Thoughts on evil CHARNAME
Necomancer
Member Posts: 622
I have a confession to make. I have a hard time being an evil CHARNAME. The reason is simple, when it comes to what alignment CHARNAME is its nature vs nurture. You can easily justify it either way. Evil because its your nature, or good because thats how you were raised.
I suppose my problem is I think nurture can trump nature most of the time. That nature is what you start with, but nurture is what you learn over time as you grow. To me, nurture is more powerful and Gorian raised you well enough to tell good from evil and what you should be.
That being said when I do get to an evil playthrough so far I think I can somehow do it by saying that the first person my CHARNAME kills in Candlekeep has a profound effect on him and somehow he becomes obsessed with death as a result. Perhaps Gorion didn't prepare him enough to resist those urges and when they hit him all at once he was overwhelmed. Also, I'll be an assassin who duals into fighter, cause poison is awesome.
That being said, I'd welcome any other thoughts on this. I'm certainly not saying CHARNAME should always be good, by all means play how you want, I'm just curious about how other people's thought processes work when it comes to their character. How do you justify your alignment? I also admit I tend to feel bad when I do evil things even in a video game, and a very silly one too. One I'm sure I can get over.
I suppose my problem is I think nurture can trump nature most of the time. That nature is what you start with, but nurture is what you learn over time as you grow. To me, nurture is more powerful and Gorian raised you well enough to tell good from evil and what you should be.
That being said when I do get to an evil playthrough so far I think I can somehow do it by saying that the first person my CHARNAME kills in Candlekeep has a profound effect on him and somehow he becomes obsessed with death as a result. Perhaps Gorion didn't prepare him enough to resist those urges and when they hit him all at once he was overwhelmed. Also, I'll be an assassin who duals into fighter, cause poison is awesome.
That being said, I'd welcome any other thoughts on this. I'm certainly not saying CHARNAME should always be good, by all means play how you want, I'm just curious about how other people's thought processes work when it comes to their character. How do you justify your alignment? I also admit I tend to feel bad when I do evil things even in a video game, and a very silly one too. One I'm sure I can get over.
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I don't really enjoy being evil, additionaly I like the npcs less and I think the narratives inferior with an evil charname
I also am a fan of Star Trek, and to a lesser degree, Worf. In here we see that Klingon Nature wills out sometimes. Spock Too struggles with his inner nature as a Human despite being brought up Vulcan. Between these two, we see very real influences that impact Charname's development.
In the end, we don't know a whole lot about Charnames' childhood other than what we are told in the all too brief introduction. We can write in our own history so long as the broad strokes match the baseline setup. This is why I don't have a problem with any of the classes ultimately coming around, where others have big problems with things like Barbarians and Druids. Ultimately, we make our own back story to one degree or another to bridge the gap. and so long as it brings us to the point where BG1 starts, who cares if it is 'Exactly' what the original writers intended?
All in my view.
You don't have to be bloodthirsty to be evil, nor do you have to pick all the evil options. Just do what serves you best.
For example: poisoining the druid grove is obviously evil, but solving the druid problem with Cernd and/or Jaheira risking their necks (not you) while expecting gratitude and ample award from the Trademeet community isn't a road reserved for good-aligned characters. Besides what do you gain with poisoning the grove? Chaotic evil sadistic pleasure, the favour of an insignificant halfling, and un underwhelming reward.
It's challenging though, I must admit. Have you read any of the Song of Ice & Fire books, or watched Game of Thrones. Characters like Cersei or Littlefinger could be inspiring.
Of course, when you discover you are indeed a demigod I think things could change. You might start to think you can get away with things and care less about the consequences of your actions, especially if you've found yourself by like minded jerks like Xzar and Montaron encouraging you to explore your dark side more.
Lawful and Neutral Evil can still sort of be on side of "Good" (that game wants you to do) in sensible roleplay much more than Chaotic Evil...
Evil isn't about going around murdering everything in sight, it's more about the character mainly caring about themself only... The Lawful vs Chaotic is more about how ready they are to break laws to get what they want...
CN would be the lowest alignment i can choose
Honestly, I really don't understand any of the arguments for Evil charnames being so very unlikely. You guys do understand that loving parents and structured environments aren't some kind of formulaic alchemy that automatically generates good people, right?
Right, but that's not what people are talking about, and is in fact a seperate (and actually valid) point. What some posters in this thread are asserting is that an Evil-aligned charname is difficult to justify the existence of in the first place. Forget playing an Evil charname out in the game world. People are suggesting that because Gorion is such a nice guy, an Evil charname requires extra headcanon to even exist to start with. Baffling logic, really.
Most side questing, however, is extremely questionable. Even the original writers seemed to notice this, judging from all the complaining korgan, vikky, and edwin do who you accept most of these missions.
It's the quests themselves that IMO are the problem-you are offered far more 'good' quests than bad, are given far more opportunity to fight bad guys than good-and often punished quite harshly, and to little reward when you do decide to fight the forces of good.
The current thinking on nature vs nurture, as far as I can tell, suggests that it is both. There might be genes that make some people more prone to violent behavior, but genes are wrapped in this other stuff, the epigenome, which is somewhat malleable and influenced by the environment. What it does is change the way genes are expressed, so those same genes that cause violent behavior in some more be changed to having an unusual focus and energy in other areas.
This is an incredulous statement.
Given your post, I'm not really sure if you know what constitutes a scientific field, but I can assure you that an overwhelming majority of scientists and medical professionals consider psychology a fundamental, if somewhat new, paradigm of scientific study.
I don't mean to be antagonistic, but a sentiment like this strikes me as somewhat backwards.
What I'm saying is it's just not rocket science; it's actually a lot more complicated than that.
