On the subject of evil characters: I was talking to a friend of mine (a DM) about a character concept I had. He's a Tiefling cleric with a terminal illness that desperately want to extend his life by any means. The consequence of this is that he will end up being the party's healer and given his motivation isn't murderous. However, he is not above experimenting on the dead and dying hence a somewhat evil character.
So the reason my friend and I landed on evil is when the question of "what wouldn't he do to extend his life?" came up the answer was pretty much that he would do anything bar none. Not to say the character would revel in it but there really is no moral line he won't cross to get what he wants. Dark Sev's comment was pretty spot on with the "(yet)" as a lot of the evil alignment will come later should the opportunity present itself.
My favorite character was evil, necromancer that believed in, what was effectifly post mortem community service. Because "Killing a bandit doesn't unburnt the town they destroyed, they deserve rest once they pay for their crime." Absolutely obsessed with burial rights and making sure the dead are put to rest outside of that though.
Didn't get a chance to play it but I had something similar planned for a lawful evil necromancer that ran a funeral home. The labor of the deceased was out towards burial fees and he would upsell things to families. The idea was thet he was a scummy guy but he paid his taxes, didn't do anything illegal and would want to protect the land because...well he just put in a new wing on his Villa so we can't have monsters running a muck or megalomaniac necromancer drawing attention from the church and the crown
A few notes on the “evil characters” discussion: Evil characters can be so much fun. The murder hobo archetype has really ruined the alignment, and doesn’t do it justice. Evil characters don’t have to be constrained to “steal steal stab stab”. Lawful evil characters can want the same things as a lawful good character, but with no qualms on how those goals are achieved. Quote Peacemaker; “I love peace, and I don’t care how many men, women and children I have to kill to get it.” Neutral evil characters (obviously) fall between chaotic and lawful, half way between being purely self-concerned and wishing to impose their ideas on others. Perhaps they’ve decided to go adventuring solely for the wealth and fame that’s promised. Chaotic evil can be the hardest to get right. People often interpret the alignment similar to the Joker; someone who steals and murders regularly without any qualms. However, I find this to be an edgy and quite boring interpretation. Think of the chaotic aspect as you would for a chaotic neutral character. They’re concerned only for their well being. However, while a chaotic neutral character may operate on the idea of “everyone do what they want, I don’t care”, a chaotic evil character would think more along the lines of “might makes right”. Chaotic neutral characters are just that - neutral. They’ll stay out of conflict that doesn’t concern them, and any harm that comes of it wasn’t out of malice. Chaotic evil characters know what they want and will step over anyone to get it. Now, the most important part of play an evil character is making a _smart_ character. Will killing the shopkeep really be beneficial? Could you really take on all 30 town guards at once? People often forget that being selfish entails having a lot of care for your own well-being. Now, be smart, have fun, and be evil!
Yeah my favorite evil character i played, only DM knew was a player so lawful good that it become evil. He was not much about killing everyone, but he just push the laws to his limites. Same rules for everyone. The 4 years old that "steal" a toy in a store should see his hand cuts as much as the young man doing for living. Being fair was important and truth too, but only his truth matter. He did not bend it. A fact was a fact. He would never break the laws unless it is to give someone the punishment for his crime even if it was not is job. It also forced my allies to respect the laws when they understand that law is law.
@@akki40000 The Knight Templar archetype. That's also quite hard to pull off successfully, because it can very easily devolve into the Lawful Stupid territory, but can be very rewarding if done right and everyone is on board with the concept.
Am tired so probably crappy explenation but one of my favorite characters was a Chaotic Evil Bard. See. She only wanted power and didn't care what she had to do to get it bit also understood that thier are many ways to gain power and the greatest was allies. So she spent the whole campain being selfless to earn allies for the sake of being selfish manipulating them for her own benigit
You! YOU GET IT. I have a Lawful Evil guy as my Pathfinder 2e character. Most of the actions he does read as good. Know why? BECAUSE PEOPLE LIKE GOOD GUYS. He doesn't want to kill women and children, that doesn't help him. But he DOES want to poison the lord keeping him from having relations with said lord's wife and taking care of his daughter (who the Lord claims as his own). If my guy has to kill some innocents or do some evil things to get where he needs to get, he might not LIKE it, but he'll do it. He's not gonna kill the party (unless he really has to), he's not gonna slaughter the shopkeeper, hell he might even give the single working mother some extra gold to keep her kid fed. Because people like heroes, and if people think you're a hero, they're a lot more likely to speak up for you when the crown guard comes down looking for a guy who looks suspiciously like you.
Maybe it could be fun to try to rehabilitate a character. IE start off as very selfish and out for themselves but circumstance forces them together with the heros. So when the heros runs off to save some villagers attacked by beasts he misses the first round of combat trying to work out why the rest of the party would risk their lives for strangers. It could open up some interesting discussions on motivations after the fight. With enough good rp points and the agreement of the GM the alignment might shift from evil to neutral to good over the course of the adventure. Or everyone ends up neutral. Who knows?
