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Old 10-05-2019, 11:09 AM   #1
Anders
 
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Default Evil Player characters/PvP games

What are your thoughts on evil Player Characters and Player-versus-Player play?

Me, I don't allow either. Evil characters tend to very quickly derail the kind of campaigns I want to run. As for PvP - I allow minor conflicts and so on, but the problem is that they have a tendency to spiral out of control and, again, derail the campaign.
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Old 10-05-2019, 11:20 AM   #2
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Default Re: Evil Player characters/PvP games

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What are your thoughts on evil Player Characters and Player-versus-Player play?

Me, I don't allow either. Evil characters tend to very quickly derail the kind of campaigns I want to run. As for PvP - I allow minor conflicts and so on, but the problem is that they have a tendency to spiral out of control and, again, derail the campaign.
I don't think these are equivalent.

I have run an entire campaign—it was Mage: The Ascension—where the PCs were in different factions. Three of them were Wu Lung; one was Wu-keng; one was Virtual Adept; and one was Akashic Brotherhood. They fell into opposed factions based on the Wu-keng/Wu Lung hostility. There were very few scenes where all of them were on camera together, a number where I was doing cross cutting, and occasional fights between the factions. It went fine and the players had a good time.

But I rarely do "good versus evil" because I don't really believe that the real world has an absolute moral frame, and I'm not usually interested in fictional settings that do. My conflicts are "this point of view against that point of view."

On the other hand, when I ran a campaign set in Middle-Earth, I did assume intrinsic good vs. intrinsic evil. But I also required the PCs to be on the side of good. Likewise when I did a Buffyverse campaign.
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Old 10-05-2019, 11:55 AM   #3
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Default Re: Evil Player characters/PvP games

Yeah, but there are certain disadvantages that... take Sadism for instance. I have difficulty seeing someone who actively likes torturing others as a hero or even as a protagonist. People who advocate for genocide.
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Old 10-05-2019, 12:55 PM   #4
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Yeah, but there are certain disadvantages that... take Sadism for instance. I have difficulty seeing someone who actively likes torturing others as a hero or even as a protagonist. People who advocate for genocide.
Well, for example, say you're playing a campaign set in World War II. Let's stipulate that Roosevelt and Churchill were on the side of Good. They were allied with Stalin, who was responsible for mass murder on a scale substantially greater than Hitler's, who maintained a repressive regime with secret police and concentration camps and a totally controlled economy, and who had also previously allied with Hitler in a war of conquest against Poland. So is it not possible to have a Russian soldier, who is fighting for Stalin's monstrous regime, as a protagonist?
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Old 10-05-2019, 01:02 PM   #5
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Default Re: Evil Player characters/PvP games

Possible, yes. But as an ardent supporter of Stalin's various genocides (without being deceived)? I have difficulty seeing that.
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Old 10-05-2019, 01:23 PM   #6
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Default Re: Evil Player characters/PvP games

American children would play Cowboys vs Indians as a stock playtime affair for decades in the midst of the 20th Century. This essentially justified and reenacted in miniature the genocide by which white Americans had claimed their land.

To perhaps the surprise of an informed modern observer, the cowboys were marked as the good guys.
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Old 10-07-2019, 07:18 PM   #7
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Default Re: Evil Player characters/PvP games

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Yeah, but there are certain disadvantages that... take Sadism for instance. I have difficulty seeing someone who actively likes torturing others as a hero or even as a protagonist. People who advocate for genocide.
Byron Henry served under a captain in War and Remembrance who pretty obviously had genocidal urges. Such situations of course can be arranged by making him an NPC.

It is reasonably common in modern cop shows to make police brutality look like a high school prank and accompany it with lots of black humor. It is to be honest, amusing when well done but more corrupting to viewers than the mere fact of violence.
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