On Being An Evil Character | Running the Game

everybody Matt Koval here welcome to the new office first video in the new space email the the video is called evil not to the about the office we could call the office evil but that would be a little bit on the nose don't you think we originally call the place the black fortress not sure why you change that we're gonna do three videos right in a row all about really contentious subjects so we're gonna start with the most contentious because I don't believe in beating around the bush I always want to give you the juiciest stuff I got so I tweeted this the other day and it sort of blew up and I was surprised and if you're on mobile and it's tiny it says I think we need more explicitly evil pcs in D&D maybe not enough folks are reading og Dragonlance maybe I've gone mad and this is a historically terrible idea but some of my favorite pcs were evil what I meant and really there's no way you would know this Twitter is a terrible medium for communication is I think the game improves if we make fewer assumptions about the hero's motivations I had no idea this tweet was anything special but it racked up 2.4 thousand likes and over 400 comments and for me that means it's probably in my top 5 tweets of all time and the result is this video we're gonna talk about evil oh yeah but because the reaction I got to the tweet was sort of crazy we're also going to talk about talking about evil and as a result this video is super long and if all you're interested in is the discussion on playing evil pcs I'll put timestamp in the doobly-doo because we're gonna cover a lot of ground thanks to the reaction I got a lot of people want to talk about actual evil in the real world and that legitimately took me aback people can't transmit information if they don't have some common ground for communication and I would like to think that we can agree that there is a difference between reality and fiction is there no one on your planet who behaves in a way that's contrary to reality because we're kind of screwed otherwise we can't judge people for wanting to play evil characters and act like this is somehow a moral failing on their part and there are people who do this there are people who hear about someone wanting to play an evil character and they say what's wrong with that person only an evil person would want to play an evil character this might seem crazy but people do say that when Jack the Ripper a real person who really lived was murdering innocent women in London in the summer of 1888 the police questioned among other people this guy this is richard mansfield and what did he do what evil lurked and this guy's past that was so bad so inhumanely vile and cruel that the cops might think he was out slicing up people he's an actor he was playing dr. Jekyll and mr. Hyde at the time and he was probably having a great time actors loved playing villains because it's not real indulging in fictional villainy is fun why evil is fun is beyond the scope of this video and something better suited for Lindsay Ellis video anyway she's much better at this stuff he wasn't a method actor by the way the method was still a long ways off he was just a normal actor chewing the scenery and the Victorian audience could not believe that someone could do that every night on stage and not be a serial killer real people sometimes have a hard time separating reality from fiction we are dungeon masters and this is a game about killing monsters so we need to make we need to author monstrous people if we are very lazy we can expect the PCs to kill the orcs because the orcs are evil if we are good teams we can expect the PCs to kill the orcs because we show the players the orcs doing villainous and cruel things and this is what make them good bad guys and we need to be able to do that outside the context of real villainy the one has nothing to do with the other it's crazy that I have to say that but for instance Indiana Jones fights Nazis and this is all well and good and as a culture we expect to be able to take our kids to see Indiana Jones movies without exposing them to anything real or horrific but the Nazis were real and horrific of course these are movies and not just movies these are pulp adventures and pulp adventure Nazis are not the same as real Nazis this is an actor not a serial killer actually they never caught Jack Tripper it could have been it could be Richard Mansfield that would be weird but you know maybe the method is a lot older than people think I have a 1 shot I'm working on in which the bad guys are Wood Elves who are basically guerrilla terrorists and these elves do some real world awful things you can very easily go online and read about the atrocities committed in places like Rwanda and Somalia the kind of tribal internecine stuff real groups will do to each other now in the modern day these are acts I'm not going to talk about here because it would freak people out but I'm gonna stick it in addy indeed because this is an adventure for folks I know and have gained with four years and I know what kind of reaction it will provoke it will provoke the right reaction they are going to be horrified and hate these elves and that's what I want but none of them think I am someone who would do those things or even someone who enjoys reading about it they all understand this is the job of the author but those same guys when we were teenagers comedic ly evil things were enough later as we got older it took more bad guys had to do more to move the needle hopefully so far I haven't said anything radical this is a game about killing monsters and that means it's heroic adventure and that means we need villains it's