How to be Really Good at Being Really Bad

[Berried]

Hi, I'm pretty new to the NWN! Picked it up a couple months ago and haven't had many chances to play because I've been in the middle of moving. So far, I'm in love with the underdark. Any advice on playing neutral/evil characters, their relationships, their motivations, etc? Or, from the perspective of a good character, what do you like to see in an antagonist?

Tangentially, I also drew my character a little while ago. If you see her running around the Andunor, feel free to say hi to her, or fight her, or make fun of her armor (which will probably lead to fighting her).

[CosmicOrderV]

Our Kiaransalee Group will be happy to Althaea around again Glad to hear you're enjoying it! Honestly too, you may notice the lag we were experuencing weeks ago has only gotten worse. So if you got any boxes that still need unpacking, may as well see to thise rather than suffer the lag. The Staff said they're looking into it, so fingers crosses its fixed soon!

[Aftond]

Try to set a greater goal with your evilness, there is no point just doing evil for evils sake. A goal helps with direction.

I really like the drawing , do you have a page with your drawings somewhere ?

[Preserver]

My personal advice would be: unless your character has some form of psychological disorder which would justify a sociopathic or psychopathic behaviour, try as hard as you can to find moral justifications that make your behaviour less reprehensible! Also, if you're willing, do try to think about what exquisitely evil traditions "mean" to your character...

Slavery is one such traditions. How does your character behave concerning slavery? Why? What is, according to them, the weight of moral and societal consequences of slavery? Are there? Are slaves just items and thus naturally devoid of rights and will, or are they normal creatures that happen to serve?

That is just one example!
Good characters are, many a time, somewhat easier to RP due to the fact that they fit into the coding of our own society. Evil (especially Evil in Faerun, a present and quantifiable power) requires some reasoning, especially related to how your type of evilosity connects with the society your PC lives in!

[Face]

As someone who exclusively plays characters that are evil and live on the Surface...

- communicate with the 'other side'. If you go up to do nefarious stuff on the surface, ensure that it's as part of a storyline rather than just some weird power fantasy. Don't participate in multiple raids in a short period of time, it becomes mind-numbingly dull for us and quickly loses any meaning. That might sound entitled as a surfacer, but remember that we feed into your RP more than you feed into ours - we're the ones meant to be emoting fear before your characters, we're the ones meant to be dropping all of our current storylines to come sprinting to be a part of yours if you attack the surface. It's great fun, but only in moderation. If it happens too often it makes us feel like NPCs.

Overall, the relationship between Surface good and UD evil needs to be about give-and-take, or it doesn't work. Neither side should be winning all the time, and both sides should be willing to acknowledge the other's victories. Still, I'm not really sure there should be 'sides' at all and I'm of the opinion that War RP doesn't work at all on Arelith, because nobody can die so nobody can lose. It would be far, far cooler to see more small-scale antagonistic storylines. I have no idea how that would work, though, and hey, that might already be going on and I just don't know about it


- find your character's motivations. Nobody except the completely insane wake up every morning thinking they're the bad guy. When you're RPing, you should be so deep in your character's motivations that you think they're right
- remember that you are the antagonist. Arelith is a story, and in stories evil eventually loses.

Something that I see often is evil characters being played as evil in every aspect, all the way down to politeness. This is probably the biggest advice I have. There are many different kinds of evil. Total psychopathic moral depravity should be incredibly rare, probably more rare even than total goodness. Evil characters can be friendly, kind, loving, warm, regretful, polite, fearful, anxious. They don't all need to be power-crazed monsters who take every opportunity to attack and insult everyone around them. They don't even need to be unpleasant to talk to.

[magistrasa]

Hello and welcome, officially! Glad you're here and settled in at last

The differences between good and evil and neutral are more than can be counted in a single sitting, I'm sure, but a major difference I tend to notice is that if good-aligned folks are more like idealists, seeing the world as better than it is or working to make it better than it is, evil and neutral tend to be more like "realists" (if that's even a word) - people who either accept things as they are and work with or around the systems at play, or they try to exploit the way the world works to their own personal gain. Probably one of the more simplistic ways of articulating that thought, but I feel like it's more accurate than saying, "Good people are nice and evil people are mean." Their respective philosophy can manifest in vastly different behaviors, but I think it generally can be traced back to idealism and apathy, and how much of each quality a character has.

