Banality of Evil

[MT++]

After reading about the psionic noble in the recent psionics and PCs topic, I thought of a good question: How do you handle PCs who are evil.

Or, make that EVIL.

They are the ones that the trade routes avoid.
They are the ones that would embarass the Brinn
They are the ones with a body count that would make a K'Kree fanatic g'naak hunter cringe

They are the ones that flip through the equipment guide and you can tell they found the fusion guns by the way their eyes light up like a five year old on christmas. HE-EY-EY-EY, WeaPons!

(That was a running gag from an old Traveller campaign. One of the players was stoned while rolling up his character and kept getting Heavy Weapons as a skill. But when he tried to write it, he kept writing heay weapons, which we pronounced as above. Little Traveller humour for ya there)

 

[Rodina]

Deal with them? I just kill them. Not all at once, but unless these guys are running at Jump-6 in a straight line, news will catch up. In MTU, the Imperial Marine officer corps is made up heavily of second- and third- sons, nephews and cousins of Imperial nobility (in MTU, virtually all nobility served in the Imperial Navy prior to taking office) and they tend to be pretty hardcore about maintaining stability in the Imperium.

Nobles need only make a phone call to get someone dispensed with in a clean and politically expedient fashion if they've committed crimes on several worlds.

 

[MT++]

Originally posted by Rodina:
[QB]Deal with them? I just kill them.
[QB]

And if the party keeps doing this?

What happens when the players, who have decided on a campaign different from the one you want, give up and go play D&D again?

What happens when the CHirper comes up and asks pitifully for help (a la RSG) and the players throw things at ti and chase it off

What do you do when your PCs do NOT want to be the champions of good and decency

 

[Rodina]

I dunno. Is it worth the trouble to keep them playing if they want to do nothing but destroy everything around them? I don't think so - and I don't try. It's no fun as GM to be surrounded by nothing but chaos...

 

[Tobias]

Originally posted by MT++:
</font><blockquote>quote:</font><hr />Originally posted by Rodina:
[QB]Deal with them? I just kill them.
[QB]

And if the party keeps doing this?

What happens when the players, who have decided on a campaign different from the one you want, give up and go play D&D again?

What happens when the CHirper comes up and asks pitifully for help (a la RSG) and the players throw things at ti and chase it off

What do you do when your PCs do NOT want to be the champions of good and decency</font>[/QUOTE]Talk to them and try to find a compromise. You could try:
- A pirate campaign if YTU allows for it. Set it in Foreven Sector. Close enough to the Spinward Marches to use a lot of OTU material as background.
- A mercenary campaign in Vargr Space. Heck, *any* campaign in Vargr space.
- A merchant campaign with a somewhat rough attitude on business. Preferably set in a "power vacuum" environment, as the other two.
- If you live up to your nickname: There are certainly enough lawless environments in MT.

If your players, however, are really so pathetic as to randomly shoot everything and everybody, if they are, in short words, the "Knights of the Dinner Table", try to keep Sara and B.A. and dump the rest.
GM is already a tough job that never gets the credit it´s due. No need to make your life miserable by conforming to such players.

Regards,

Tobias

 

[millican]

While I did deal with some pretty tough PCs in my days of GM'ing, most of them were generally for the side of goodness, rightness, and decency. And, generally, they played along with the scenario. I think this was because we switched out playing and GM'ing various games, Traveller and otherwise. Therefore, everyone in my group knew what it was like to be in the hotseat of GM as well as having the fun of being a PC. However, there were times when things were poised to get out of hand. In those situations I always fell back on:

a.) I am the GM (Game Master - emphasis on MASTER).
b.) Evil never pays.
c.) The GM can always, ALWAYS amass more and better firepower than the PCs.
d.) The fog of war does not affect the GM, it does affect the PCs.

Therefore, evildoers become criminals sought after by the Imperium. The more heinous the crime the more sought after they are. BTW, I find that the Navy particularly likes to sharpen its skills on pirates. Also, like many police agencies, the GM can bide one's own time on when and where to apprehend said evildoers. Therefore, that night of drunken partying ends up with the next morning, or what the PC's percieve as the next morning, in an Imperial high security lockdown and an awful hangover (from the booze and the drugs slipped into the drinks).