not a game about romance and misunderstanding and ennui and missed connections on the subway we need to make villains the players will hate because they're going to attack them with swords and spells if you wish to write a grand opera about a prostitute dying of consumption and a garrote I suggest you contact mr. Gibson in Ozlem I'm sure he'll be able to furnish you with something suitably dull this is the job of the DM just as it is the job of the author DMS and authors have a lot in common but here's the thing you are the author of your character and just as it can be fun for the DM to indulge in fictional villainy it can be fun to play an evil PC it can be fun for everyone I know it because I've done it I've played evil pcs I've run games with evil pcs I've played good pcs in parties with evil pcs and it was fun in fact it was never not fun although when we were teenagers it was also disruptive it was fun and disruptive but we grew up some folks wanted to argue that it was by definition terrible to play an evil PC because it never works I get that all the time whenever I publish a video suggesting something radical like players tracking damage to monsters or the DM making stealth roles for the players I get three categories of response one that sounds interesting I'll not try it - I have done that and it works three that would never work here's why you would think the existence of the second party would instantly negate the third party's argument but apparently not another thing folks on Twitter sort of hyper focused on was alignment you talk about evil in D&D people want to talk about alignment let me ask you this what does alignment have to do with playing an evil character again we have to sort of lay the groundwork for our discussion done and Dragons released in 1974 evil as enlightenment appears three years later in 1977 but D&D did not invent evil not only did it not invent evil it didn't invent evil characters so we don't even need to bring up alignment a player can be inspired to run an evil character just because they really like care Avon from Blake 7 alignment in this context is a distraction this brings us to the third thing we have to talk about before we can actually talk about playing evil characters and that is Wang rods a lot of people feel like only Wang rod would want to play an evil peacc the point earlier about the difference between reality and fiction and that playing an evil character is just giving an an excuse to be an so again let's establish some common ground if your D&D group has terrible people in it who enjoy behaving badly you're gonna have a bad time or regardless of what character they are playing it's a truth table right I've had games with evil characters go well I've had games without evil characters go well it also had games with evil characters fall apart and games without evil characters fall apart so if your experience is that terrible people want to play evil characters and ruin your fun the solution is don't play with terrible people if you're playing with terrible people you've got to pull the ripcord on that because regardless of what PC they're playing you are gonna have a bad time but if you're playing with friends with people whom you've developed some degree of trust you can play an evil PC and it doesn't have to be disruptive all right all that is out of the way playing an evil PC doesn't make you evil it doesn't have anything to do with alignment and terrible people are going to ruin your fun and regardless of who they're playing so now let's be evil first as with all good discussions we must establish our definitions we're talking about eel what does that mean this is a very confusing subject and it's confusing because there's no hard and fast rules for our terms the idea of evil and evil characters means many different things even to the same person depending on context so we need a language we can use to talk about these things D&D takes place in an explicitly Manichaean world minikin ism is a Theological movement that started in Persia but which would eventually catch on in various ways with the Catholic Church the reason it's occasionally popular with some people is because it deals with the nature of real world evil God and most Christian traditions is all-powerful that should be a uncontroversial statement but what all-powerful means is never well to find and folks decided it would be a good idea top argue about it for thousands of years the fact that the Christian God is traditionally all-powerful and to a lesser extent to the idea that God is perfectly good causes some pretty typical problems in normal people you don't have to think about it very hard before you have questions and one of the big ones is then why is there evil this is somewhat not very imaginative Lee called the problem of evil if God is all-powerful and perfectly good then why is there evil there are many at different attempts to tackle this problem and some of them are more satisfying to different people than others we don't need to get into it you get it we associate evil in the Bible with Satan but in most Christian texts there's a lot about God not really a lot about Satan like the snake in the garden that's not Satan the text doesn't say anything about the serpent being the devil that's just something folks imagine when they hear the story but even though the Bible doesn't say much about singing everyone else has a lot to say our modern notions of the devil do not come from the Bible they come mostly from Dante and Milton and maybe William Blake depending on how much mescaline you've taken maneechan ism says there are at least two godlike entities a good one and an evil one and