My preferred antagonist (whether playing one or encountering one!) always makes things personal in some way. The conflict is built through deep and potentially irreconcilable differences in philosophy or ambition, and victory for one or the other can't be measured in battles won or lost - only through the impact those interactions have upon each character, and the change that is inspired in themselves and the people around them because of it.

The most interesting enemies are the ones you can't, or maybe don't even want to, flat out PvP against. Which isn't to say PvP makes villains less interesting - I don't think there's enough PvP to be honest, sometimes the story you're telling together calls for a corpse bashing and you just gotta hit that hostile button - but I live for the slow burn up until it reaches that boiling point, and I cherish those rare gems that make me eagerly anticipate it.

[Hazard]

Your art is beautiful!

[Durvayas]

The differences between good and evil and neutral are more than can be counted in a single sitting, I'm sure, but a major difference I tend to notice is that if good-aligned folks are more like idealists, seeing the world as better than it is or working to make it better than it is, evil and neutral tend to be more like "realists" (if that's even a word) - people who either accept things as they are and work with or around the systems at play, or they try to exploit the way the world works to their own personal gain. Probably one of the more simplistic ways of articulating that thought, but I feel like it's more accurate than saying, "Good people are nice and evil people are mean." Their respective philosophy can manifest in vastly different behaviors, but I think it generally can be traced back to idealism and apathy, and how much of each quality a character has.

I must respectfully disagree (Though I mean no disrespect. <3), You can absolutely have evil characters that are idealistic. The thing is that their accepted means of getting to that point involve doing evil things.

An idealistic villain might want to ensure that crime is no longer a thing, and strife between religions is a thing of the past. The ideal is all well and good. That their idea of an 'acceptable' method of getting there might be committing xenocide on all halflings and destroying all other faiths in the name of almighty Bane is what sets them apart.

Everyone is the hero of their own story. All characters that are movers and shakers are idealists from their own perspective. Idealistic motivation does not make a hero or a villain. Being willing and able to commit great evil in the pursuit of one's goals is what makes someone truly evil.

Hitler was charismatic and VERY effective at being bad because he was chasing after(from the german perspective) an ideal:

Restore the german empire to superpower status and ensure lasting prosperity and global dominance for germany for generations to come.

There is nothing evil about wanting one's own country to flourish and prosper. Thinking that declaring war on almost the entire globe and attempting to wipe out entire ethnic groups is a nescessary, and acceptable, evil, is what made the man a monster.

[magistrasa]

That's not necessarily a contradiction, Durvayas! I'm pretty sure I'm basically saying the exact same thing as you are (but uh, minus the Hitler bit, I ain't touching that). Like I said, it's the general breakdown for the philosophy behind their actions. Not saying that evil people can't try to do good things, just that they probably don't believe in goodness while they're doing it.

Believing in the inherent goodness of the world, a good person wanting to make a crimeless world would say, "I need to heal the class divide and remove the necessity or temptation towards crime for those who are vulnerable and turn to it for lack of better choices in life."

An evil person, believing in the inherent evil of the world, would instead say, "People need to be controlled by power or fear to be driven away from their criminal impulses."

The difference isn't in the goal per se, but in the world view that informs it.

[Iceborn]

Welcome to the forum! I hope you got your shots before getting in, ha.

Some good advice by Face up there, but for my own cup:

There are many forms of evil. Extremists, zealots, deranged villains, crusaders, misanthropes.
What you have to understand is that there is no evil without reason. A character does not kick puppies because they just want to be Evil McBoneDaddy; they do so because there's something twisted and broken inside that manifests in anger and rage, in violence, in the simple desire to see others suffer because it brings them a sort of appeasement.

Frustrations, disappointments, every evil character is innately twisted because something happened to them; by mere virtue of an equally twisted culture that breeds that kind of character, or by happenstance, their motivations are deeply ingrained in their minds after in a lifetime of injustices.

Once you understand the essence of your evil, you may have an easier time manifesting it, in lashings of a damaged mind, of a twisted sense of what is "right and just", in wanton indulgement of other vices. So be it in roleplay of smaller impact (just lobbing out a bottle at somebody that was wearing a purple scarf, because you REALLY hate those scarves), or larger impact (going so far out to capture a bunch of humans and force to kill each other. You may even offer the survivor to be taken under your care).

Why would you do those things? That's up to your specific backstory and roleplay to decide.

[Diilicious]

The best evil characters imo are ones that have relatable aspects to them despite their overall terrible modus operandi

[A little fellow]

My advice to bad aligned players and good aligned players is exactly the same ..

1) Bad guys need to take good guys seriously. Good guys need to take bad guy seriously.

2) Understand that the best way for bad players to achieve gravitas is with the help of willing good players, and that the best way for good players to achieve gravitas is with the help of willing bad players ... build up the other side, be willing to take an L where it can be afforded and still be in keeping with your characters vision, and trust that the good side will give you a W.

3) Have a starting vision of who your character is, and a different end vision of what you want them to become. If you start them as an evil genius they’ll likely get stale fast, and the change makes them 3 dimensional.

[MoreThanThree]

Morality is a spook.

[Petrifictus]

My tip with good bad guys is to give them some personal limit, which might be some code, rule, oath, etc. where they draw the line. This will make them more real and interesting.

Like you can be a villain who's fine with raiding settlements and blackmail, yet has strong dislike on hurting women and children.

Evil without limits gets very boring really quickly.

[lakhena]

Over the years, I have found that I really enjoy playing sympathetic evil PCs. They were undeniably evil by modern societal standards -- violent, lying, having no qualms about doing rather vile things (including throwing a demon-blooded baby off a cliff, burning an entire village of halflings because my PC viewed them as hedonistics and therefore sinful) -- but they tended to be part of a greater cause that arguably justified their actions. Most of them were likable, but just had a warped sense of what was acceptable and were completely mission-driven (e.g. wanting to eradicate drow by any means necessary, trying to bring a beloved one back to life, saving a dying friend, avenging a child's death, etc.). Like others have said, it really helps to have a motivation that drives your PC's actions and colors their behavior a certain way.

From a good-aligned PC point of view, I like to see evil PCs that I can interact with and/or learn more about. I especially like the evil PCs where there's a chance you could influence their behavior, even if you know you can't convert them to a more upstanding and principled life. Small interactions that have nothing to do with good or evil are especially enjoyable. With one of my favorite evil villains from another server, my PC always remembered him as being the kind gentleman who helped her pick herbal flowers (without trying to romance her) -- she helped bring about his downfall, but the RP that surrounded it was more interesting with that perspective, and laying a flower on his grave had that much more meaning.

[Preserver]

I would also add, as somebody above already stated and as a player who plays villanous characters: remember your role in narrative balance!

What I mean is that a narrative focus should be aimed at making you feared, terrible, and "so fun to hate"... but ultimately the villanous figure exists for the hero, the anti-hero and the sidekicks to shine even further, challenge their own limits and win against all odds. Your role as a villanous figure (assuming your playing a villain and not a rival or an adversary) is to be a foil for the good guys and create the "lack of odds" they're supposed to fight against.

Agreed, this is an online RP experience and even villains want long stories and chances at a wide spectrum of RP, therefore my statement might easily feel unnecessarily draconian, but in my very personal experience playing the villain knowing that you exist as a narrative tool for the heroes is extremely satisfying =) !

[Gobbo Champion Inc]

I've long held the belief that one of the chief narrative purposes of a villain is to raise the price of heroism. That requires not just being dangerous and being able to project force, but also to hit heroes where they have a weakness. Ideally done in a way that they also have ways to retaliate against you, so there is room for a story to develop, and eventual defeat is not a bitter experience but a meaningful ending to a good story.