I cannot argue as to its infancy. For all its promise, we have made serious missteps, and are still feeling our way through the beginning stages.
For example:
- Is it good to pick a preventable fight with Meilum or with Kirian and her hunting party?
- Is it good to kill off mind-controlled Shoal the Nereid after she begs you for help and raises any fallen comrades, just because she's worth 5000 XP?
- In Candlekeep, is it good to execute the non-aggressive Iron Throne leaders most of whom you don't know anything about, without any trial or even interrogation?
- Is it good to loot all the magical weapons and items in the D'Arnise Stronghold?
- Is it good to re-assemble ultra-evil Kangaxx whose parts had been carefully separated so that he could do no more harm?
I'm not saying all of these actions are by definition evil, but IMO they go better with an evil aligned character than with a good{aligned one. However if you always consider this kind of behaviour to be "good enough" for your good-aligned character, then I can imagine you're having hard time being evil, with only the non-lucrative evil options remaining open.
In a way it's easier to be evil than to be good. Because being good implies never doing any evil deeds, whereas being evil doesn't prevent one from performing actions that can be considered good.
I don't see problems with keeping the loot either. If you're now in charge of the Keep, it falls to you anyway, and if not, Nalia would probably rather you keep them than hand them over to the Roenalls.
I agree with all the BG1 examples, though. Could go either way on Kangaxx. Ending him forever seems somewhat justifiable from a good alignment.
I'm just saying that there are many scenarios in which a case can be made that certain behaviour would be unacceptable for a good-aligned charname, but many players (including me, to be honest) tend to overlook these issues once there is gain is to be had...
I fully agree on what you're saying about Kangaxx though.
And let's face it, without metagaming unless you've picked berzerker as your PC, 99% of the time all CHARNAME would have achieved is reassembling Kangaxx, being immediately imprisoned, and letting him loose on Athkatla.
Iron thrones leaders will attack you if you talk to them too many times. You know that they are up to some ripe evil anyways, so it'd be perfectly in character for a chaotic good type to whack them anyways.
Shoal the Nereid wasn't mind controlled. Her dialog mentions something about it not being 'fun' anymore to kill people after you beat on her for a while, so I'd take anything she says with a grain of salt.
Pretty sure Nalia at some point mentions that you can take what you want from her keep. besides, fighters get the keep anyways later on.
Melium & Kirian? Well, it's not as if they turn you down when you challenge them on their boasts. Evil, not so much I think-perhaps neutral.
re-assembling Kangaxx is stupid, not necessarily evil.
Evil Players get attacked on sight sometimes in Baldur's gate. I remember it happening at least twice. Once by a Paladin in a bar, and once by one of Gorion's old pals In the docks area.
not enough evil npcs to make a full party in BG II.
Only one 'evil' npc romance, and that's one that includes a redemption plot line.
Closest evil Carsomyr equivalent In the game is the human flesh +5....which you get much later, and is nowhere near as useful, is comparatively easy to miss.
Dearth of 'evil' quests that end early, reward less etc or are just plain harder if you choose an evil option to resolving them.
Harder to keep good party members in the party than evil-lots of 'good party members' will try and kill you if you do something they don't like-poison druid's grove, attack drizzt, etc. Never had that problem with any of my evil party members, even korgan, who murdered folks from his last adventuring party In their sleep.
Gorion being a good person and telling you to seek out his good and noble friends means nothing. An evil charname can just wait for a chance to get out of Candlekeep and then immediately throw all advise overboard. It's just... more fun with headcanon, i.e. my assassin charname aspiring to join the Zhentarim, taught by a secret mentor who visits Candlekeep, disguised as a scholar, thinking of Carbos and Shank as a "graduation test" to make a thief a proper assassin (kit justification) is more fun than thinking "hurr hurr evil charname, kill everything in sight!" After that, I headcanon that Xzar and Montaron drop hints, like checking charname's loyalty to the Zhents, and finally formally introducing him to their superior in Sorcerous Sundries.
People who say playing evil is dumb ("hurr hurr kill all") or "sick" ("omg video game violence! *gasp*") or difficult ("how to justify my blackguard is TRULY evil???????") probably just have a limited imagination. No alignment is more difficult than the other to "justify" or roleplay, they are all just different and that's the beauty of it.
TL;DR: While RPing as an evil character with a good DM is generally no barrier, Game Devs prioritize certain things over others-and as a result of that in rpgs evil characters tend to have less content and general attention in my experience.
1. Anticipated player demographic
2. Limited resources/time/developers/etc.
Now, 1 is slowly being chipped away at due to ... Well, the media and political correctness more than anything. Unfortunately I see it done in very silly ways at the moment where it seems forced. I think, though, that we will eventually see people genuinely making characters, for example, bisexual, because it genuinely fits their personality and persona. This really can't come any sooner because said forced characters actually do more harm than good.
2 is dying because we have huge development teams. It's still around though. Amusingly there are counter-examples to Baldur's Gate -- The Grand Theft Auto series tends to favor evil over good. That series makes a good example of what I'm saying however, because the newest game appears to give good players a lot more options than previous installments.
I see much more statements along the lines of "I would NEVER play an evil character or accept evil NPCs, that's just sick and I'm not an evil person irl" than people speaking out against playing good or neutral. I don't get it. It's roleplay. It's not meant to be "like we are irl". I doubt many people are indeed serial killing monsters and that's why they play evil characters. I do because there are way more works of fiction where the "good hero" wins. There are many interesting villains that make you wonder "what if they won?" and a game like this gives me a chance to find out. My evil charnames do not represent me. They represent a fictional character of a type that usually doesn't get the final victory.
I don't see how coming up with an evil character is more difficult than creating a good character. It's the very same process, going through the very same attributes (personality, looks, goals, motivations,...), you just play with different tropes.