 Howdy, how's it going? My name's David Chappie and I can be an evil bastard when I want to be. It comes from the role of being the DM Sometimes you have to break a few eggs to make a frittata. Even if those eggs are in the shape of your friends and family But in my many games of DM-atude I've seen all the different ways that players have fallen to the dark side and the effect that it has on the rest of the party And so it's time to share that knowledge in case one day you want the devil to tip his hat to you I'm gonna go over what constitutes an evil character. I'm gonna go over what constitutes an evil Lizzie. I'm gonna go over what constitutes an evil character Why the stigma around them exists how to avoid it and how to play the bad guy without the rest of the party seeing you as a Bad guy as always keep in mind that the majority of this is just my opinion So if you're one of those very original people who think that their character's theme song is Voltaire's when you're evil Feel free to play your games however you want and if you want to break down on how to role play evil NPCs You can check out my villains guide and real quick I'd like to give a brief shout out to my new patrons this month, Tykota Jalecki I, Davy Chappy, will from now on only respond to the name Stinkly Dingley So please call me that and only that Shad, Aga, Sam Havens, Nathan, Evans Thank you so much for pledging to my Patreon I noticed that a couple of you pledged to my weekly D&D games and you can be notified of when those games become available by checking out my Discord or my Twitter, but with that out of the way, let's begin So an evil character is a guy who just does bad stuff The reasons to do bad stuff are multitudinous and they don't even have to be antagonistic when put into context But regardless, you are predisposed to take the non-heroic action at pivotal moments The good guys swore of left, but you follow the beat of your own drum and swore of right The good guys want to interrogate a dude, but then they look at you like you're the bad guy for bringing a water-soaked burlap sack But when you're the type of person who likes to fight spandex wearing muscle men, you sort of get hit with a double standard Morally ambiguous characters are considered fun and dynamic all the way up until they actually do stuff that conflicts with the party But in order for a character to be evil in more than just name, they have to do evil things Which is hard when you've got a team full of idealistic bleeding hearts And on a meta sense, it can be really annoying to have one member of the party constantly be tugging everybody else in a counter-intuitive direction That's why the stigma around evil characters is so strong, because as much as I sing the praises of role play, there is something more important Meta play. Meta play isn't playing the game, it's playing your players And in that game, there is only one thing that matters, making sure that everybody else is having fun The key to recognizing a good table is by noticing whether or not the players are checking up on each other And relying on everybody else to check up on them in sort of an unspoken trust fall kind of way If a player doesn't check the other players, either intuitively or better yet verbally, then they can start irking people But they also have to check to see if the other players are giving as much as they're getting as well Otherwise, you're just gonna get suck dry of all that happiness that you bring to the table The reason I'm bringing this up in this video is because to be a bad guy in-game, you have to be a good guy out of game People often bring up not screwing over the party as a rule for playing evil characters But what people don't often bring up is that in-game betrayals do happen And they can be the best twists in the story because while everybody is looking at the DM for incoming plot points Their attention is suddenly turned to Jimmy Mick a good guy revealing his true identity as Jamantha Mick bad girl But the reason some of them are praised as the best twists in the campaign while others are only brought up in dungeon Anonymous meetings is because of the level of trust within the group The perception of whether something is recognized as a role playing moment or a personal attack is often based on how much You like a person for better or worse and as a result I found that socially confident people are more likely to talk positive about playing evil characters while people who have a harder time Socially tend to have bad experiences because they're hoping that everything stays within the dice But perception is reality and the reality is evil characters take social finesse One side is focused on role play the other side is focused on meta play and both sides feel like Agency is being robbed from them when the other side makes a decision But dnd is a team game and you're gonna have to work together somehow So to break it down into a digestible plan when I make an evil character The one thing that I have to remember when I role play is this evil is not stupid There are a lot of factors that go into creating a character But one of the most global ones is that you have to play someone who wants to be in the party If your idea of fun is splitting off from the group and murdering people because your character is psychotic Then you're gonna have a problem You don't have to not play a crazy axe murderer But you do have to take out of game steps to rationalize it so that they stay within the confines of the party Such as recognizing that dnd is all about murdering creatures who are just minding their own business So you don't need to go out of your own way to do it If your type of evil is greedy then take a moment to realize that with your party You were finding treasures beyond your wildest dream So why wouldn't you play ball with the more sentimental rules that you come out rich in the end? You don't even have to steal anything the money is coming to you and someone with plans for world domination Isn't going to have a world to dominate if some other schmuck does it? Or maybe you just don't want to look like you're riding the trend of being a dom Regardless of what your character's goal is their motivation has to align with that of the parties At least in so far that they don't mind sticking with the party Blizzard I love you At least in so far as they don't mind sticking with the party and not doing things that will constantly jeopardize that relationship These are the overarching ways that you have to rationalize your character's behavior But that's only the start because you're still going to be spending session after session playing a character with antagonistic tendencies And the key to not pissing your party off is moderation picking your battle so that it doesn't look like you're just demanding that everybody else Play like you want is the key to playing any character not just evil ones Remember there are three to five other people at your table and all of them want a time to shine So the more impactful your singular actions would be to the entire party the less likely you should be to make them And the more time you should spend in between those actions You can voice your opinion whenever you want but actions speak louder than words And people will remember the things you do more often than the things you've said The trick is to make your ideas seem palpable to the rest of the teams that they don't feel like it's too far off From what they want to do already the more often you try to do things that the rest of the party doesn't want to do The less fun they're going to have and if you can at least explain your actions so that the rest of the team Doesn't think that you're at the big dumb then you probably shouldn't be doing it in case you need some examples Of what an evil character can look like a long time ago I set out to prove that evil characters could be played effectively in a party And so I made three of them based off of the alignments of lawful evil neutral evil and chaotic evil The lawful evil character was an overzealous cleric that punished evil where he found it and took that to mean that it was the Salem witch trials and everybody else was a gorgeous woman He hated the other characters impurity but saw them as a necessary evil Or at least he was smart enough to know that they could stop him and people kept Challenging his views until he ultimately came to the conclusion that he was just as evil as the people he punished But instead of javaring himself. He just devoted his life to not being a knobhead the neutral evil character was easier He was a selfish bastard who cheated and lied to everyone including his family and kept cheating and lying his way through the campaign Until he eventually got caught enough times that he had to grow up and he started cheating and lying for the forces of good And the chaotic evil character was a serial killer who wanted to rule the world But part of his backstory was that he had amnesia due to one of his world ruling schemes backfiring on him So he was just a chill dude with an occasional sociopathic episode until one day He got all of his memories back but kept his memories from his time as a bro Which made him realize that the real murder victims were the friends he made along the way I hope that this video is able to help you with making an evil character for your games But it's good to remember that alignment is bullshit anyway Your character is just the culmination of the things that they do and say and it's up to you to decide If those things make the game better for you and your friends Don't make an evil character make a flawed character and work to reflect those flaws in an interesting way Kidnap a princess tie someone to the railroad and then hey Maybe you can go out for lunch afterward with the money you stole from the orphanage But that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video Be sure to leave a like comment subscribe ring the bell if you want to stay up to date and all of your Davy news and maybe support me on patreon so that I can continue to take shots at old edgelord tropes But yeah, Davy out