Mind Control is No Fun

[MaxWilson]

To some extent, yes, but which hurts more? "My character died fighting for what he believes in" or "My character became a mindless thrall and murdered everything he cared for"?

Depends how much you like roleplaying angst. : )

"I dedicated my life to protecting my friends and then one day a god cursed me into murdering them all" is a tragic backstory not dissimilar to events in the life of Heracles. If you're willing to let this event affect your PC emotionally it could be good roleplaying material.

Having a tragic backstory imposed on your PC against your will could certainly be irksome though. Hopefully everybody survived, so you have the option of just shaking it off like it never happened.

Yeah, that is a temptation, isn't it? Maybe I can ask the DM for some more autonomy. Good suggestion.

The worst thing a DM can do is force a player to sit around being bored when alternatives are available. As a DM I would always lean on the side of "more autonomy" for this reason. Even if from the story standpoint there's an evil wizard literally meat-puppetting the PC (via e.g. Magic Jar), I would almost always negotiate the specifics of what the evil wizard is doing with the player--in the case of Magic Jar I might even just straight-up hand them (most of) the evil wizard's stats and say "you're now playing this guy inside your normal body, and here are your evil goals".

Nobody wants to watch the DM roll dice against themself, so engaging the players as much as possible is a good goal even when it sometimes winds up with evil wizards using less-than-perfectly-optimal evil tactics.