The concept of a suddenly evil metallic dragon is so fascinating, given the nature of alignment in dragons is squarely divided straight down the Metallic-Chromatic divide due to their respective divine compelling their alignments to good and evil. It's like... if suddenly, in a crowd of humans, one person like three rows back suddenly began falling UP. the amount of sheer terror that would inspire in the rest would be AMAZING.
Me (the DM): I'm nerfing goodberry. Druid: "What? Oh, I guess that's fair, considering how I burn all my slots on it every rest." Me: "The spell now needs to consume one fruit, nut, or berry and produces clones of that item." The party: *FORAGE CHECK*
A simple nerf is making the sprig of mistletoe consumed on casting if the DM wants survival to be part of the campaign. Good berry covers all the food needs for the day and heals them some so they have to find a sprig for each day or find food.
@@nobodyimportant2470 Unfortunately that concept while good in theory becomes tricky to work... That is also literally a spell focus for durids, and consuming a spell focus is a lot more mean than just banning the spell.
My friend changed good berry into a magical means to temporary suppress hunger. Nothing can live off good berries alone. If you do not get real food in you your going to die
reminds me of a gag where someone was on a long flight (much longer than he expected) and did have a spell to copy food, BUT he had only Beans and Milk to copy.
Once had an paladin in a game who was evil because of his beliefs telling him mixing races was bad and technology was bad. Never hurt my character an artificer homebrew race. But always made it clear that he disliked her. That was until she sacrificed herself to save the party. He broke his oath when his god refused to let him bring her back. Coming to the conclusion that she saved him despite him being a jerk by switching his faulty teleport pack with her working one. And that nobody evil would have done that. So he became good in the epilogue.
After a guy who used to be part of my group spent roughly half his starting gold in a 10th-level one-off on sheep, my group has had a standing ban on owning livestock.
@@SodaPopBarbecue I'm betting on Trap Detector... Send it down a corridor and if it doesn't trip a trap or get jumped by a monster, the corridor is safe... 😄😁😆😅😂🤣
I actually had an evil character that was implemented pretty well. It was a different setting (Modern world but with magic, mystery, and time collapsing so that different eras are colliding together). We had a party of three and my friends were playing as classical elf archer and a huge beast-hybrid who could create real items from drawings and they both were chaotic-good. Meanwhile, my character was a lawful-evil dark slime controlling a plague doctor costume. They had some special abilities such as taking a "mind" of any shape they take: if they wear a doctor's costume - they want to heal and research, if they wear armour - they want to fight, and if they happen to get a shape of, I dunno, a potato, they would behave like a potato. But when this thing loses any shape... it becomes a huge abomination of dark slime and teeth that mindlessly attacks and devours everyone around without discriminating, so one of the huge parts of the gameplay was to keep my costume safe to protect the allies. They also were insanely vulnerable to any light and fire and had the ability to learn the abilities of any dead creatures by dissecting their corpses to tiny bits and researching them deep to the cell level. As a result, they had a very simple goal: to grasp the ultimate knowledge of living nature... and they needed tons and tons of corpses for it. And yet, I balanced the creature in such a way so that it simply couldn't be a murder hobo or a betrayer by making it incredibly weak physically when having a form. Since it was a bunch of slime operating a humanoid costume, it didn't have any bones or serious force to move so basically even a child could push them away and one flaming spark could annihilate them in seconds. As a result, they really needed their comrades as they couldn't survive without them. And of course, a creature actively seeking the death of others and not understanding human morals caused some serious problems with authorities so they needed help with it, too.
@MoonDrip@@3rdCharcoal Thank you, it's been a blast to play them and convince my team to avoid any brightly lighted places while also trying to inspire them to kill someone secretly... Can't wait to return to that campaign :D
@@Reginald_Ritmo Well, it's a brand new system developed by me and my colleagues. It's based on the Backrooms (and no, we started it long before it became mainstream) but we focus more on using the levels of the world as puzzles - there's always so much to explore. We're going to publish the rulebook for it pretty soon but unfortunately, there's no English version yet.
i think it's important to know that the evil alignment can simply mean someone is selfish, or uncaring, not that they're genuinely a terrible person or are MANIACALLY evil. i played in a campaign with an evil-aligned character who basically just didn't care about anyone but himself and his boyfriend who lived in the forest (log cabin, wilderness-y guy). he wanted to adventure primarily because he was bored, and ended up being sucked into our group's conspiracy to overthrow the tyrannical government (the player joined the group part-way through the campaign). a particularly impactful scene was when a village just outside the woods where the character's lover lived had been set on fire. this character tries to run away from the scene to go find and check on his lover, but my character stopped him and I had possibly my greatest improvised speech ever. summarized: "so what, you only help people close to you, and everyone else can burn? I wonder what your friend in the woods would say if he saw you right now? you're pathetic." the character silently turned around and came with us to help carry people out of the burning buildings, and over time began to change his ways, eventually becoming a great friend to the party and changing his alignment to good. personally i think it's a great way to write a character: evil-aligned person who either wants to redeem themselves or becomes willing to do so over time.