For a lighter approach, reminding PC's that a form of behavior is not in keeping with the character's character is not out of line for a GM. Thus, it is highly unlikely that a former / retired Imperial Marine will shoot, murder, maim, or pillage innocent women and children - it is against their very being and training. This can also serve as a warning if you, later, have to bring forth a heavy hand as above.

Hope it helps.

"The use of excessive force in the apprehension of the Blues Brothers has been approved."
- Illinois State Police radio broadcast from the movie "The Blues Brothers"

 

[kafka47]

Evil for me is a matter of perspective. If the characters have done truly horrific such as let loose a nuclear weapon into an enemy starship, I tend to describe the silence of a 1000 screaming voices. But, mainly I use the Fading Suns rules Passion Play (I knew about them before they were written, I have always tried to referee with the idea of a confused higher good exists to reign them. Plus, as anyone knows who has played an Anti-Paladin for a period of time to play Evil is not as much fun, as to find ways to fight it.

 

[DrSkull]

Since I realized that mercenary campaigns can often degenerate into evil pretty quickly if not monitired, I cooked up a pretty effective scheme for my T20 playtest game.

I gave the mercenary unit as a whole a rating for "effectiveness" and another for "ethics". The two numbers added together gave the unit "reputation" level.

Basically, when they completed a ticket successfully, their effectiveness went up by one, and if they abided by rules, laws and common decency their ethics went up (and the ratings could go down if they failed or did evil acts).

The Ethics rating was used as a modifier for getting jobs from ethical employers (i.e., the preferable jobs) and for recruiting new troops (no one wants to work for the bastards).

On their first mission, they failed the Ethics test, because they fired on their enemies during an agreed-upon cease-fire. They were not pleased at their ethics going down.

So, several missions later, a group of enemy mercs surrendered, and activated repatriation bonds. The PC's were fit to be tied. "What do you mean, we just let them get on a ship and leave the planet?" I told 'em, do whatever you like, but that's the law, they are now non-combatants. And in order to keep their unit's reputation in tact, they knuckeld under, without much arm-twisting on my part.

 

[kafka47]

Originally posted by DrSkull:
Since I realized that mercenary campaigns can often degenerate into evil pretty quickly if not monitired, I cooked up a pretty effective scheme for my T20 playtest game...

Brilliant innovation! But, why not strand the mercs, in what they think is a very hostile situation with armour but without guns. That plus the humanitarian missions that I mentioned above usually cures the bloodlust.

 

[soloprobe]

I find evil to me a matter of perspective....with that in mind, you can always reign-in evil characters with evil N.P.C.s

 

[Uncle Bob]

I run a "noir" game myself, with grity reallism. I haven't seen much evil in my game, because I make them role-play it. I recall a Flashing Blades character who seduced and murdered a Spanish General. I made her play the murder, although not the seduction (her husband was a friend of mine). She botched the roll twice and he took a while to die and got her sheets all bloody. This was no worse than what I did in other fights, but she and the General were all alone while he died (as in All Quiet on the Western Froint). She lost all appetite for assasinations.

I have played in Orc campains where we "played with our food," mostly sheep and elves, and that is a matter of perspective.

But I have played in campaigns where some of the characters got truly evil. Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson and Ted Bundy evil. I recall being chased by villagers and trying to figure out why. I thought one of the characters had seduced the teen-age girl he was talking to the previous night. "No, they couldn't have found the body this quickly." That player allways played a boy-scout in my game, so I blame the GM.

 

[Shadowdancer]

When I GM, I run a pretty realistic and graphic game as well. I can give some pretty gory and gruesome details. Usually, one or two of those and the characters loose their stomach for being really evil. They might be bad every now and then, and naught on occassion, but hardly ever evil.

And I make sure there are always consequences to their actions, good or bad.

