goals all have to support each other.
Your characters have to like each other, and be loyal to each other.

The Oni
2014-05-05, 07:16 PM
The question is, *why* is it the forces of good versus the forces of evil?

Maybe your guys all belonged to the Evil Empire when it was an empire, but now the glorious forces of good have broken its power and it's mostly just small contingents unwilling to surrender and play nice. You are one of these contingents. Being proud and noble soldiers of Eviltania you refuse to submit to these condescending, self-righteous paladin types and thus you must somehow, through whatever means necessary, restablish your fallen nation as a credible threat. And if that means jumping off the slippery slope into the black abyss with your soul-purchased pit fiend wings and talons a-gleaming in the penumbra, then by Asmodeus it will be done.

It's not about being *evil,* it's about your way of life. It's about your wicked valor and the right to be unfettered by quaint concepts like "compassion" and "human decency" that hold back true and noble human self-improvement. You can't just let a big mob of clanky preacher types in armor destroy the pillar of order and stability that *is* Eviltania.

Now there's your motivation. Doesn't have to be complex.

Red Fel
2014-05-05, 07:36 PM
The Campaign setting is the general, forces of good vs. the forces of evil. they will start as part of the military force of evil. in general I plan to let them do what they are going to, but point them in a direction in which to do it. It's pretty easy to get them to go in a general cardinal direction but I'm not sure how to keep the party toward the front lines where all the entertaining stuff is.

Here's the thing. Evil is selfish. More often than not, Evil is defined as a willingness to put yourself first, at the expense of others.

Many in this thread (or the other), myself included, have recommended encouraging the players to come up with motivations for their characters and reasons for them to stay together as a group. Their own motivations.

What you are proposing, with language like "how to keep the party towards the front lines", sounds more like you plan to give them motivation. DM-imposed motivations may or may not work, but in all likelihood, they work only as long as the players find them convenient. As I said, Evil is selfish, and the PCs would be within rights to desert their army, their cause, and frankly, your plot at the first chance they get. Are you prepared for that?

Because if your answer is "They can't, because I have this whole awesome campaign prepared," you've kind of missed a major factor about Evil campaigns - Evil characters have a notorious tendency to ruin things. Cities. Kingdoms. Religious orders. Childhoods. Carefully-wrought plans. Fire is often involved. And if you intend the characters to adhere to their military directive (and by extension, to your plot) you'd better have some powerful incentives ready for them.

You need your players to feel invested in the cause. Not just because you said so, but because they want to be.

There's one more thing I'd like to point out. Pragmatic Evil - truly pragmatic Evil - doesn't thrive by fighting the forces of Good, but by steering them. Infiltrating them. Corrupting them. Tempting them. Rotting them from within, not slaughtering them from without. Some Evil characters might not want to fight on the front lines, and not just because of cowardice. Are you prepared for your players to say "My character defects at the first chance he has, in an attempt to infiltrate their society and bring them down from within?"

saxavarius
2014-05-05, 08:56 PM
If you are set on your PCs answering to a higher power and being used as a means of destroying the enemy; FIRE FROM THE HIP. Tell them their aim is to subvert the enemy forces from Good-land but let them come up with how; assassinate the general, poison the food so the soldiers hallucinate, etc. Let the players have fun with wreaking mayhem in their own special flavor.

Thrudd
2014-05-07, 03:35 AM
The simplest thing is if evil characters want to accumulate great wealth and power and rule their own kingdoms/become the lord of all thieves/become the most powerful wizard ever/become a god, and will do whatever it takes to get there. The reason they stick together is simple...adventuring to accumulate all that wealth and power is too dangerous for anyone alone. You need a party to support you on expeditions and share the danger, and this means you must grudgingly give the others a share of the loot. They seek out treasure and magic items and spells in all the normal dungeony places, killing monsters and competing adventurers along the way. Acting stupid should be met with harsh in-world consequences. Stupid evil doesn't make it far in life, because they cross the wrong people and make targets of themselves (sometimes the wrong person to cross is one of the other PC's).

Upon gaining sufficient wealth and power they begin the founding or conquests of their kingdoms, and perhaps the game shifts into a more PvP game of domain management and mass warfare to see who gets to rule the whole world (after conquering all the forces of "good", probably).