they grant their servants power and they fight over this plane of existence and at this point it should start to sound like I'm talking about D&D again in D&D you can be evil just because you're a bad person and you kicked a puppy or you can be evil because you're the scion of orcas trying to summon the demon lord of undeath and one of these two answers is way more useful to us as Dungeon Master's so from one point of view an evil character is someone who serves the enemy whoever that might be orcas or vecna or Jew blacks or whoever another very popular I think answer to the problem of evil is there isn't evil evil as a supernatural force isn't real there are just people and normal people have it in them to do good things and bad things and therefore Nazis that sounds glib but for decades after World War two people tried to come up with an answer to the question what the hell happened in Germany it was really difficult for folks to understand how otherwise normal people could commit such atrocities I've got a lot of German viewers by the way and I know they're watching saying again with the Nazis I sympathize but it pays off I think you'll see the answer to the Nazi question started to coalesce in the 60s and it's the I was just following orders answer and it imagines that evil happens because normal people will do terrible things if someone in the uniform asks them to Stephen Milgram did a series of experiments about this at Yale in the 1960s these are famous experiments Milgram asked volunteers to come help with an experiment at Yale he told them the experiment was about the effects of negative reinforcement on memory and learning the volunteer was introduced to the subject another random schmuck and the administrator and then the volunteer and the subject or separated taken to different rooms the administrator would ask the volunteer to give the subject a series of problems and if the subject got one wrong the volunteer was asked to turn a knob marked voltage and then press a big red button I'm simplifying a lot for the sake of a D and D video but you can look all this up the subject is in another room the volunteer can't see them but there is a speaker they can hear each other the volunteer can hear the subject give wrong answers and hear them Yelp and eventually scream and eventually beg for the volunteer to stop as the wrong answers keep coming and the voltage climbs until eventually the volunteers could hear the subjects dying even if you've never heard of Milgram's experiments you can probably guess where this is going the subject of the person being shocked and begging the volunteer to stop was an actor the actual subject of the experiment was the volunteer and the thing being tested was how far will you go how much pain will you inflict how cruel and torturous will you be if directed to be so by someone in a lab coat or uniform and the answer is disturbingly far normal people will administer lethal doses of electricity like they got to listen to the actor pretend to die and they didn't know they were acting if asked to do so by someone in a lab coat someone in a position of authority this neatly solves the problem of evil evil isn't a force in the universe it's what happens when a handful of sociopaths end up in charge and those responsible for the day-to-day menial tasks required to murder millions of people were just normal folks following orders it's not a coincidence that these experiments happened in the same year that Adolf Eichmann an actual Nazi and the architect of the final solution was on trial in his defense amounted to I did what I was told now we begin to understand evil in a more sophisticated way I was just following orders but this is also super wrong that was not Milgram's point or his conclusion that's just the story that's come up around the experiment in the decades since in fact the perfectly normal people objected to being asked to electrocute an innocent person and when they objected the administrator would tell them to continue the administrators had a script they had scripted answers to the volunteers objections the volunteers were told this is an important experiment the subject of volunteered this data will save lives they continued shocking the subjects or so they thought but if the administrator said I'm sorry but you have no choice you must continue in every instance the volunteers said I do have a choice I'm not doing it and they stopped in other words when they were ordered to obey they refused Milgram ran this experiment many times changing the experiment in different ways but this was always the result when ordered they refused they would not follow orders but they would continue they would murder people if they believed it was for a good cause if they believed it was advancing the cause of science they would kill those poor actors if you can convince someone their terrible deed will produce a net positive effect for the greater good people will do anything I had to do it don't you see genophage or genocide i save galaxy from Croghan save Croghan from galaxy this gets to the core of the problem if we believe that there is no such thing as evil there's just people and people can be variously good or bad depending on the circumstance then what this playing and evil character mean you just said there's no such thing as evil and I don't think folks play this game because they want to sit around debating epistemic evil but if we imagine that playing evil character means playing someone committed to doing something awful in order to achieve a net positive result in the cause of science or patriotism or family well that is more useful I think that talking about evil in terms of