 

[RabidVargr]

Originally posted by MT++:

What do you do when your PCs do NOT want to be the champions of good and decency

Simple! Run an eeeeeevil campaign! If they're the bad guys, there's consequences. Hard to pull into a starport when they've got wanted posters on the wall of their hanger. If they're bad enuf, impy ships shoot on sight, and claim bounties later. Lots of subterfuge to get around and all kinds of stuff like that. Find out what they want the goal of their characters to be and plan accordingly. I actually have a lot of fun with evil campaigns. Even being evil, you can do good. Read the liveship trilogy or assassin trilogy, preferably both. (Robin Hobb is the author) In the liveship trilogy, Pay attention to Captain Kinnet (liveship series). He's got power hungry goals, but ends up being a folk hero in his hometown as a pirate.

RV

 

[Murph]

Are we discussing me (the great orc torture?) or perhaps Dorian Cheval et. al? Eeeeeeevil is fun every now and then according to Atrocity Smith. BTW nothing Atrocity Smith did can be held against me, now War Crimes Eichmann however....

But seriously, most players get bored with evil after a while. Let them work it out, and in many cases go with the flow. I don't know how many well designed adventures I had to throw out, and "think on my feet" when the players decided to torment the Groaci, or some such plan. The mark of a good DM is the ability to improvise as needed.

And every now and then allow a player to go off the deep end, it might help them deal with a real life problem that they have. The aforementioned character "Atrocity Smith" was my way of dealing with a very bad problem in my life at that time. Or run a bifurcated campaign where you have an Evil character and a Moral character, and allow the group to decide what character they wish to play that particular night.

Originally posted by Uncle Bob:
But I have played in campaigns where some of the characters got truly evil. Jack the Ripper, Charles Manson and Ted Bundy evil. I recall being chased by villagers and trying to figure out why. I thought one of the characters had seduced the teen-age girl he was talking to the previous night. "No, they couldn't have found the body this quickly." That player allways played a boy-scout in my game, so I blame the GM.

 

[mshoen]

As a player I usually do not play truly evil characters. As a cop I see enough depravity, cruelty, neglect, and viciousness in real life. As a GM I try to let players play their characters as they want as long as it fits within the character concept. I also try to emplace the logical consequences for their characters' actions as well (good or evil). If they want to commit atrocities then they should expect an appropriate response to those atrocities. I think the best way to discourage evil acts within the game is to have all the players and the GM come to an agreement of what won't be tolerated and using in-character peer presure to enforce it.

 

[Uncle Bob]

If the shoe fits, Murph...

But I was thinking of Paul P.

Does it bother anyone that the players for "Atrocity Smith" and "War Crimes Eichmann" are now both Texas lawmen?

Not me. I know them.

 

[Murph]

Actually Brad was War Crimes Eichmann. You know at 4 xp per orc, wiping out 8 villages of them gives you some serious xp. But seriously, most players who play Eeeeeeeeeevil characters end up giving it up in the end. The Evil phase just doesn't last long.

I'm going to email you about a call I had that left me shaking my head, and wondering if aerial spraying of Prozac could be a good thing.

Originally posted by Uncle Bob:
If the shoe fits, Murph...

But I was thinking of Paul P.

Does it bother anyone that the players for "Atrocity Smith" and "War Crimes Eichmann" are now both Texas lawmen?

Not me. I know them.

 

[Uncle Bob]

AAURGG! Yeah, Brad's character didn't bother me. He was a sociopath (if that's used properly) in the pattern of the Herpes brothers, but with more dignity.

Paul P's Aftermath psychopath actually sickened me. It actually turned me PK (player killer).

 

[vegascat]

It can be interesting to throw in an NPC along the lines of Hannibal Lector, the good and friendly doctor.

He's a good cook by the way. Great at conversation and when taking care of the passengers in low berths, does an excellent job.

See what happens after a week in jump space. Expecially after when they start hitting planets a second and third time, they read the news reports.

 

[trader jim]

uncle bob - question - who and what are the HERPES brothers?? theres gotta be a story here!