Naytle Crysmus wrote: ↑Mon Nov 27, 2023 6:25 pm
...it's the fault of a decades worth of Roleplay hardening the server culture. The server has seen the bad guy, we know what they are, we know how it works.
...having an attainable goal in mind. An actually attainable goal.
The destruction of Arelith is not an attainable goal. The destruction of Cordor, or any other settlement, is not an attainable goal. If your plan is to have your bad guy become a world-ending catastrophe, you're playing your bad guy in a way that just won't work. You can try all you want, and find some success but you should acknowledge OOC that your character will not change the landscape of the world.
...it falls to the Bad Guys to bring something interesting and worthwhile to the table far more than it is the Good Guys' responsibility to let you win sometimes.
There are some great server-specific insights here. I think villains have it continuously harder because there are only so many bad guy ideas, only so many original plots, only so many unique schemes. If you've played enough Arelith, then even if you haven't seen plot x before on your character, you're likely to have already seen it as a player. And it just can't command the same interest and attention it did your first time.
That's not your fault, villainous players! It's just tough to be a villain. I've been a couple. I feel it. You can't rely on DMs to make your villainous acts more "real" (not because they don't want to help you tell great stories, but because there are only a handful of (volunteer) DMs and thousands of players; while they can dedicate some of their time to your specific plot, you can't expect them to and you definitely can't hinge any of your plots on DM involvement.), it's a shot in the dark whether the characters/players you're targeting with your acts of villainy will actually want to engage with you rather than ignore you (your plot might be genuinely terrific, but as players we all have different tastes; sometimes you just don't find the right co-storytellers), and a hundred other reasons why you might try "evil" roleplay and it simply doesn't work. Being a successful, well-regarded villain is among the toughest things you can achieve on this server.
Here's my take on good vs. evil on Arelith. Take it with a grain of salt.
To be a successful villain on Arelith, you need to be more than a talented, gracious, and creative roleplayer. Having a compelling plot that meaningfully includes other players is the baseline of your success. You need to specifically know Arelith's culture as a server, and you need to know what you can reasonably achieve. You need to involve other players in a way that they enjoy, you need to respect other players, and, yes, you need to respect their characters and their efforts to stop you, because if you don't give them that respect they won't offer it to you. Extol your opponents, spread tales of their fearsome nature, hype them up even as you plot their doom. If you want to be a legendary villain, you need legendary heroes to go up against (it should go without saying that this goes both ways, all you goodly characters out there).
You also need to have thick skin. Characters may try and metagame you to "win", characters will scry you immediately after you log in, characters will find out your secret identities, characters will badmouth your character and complain about them on news boards, characters will undermine your motivations and call them dumb, irrational, idiotic, stupid, or - far worse - tell people that you should just be ignored. And you need to take all of that on the chin and roll with it, because if you don't your story fizzles out. You need to be a shining example of tolerance, cooperativeness, and adaptability, far more than "team good" has to be, because you're the one upsetting the status quo. And to make it all even tougher, your villain will likely lose in the end. And that's okay! The success of your villain isn't measured in whether you won or not. It's measured in the quality of the story that you, your allies, and your enemies were part of.
I promise you, if you're able to do all of the above, you will attract players who want to roleplay with you. You'll attract allies that want to help and enemies that want to understand you. You'll find yourself surrounded by characters wherever you go simply because they want to see what happens next. I firmly believe that the more respect you give out, the more you get in return. And if you feel like you've been metagamed? Report it, adapt your plot, and move on. There's nothing else that's worth the stress.
None of the above is easy, particularly in a game we play for fun in our free time. But if you really want to be a villain and you think you can do all of the above, then you can be part of a compelling story that'll stick with you - and everyone else who was involved - long after your character is rolled.
This made my morning, thank you!