philosophy and psychology and religion and sociology is I mean we just did it I think it's interesting but it's messy and unhelpful if we want to talk about evil characters we should be talking like authors consider that we are expected to play heroes although stay tuned for more on that heroes oppose villains and vice-versa but there was another axis we can explore in a grime a.cian square I'm pretty sure we've talked about this before we can plot our characters along two axes we have our hero and our villain in opposition but we also have the antihero and the anti villain in semiotic so this would be the not hero and the anti not hero let's talk about what these terms mean and how we can use them to make fun evil characters who don't tear the party apart and piss everyone off let's start with an antihero I think folks usually confuse an antihero with a tragic hero or a reluctant hero a tragic hero is someone who could have been the hero except for some fatal flaw good and fatal flaws are things like hubris or ambition or just being blind to other people's flaws misplaced trust loyalty they are things you could have overcome if only you were a better character Duke Leto from dune is a great example his tragic flaw is that he cannot believe can't even imagine the possibility that someone who hates his enemies as much as he does could be enemies themselves this is his downfall a reluctant hero was just a hero who needs some convincing we know Han Solo was a good guy he acts selfish but we suspect he'll do the right thing when the chips are down and he does an antihero by contrast is someone who literally does not want to be a hero they do not embody the traditional virtues of heroism they reject them and often openly ridicule them but they can be trusted to do the right thing because it furthers some necessary goal you can't rely on them to be on your side in the grand scheme of things but for this one mission you know they will help because they have to you know who a great antihero is max two days ago I saw a vehicle that at haul that tanker you want to get out of here you talk to me max actually doesn't care about these people maybe he developed some affection for one or two of them but max is not Rick from Casablanca he's not han Solo he actively does not want to do the right thing he only ever does when he's literally given no other choice he's not evil he just doesn't go out of his way to volunteer to help others this is a great character archetype and one that can be fun to play as a PC but it requires the DM and the player worked together to create this artifice what is the circumstance that will force our antihero to join the party in the original Dragonlance books the answer was my brother thinks this is a good idea and I am here to keep him out of trouble I don't care about any of you and I don't care about doing the right thing Raceland really doesn't care about doing the right thing but he cares about his brother and as we read the Dragonland saga we start to question that tenuous old Raceland wants power and will do anything to get it he also wants to protect his brother what happens when these two irreconcilable ideas are forced to reconcile which do you think will win this is tricky because even if you and the DM can come up with a reason why your antihero character would travel with this party eventually your character will get what they want and then why would you stay with the group well I am perfectly happy with the antihero being in the party only temporarily we both got what we wanted now our partnership ends I'm gonna go my own way I love that because a you could always make a new PC and B it is a fantasy world the antihero can't get that far away they take their reward and go build a stronghold and after some downtime the DM presents a new adventure to the group and gosh it would be nice if that antihero we know would go with us they are awfully powerful and now you need to go to the Andy heroes tower and make your case very dramatic I love this now because this is a video about evil and we're talking about evil PCs it sounds like having an evil PC in the party instantly makes everything about the evil PC that's only true if you let it be and this gets down to the core of character and motivation in the game this all started when I was working on the new items section of strongholds and followers most of these new items anybody can use but some of these items are weapons useful for good characters and some are useful for evil characters and some are useful for neither let me say that again some of these weapons are useful for evil characters they're not cursed they're just weapons that do something cool if you're evil and I thought about how a lot of strongholds and followers is like that I make no assumptions about the background of your character one of the four types of stronghold is a temple and if you build the temple you can summon extra planar beings and we made sure there were good ones and neutral ones of different types and evil ones and I didn't do that because I expect the villains and your campaign to build evil temples and summon evil creatures although they should I did it because I didn't assume your players characters are all good they could be evil because that's how I was raised for lack of a better term if you go look at some of those old adventures like the village of Hamlet or against the cult of the reptile God you'll see there are very rarely hooks nothing to tell you why the heroes are there and it may seem that's just because it was early days in the hobby and they weren't very good at adventure design yet but I think something more complex is going on I think there were no hooks because they made no assumptions about your characters motivations there was no instruction to go save the blacksmith's children because there was no assumption that the players would want to do that and saying go save the blacksmiths kidnapped family makes an assumption about the hero's motivation and that narrows the possible motivations and that makes the game less sophisticated I didn't even really think about that until I was preparing this video but it sort of blows me away the motivation was treasure not because the game assumed you were murder hobos and just wanted treasure for treasure sake far from it the motivation was treasure because every character can use treasure to further their own ends whatever those ends are develop your own motivations the game was saying develop any motivations and the adventure will provide you the resources you need in gold and magic items to pursue them me needing to go persuade the anti-hero to help us out didn't make the game about the antihero because we were each doing this to further our own goals I need this character otherwise I can't get my stuff done now this isn't something I'm discovering by way of archaeology digging up the past and making conclusions based on what I find I remember playing like this I remember the fact that all of us wanted treasure but we each wanted it for different reasons we each used treasure to further our own often very different motivations the druid wanted to turn an elven forest into a sovereign elf nation the magic user wanted to free their imprisoned God I told you that story by the way one of my all-time favorite D&D stories I wanted to serve the king and I needed to build my own army to do so and this gets to the heart of the way the game has changed in the last 40 years the game very much expects the players to be heroes modern adventures provide hooks and those hooks almost always but not always to their credit they almost always involve helping someone this may seem incredibly straightforward we heroes of course we want to help people I think this gets to the reaction I got to the tweet where heroes of course we want to help people D&D is a fantasy and it's heroic fantasy and that archetype has always been part of the game and providing players with straightforward hooks is an incredibly useful tool for players as well as DMS but early adventures often didn't even have villains just ancient terrifying monster infested dungeons and arcane traps that have spruce puzzles they had lain in the earth for thousands of years and you explored them to test your mettle but also because the treasure you would come back with would let you further your own ambition and that freed you to have whatever ambition you wanted including conflicting ambitions and this wasn't considered a bug I think it produces a wider array of more interesting characters and more interesting parties but that's predicated on the assumption that you're playing with people you like who aren't Whang rods and your characters can snipe at each other and you each someday know you may come to blows but the players aren't mad at each other they love it what a great character dynamic so we have three corners of our semiotic square we have the hero and the villain all perfectly straightforward and we have the antihero who will do the right thing if forced to and then we have the anti villain and this is where the idea of playing on evil character really gets interesting if the antihero is someone who doesn't want to be the hero but does it out of necessity the anti-villain is someone who doesn't want to be a villain but does it out of necessity because they believe they must do this awful thing in order to set the world right or achieve some greater good remember Stephen Milgram at Yale those people did terrible things because they believed they were serving a great cause mr. freeze will do anything hare things if it means restoring his wife doctor you eat betrays Duke Leto because he thinks it will save his wife wives appear to be a good excuse don't roll your eyes at it steal it or adapted anti villains are tricky because they can easily pretend to be heroes until they betray the heroes at a crucial moment I'm sorry but I need this artefact to bring my lover back from the dead I'm sorry when that works and I've seen it work at the table it can be a huge gut punch sorry my friend mark said to Craig when Mark betrayed the party it's just business nothing personal I'm not evil because if my nature is just that right now I have this obligation this terrible purpose and you were in my way and nothing not you not anyone will stand in my way coach no matter what you will not get in my way we've been face to face yeah but I will not hesitate not for a second great character great moment and when it works the players remember it for the rest of their lives huge rug pull moment this is what it takes to play an evil character you need to know what is it that makes you evil are you an antihero or an anti villain if you're an antihero you look like a villain you don't care about the heroes you don't care about doing the right thing but you will because you have to so you need to sit down with your DM and work out why why are we temporarily on the same side because the enemy of my enemy is my friend because I can release myself for my obligations if I help you because helping you is my freedom if we succeed on Lockland otherwise I'll die with him all good reasons my friend Jordi ran a great game in my setting inspired by the Suicide Squad and this is one of the great D&D setups anyone can steal this the castellón has an impossible task and a bunch of criminals on death row he gives them the choice solve the unsolvable dungeon or adventure or whatever and earn your freedom one or two characters is one thing but Jordi knew that throwing an entire party of scheming evil cutthroats and murderers together was not gonna work unless some outside pressure forced us to work together so we were each fitted with a collar very symbolic that will explode if we disobey orders and if the guy who controls the collars doesn't refresh them regularly they also explode very clever being picked from death row meant we were free to be whatever kinds of villains we wanted to be I was the head of the enemy States secret police nothing personal just business my friend Mark was a bog-standard psychopath and he did a great job he was basically mr. Hyde from the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen he was guilty remorseless and happy to be given an excuse to indulge his bloodlust a blunt instrument I thought but a useful tool dangerous though not someone I'd prefer to rely on you could be a political dissident or an innocent victim framed for a crime you didn't commit that's what Framed means frame for a crime you didn't commit as redundant but it's dramatic if you're an anti villain you have your own agenda probably secret and you fit right in with the rest of the party but in a crucial moment you will betray them because you feel you have to you feel you leave you're doing the wrong thing for the right reason you just need to think about that reason I've played evil characters I played a drow once in my friend Jim's game and I knew I was antihero I'm not a good guy but our goals for the time being intersect and I didn't even know what our goals were yet no problem we all knew there would be goals and I would be able to retcon my motivation to fit no one thought I was doing this to disrupt the party I will help you I will save you because I need you and you need me the DM needs to know what you're up to both to help you plan and because it's not a given that your DM will allow you to play someone other than a hero for a lot of DMS it may never have occurred to them that anyone who ever want to do that so dialogue here is virtuous but the DM is not the only other player at the table some players might feel uncomfortable with you playing an evil character and unless you know them well and this has come up before and it's no big deal surprising someone who thought they were showing up to roll dice and kill orcs and save the beautiful dragon from the horrible princess by revealing yourself to be cruel or deceitful could ruin their fun very easily and we do not sit down at the table to ruin other people's fun at the same time sitting down and just explicate in your character's entire backstory motivation and goals is not something we expect to have to do in fact I think most of us believe that would take the fun out of playing our character regardless of whether we're playing a hero an antihero or an anti villain so if you're a DM with a player who's thinking about playing an evil character and you are okay with this just tell the other players you're running a game that has some moral ambiguity to it and you do not assume that all the players are going to be heroes don't make it about that player running an evil character make it about your game hey this game is gonna be a little more morally gray the characters you play don't have to be heroes they could even be anti heroes or anti villains are you all ok with this a lot of players a lot of players will happily sign up for your nonsense if you communicated it at ahead of time and if so facto we'll be really pissed if you spring this on them unawares this is just the normal work of communicating to your players what kind of game you're going to run I think when my friends I were very young we played evil characters and it all went south but it did so in a very interesting way this is already a crazy long video so we're gonna do is we're gonna jump on Twitch tomorrow night and do a live QA about this video if you watch this whole thing and have questions you can come by twitch tomorrow night let's say 6:00 p.m. Pacific and we'll talk about it the first time we played evil characters things went wrong but we kept playing we learned from it and while we didn't immediately play evil characters again we did try it later and it went fine sometimes it didn't go fine for very weird reasons and we can talk about that tomorrow night or maybe in a sequel to this video in other words in my experience there's nothing wrong with the decision to play an evil character I think you just need to be able to explain clearly to your DM what that means you could try and express it in terms of real world philosophies and attitudes but I think that's a distraction think about it in terms of the semiotic square the villain is the dm's character who are you gonna play a hero an antihero or an anti villain that's it folks super long video very ambitious of the first video we've tried to shoot in our office I hope you got something out of it and if it turns out that it was too long don't worry the next video I already know is gonna be much shorter this video this office this whole production was brought to you by the strongholds and followers Kickstarter we talked about it a little bit in this video if you're interested in the content of this book you can pre-order it right now there's a link in the doobly-doo so tomorrow night 6:00 p.m. on Twitch we will talk about this video how successful it was or was not and we'll get into some of the nitty-gritty details that I think we're probably too noodley to cover in a video next week we'll split the party until then peace out

