Post
by Watchful Glare » Thu Apr 22, 2021 4:26 pm
Playing evil gives you a variety of tools, however, as Irongron and Dawn mentioned, this can be challenging in being mean sometimes. Not just towards characters in general or the characters of players that are particularly nice, but when I feel that someone is not really playing a character entirely but also partially allowing themselves to blend in. So I get this feeling sometimes that if my character is mean, they won't think "Oh this character is a d#ck", but rather "Oh, this player is a d#ck" and fume about it and have a bad time. I do not particularly enjoy giving players a hard time OOC or making them have a bad time, but there are moments where there is no IC way of justifying not doing the evil selfish thing without bending your characters motivations and ways in a hard way.
Arelith's death system is hyper forgiving and I've always said that OOCly there's no consequence to it, which is both something good and something bad, it has its pros and cons. So you know that for instance if your character kills another they're not being perma-deleted from the server and you watch them get Thanos snapped and you tilt the other player into oblivion. They just get a time out for a little bit with some debuffs. But then, why is it sometimes hard to do it and inconvenience the other player temporarily, for me? It happens to me when dealing with low levels, when I want for them to find ways to walk of it alive and they're just not cooperating, or with characters that try to attack mine or meet my evil character in an unexpected way and I feel like it's not really their "fault". It's not that they, purposedly, came looking for a fight and insulted my character and really bought into the whole affair. They were just at the wrong place at the wrong time, chose the wrong thing.
I remember once for instance my character captured someone from the surface; I enjoy long'ish emotes so we were taking our time emoting while we walked down the caves system when we ran into someone, that clearly saw that ICly the other person was being captured. It was no casual stroll. My character told them to go away, theirs started to stall for time uncomfortable with what he was seeing, the warning was repeated and they, I assume, just couldn't find it in their character to turn a blind eye to it, so they ignored the second warning. There was a third one, an ultimatum, and then it came to blows. They died. Accidentally too, because I tried to toggle subdual but it turned out I had already toggled it on, so I just deactivated it. They were lower level, too so it was very one sided.
It happened again two minutes later, we were still going down, had transitioned servers and a surface elven archer came running down full tilt, past the transition and started warding up, and as I started to try and emote they attacked my animal companion and we traded blows when I managed to find them in the player's list to turn them to hostile, they too were killed. I don't PvP often. I didn't even manage to toggle subdual in time.
I think at that moment, after my character kills them, about how they might feel about it. In both instances I reached out to them in tells, to let them know it's not a targeted hate or anything. In both cases I have offered to raise them, a lense, or to give them RP in the Underdark because I feel it would be more conductive to RP than just getting killed for being a hero in some musky cave. Gives them a chance to escape, to have some more character development. But it has also been in general because I feel sometimes there's not much difference between characters and players for some people, and I dislike the idea of giving someone a really bad time OOC and the idea of there being no difference makes me uncomfortable. That it can be perceived not as your character being mean to theirs, but as you being mean to them, as a player. Maybe because I am still of the mindset that character death is a very high consequence thing.
It doesn't sound like a pleasant experience to deal with.
Being mean in general, can be challenging. Being unwelcomingly mean, as an unexpected factor, more so.
I can only imagine it gets easier as you do it more and get more comfortable with it.
I have only played one good character, a Paladin, and I found it very limiting and very challenging. Specially trying to play a Paladin that is not a smite crazed murderhobo with a pass, but someone that philosophically believes in his cause, and has managed to convince "villains" to change their ways and do good. Redemption arcs of sorts. Someone to whom violence is a last resort. Selfless, dedicated. Aiming to be a good person, but with heavy personal flaws to give contrast. And it's very challenging, and taxing. Very rewading too, but it comes with it's own set of limitations and expectations.
For them to have something to do other than charities and helping people kill a badger on the road, you need for evil peeps to do something that challenges or affects the status quo. You react to that. Unless the setting is inherently a dark and bad place, more often than not unless some set of circumstances are met you can feel like an agent of the status quo more than a champion of good.
Evil is not so limited in it's scope. As many have stated, if your character is evil and does a good deed they've not stopped being evil, many will see to that and point it as an oddity, some false attempt to gain sympathy, they will word it however they want. However your character would still be perceived as evil. If your baby eating demon worshipping Ogre o'Brien saves an Orphanage full of starving kids he's still evil, even if he did a good thing. Guards would still kill him on sight. And you can get away with it if it's justified.
You have less creative limits on an evil characters since there are less moral or narrative restraints on him, only the ones you make for it; while good characters have to conform to and uphold a certain kind of standards at all times or they're no longer considered "good" by the status quo. Playing an Evil character you have more tools to be proactive rather than reactive as many have aptly put. And you have a wide array of narrative possibilities to choose from, all up to and including, ironically, a character that does good things for the wrong reasons if you felt like it.
Biz here was a constant subliminal hum, and death the accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol.