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Old 05-10-2002, 04:26 PM   #16
Valg
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Join Date: Apr 2002
Home MUD: Carrion Fields
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Valg will become famous soon enough
My nickname for the brand of evil that I think thwarts most people's attempts to play a successful evil character is "Team Evil". These are the guys that, for all intents and purposes, are exactly equivalent to your local band of paladins, except they agree to fight good-aligned people instead of evil. They share property freely, get really angry if anyone on Team Evil does something mean or self-serving, risk their lives for their evil pals, etc.

If I had to summarize the nature of evil in an RPG very briefly (not really possible, but here goes..) it's "Evil. Not anti-Good." Evil characters need their own set of motives and goals, and often the key differences aren't in the goals themselves, but rather in the methods used to attain them, and the sacrifices they are willing or unwilling to make to get there. Joe Good and Joe Evil might both want to be king, but only Joe Evil is likely to resort to bribery, the murder of innocents, theft, deception, and the like to try to get there. On the other hand, he's also probably too concerned for his personal well-being to try things like building trust among his allies to have a coalition brought to power, or making and keeping promises to the people that would restrict his (assumed) future power.

Killing for pleasure is one brand of evil, but it's probably a better indicator of insanity. Evil folk more often do dastardly deeds to get somewhere- waylay that innocent elf because he has valuables on him that you want, or because the elven nation has declared war on your kind, not just to kill elves. And, as someone else mentioned on this thread- evil folk usually don't think of themselves as evil, and may indeed view their foes as such, even if a more objective view would be otherwise.
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