Channel: Matthew Colville

Views: 889,156

Keywords: matt colville, matthew colville, dungeons and dragons, D&D, Running D&D, Running the Game, Evil, Playing Evile Characters, How To Play D&D, How to play Dungeons and Dragons

Id: kVuF4fkRD2c

Length: 30min 11sec (1811 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 25 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Kasrth]

Matt: "This video is super long"

Video is 30 minutes

Me: "it's not long enough"

[u/SirMonticus]

As a DM, I absolutely love the anti-villain trope, especially how Matt was describing it:

"Nothing personal, it's just business."

There's so much drama in that statement. Not only does it drop a thousand bricks on the heroes, but it creates so much room for characterization within the other players. I'm running a morally ambiguous campaign right now, and it's going to be really fun to develop these kinds of NPCs.

[u/abookfulblockhead]

"You can be evil because you kicked a puppy one time. You can be evil because you are the scion of Orcus."

I remember the most memorable villain from my first campaign. It wasn't the masterminds of the shadowy criminal conspiracy running the city. It was an actor that was a dick to the party one time. (Okay, several times). He gave backhanded compliments, sent insulting "gifts" to the party (dead flowers to the druid, a maid uniform to the halfling ranger).

Hell, the party didn't even fight him. But by god, they started a gossip war that lit up all the social circles of the city. By the end of this, the Paladin just punched said actor squarely in the face, much to the approval of everyone.

What's this guy's alignment in the module? Chaotic Evil. The guy isn't a serial killer. He's not secretly a cultist of the Old Gods. He's just a straight up asshole.

[u/BeardyBear_]

COLVILLE'S ALIVE!

[u/VexonCross]

My absolute favorite take on Evil as a concept is the Legacy of Kain series of video games. Both of its main characters, Kain and Raziel, completely fuck over the concept of what it means to be a hero or a villain, both of them inhabiting both roles multiple times over throughout their battle with destiny and each other. The entire series revolves around the idea that for a person to be a force for good, all they really need to be is less shitty than everything else. It's exceptional dark fantasy.

[u/LaserPoweredDeviltry]

Matt dances around this a bit, but is not as explicit as I'd like. Evil is purposeful, to avoid disturbances, long term goals are a must. Much more so than other alignments.

[u/69001001011]

My next character is a conquest paladin. He is a paragon of law, to the point where he is willing to do the most evil acts possible, as long as it means maintaining law and order. The only things he is not willing to do, are dishonorable acts: such as lie, cheat, and steal.

Watching Matt's video, he is an anti-villain. He has seen the horrors of the state of nature, and wishes to crush it by any means necessary.

He is somewhat inspired by thanos, but their largest similarity is in being evil paragons.

His main goals are to gain enough power to crush chaos, but also give a select few enough power to defeat him. Circumstances of the game might change that.

[u/Silidon]

There's a Starfarers of Catan?!?

[u/TemplarsBane]

Man, when Matt goes away for a while he comes back with some HIGH quality stuff. This has been his best video (IMO) in months. So much good, applicable, useful stuff in here. For new and old DMs alike.

Looking forward to having the machine up and running again. I've missed solid lessons from Uncle Matt!