This. A lot of people underplay selflishness and empathy in their characters and play them as "good" purely because they do good deeds occasionally. Like no, treating other people like shit is evil, especially your own party. Hoarding loot and stealing from your group is evil (maybe neutral at best). You don't have to be a complete murderhobo to be considered evil
thats just most players. tbh this is why the dm should have a meta way to reward / punnish this kind of stuff. if you say that your charcter love halping peaple. but than steals from the poor baker, or is law abading .but then kills a sherif thats whants to quantion them. some real punshiment to there charcter mechanics wise should be in put
Regarding player characters fighting other PCs, I am in a game where one player got stuck with an ancestor ghost-thing that routinely tries to possess him. This made for some great and tense RP early on, but it wore the player down because they were unsure if the ancestor ghost would make another attempt again. So the DM worked out with the player how to send the character off on a high note: he got possessed one last time, and the BBGG (Big Badass Good Guy) that brought the party together and only rarely shows up when absolutely needed literally sent the possessed PC to the shadow realm, and that was that for the character… for now. He was a character that had a good heart and nature, but kept messing up or getting into awful situations because of that ancestor ghost, so narratively there’s still the slimmest chance at redemption for the poor guy with all the shite he’s had to endure, while not subjecting the party to constant possession attempts. The player is happier now and is gonna bring a new character to the table, one not constantly consumed by angst and possession attempts.
I'm a player, though I think everyone at the table agreed to the rule the DM made: DO NOT RIP OFF GENITALIA AND THEN PROCEED TO EAT IT No, I shall not elaborate.
@@skell6134 It was a one-shot that we (as a group agreed to), we all lacked a part of our souls after that one-shot, there are more weird anti-degeneracy rules made because of this one-shot, but this was the most memorable. PS: Yes, I know this is elaboration, but I did not give proper context to what led up to this rule being made (except the obvious).
@@Lordmewtwo151 BBEG was doing a monolgue, and a gremlin of a player (goblin rogue), decided to do a sneak attack on his dick, the while the BBEG was writhing on the ground the player decided to eat the severed penis to establish dominance.
I am amused that it is not specified that a character did this, so I like to imagine that a player just tore off his own dick and chowed down, traumatizing all witnesses.
I remember when going through a shop, and before buying anything my DM explained he banned buying a bunch of candles at once because a previous player a long time ago found a way to exploit candles to god hood levels of over powered. I tried to ask what it was but told me: "NO! I don't want you to destroy some other DM's game!" Considering the other stuff we did and how he's only shown mild disappointment but lets keep going with it, him being that serious about not buying a bunch of candles meant something. So to this day, I know that candles are super cheap and in large quantities can be overpowered, but I have no idea how.
I played an evil character once. He was fun. The trick is to, as you said in the vid, have the same goal as the party for selfish reasons. My evil character was a goblin who, due to events that transpired in a previous game with another of my characters, was forced to have to EARN his shinies. He was cursed to never be able to steal and so the only way he could get his hands on shinies was to help humans somehow and hope they would pay him. The thing is that he didn't care who he was helping, why he was helping them or what he was doing to help them. So he found a party of adventurers and since he was a rogue, he was helping them by doing "The Poke-Poke". He didn't care to remember anyone's names that he traveled with. He didn't care what the party was doing. He would just get excited when people would raise their voices because as long as he helped the party fight whoever was mad at them and they shared their gold with him, he was earning his shinies just as the curse made him.
Another spin on it is having the evil character be more of an anti-hero. Out to do good in the world but having no problems with doing reprehensible things to get the results. Elder god needs a child breed specifically for a ritual for them to inhabit to enslave the world? Instead of trying to rescue the kid and protect them until the time of the ritual passes, kill the kid in a way that makes it very hard to bring them back in time for the ritual.
Sex stuff in an RPG is only okay if EVERYONE at the table is into it, and generally, it's best if the game is upfront about that from the start. I actually got in trouble with a player because I was going to have a bait and switch. (Looks like sex, turns out to be a spy who is going to brief him) And the guy wanted to fade to black a BIT too soon.
So, my evil character story? One of the players wanted to betray the party. I arranged it all with her, she was ready... Only she decided to, before the betrayal, have the character be an ABOSLUTE jackass. Just...spend the entire time grumbling all but going "You'll pay! You'll all pay." And being standoffish, rude, and a jerk. ...I told her I was killing the plan. She'd overplayed it.
One of the best inventions I've ever seen is the X card. By all means, be upfront about where the boundaries are at game start, and make sure everyone is okay with those boundaries before continuing. Then, hand everyone a card with an X on it (either real or hypothetical, such as a safeword, or both). Someone is uncomfortable in the middle of a scene? Hold up or trigger the card, and the scene IMMEDIATELY wraps up, with a synopsis only if absolutely necessary. Otherwise, by all means keep going! (Edit: alternatively, since so many games are online nowadays, if the uncomfortable person is not directly involved, fade to black immediately and go through the rest of the scene with only the relevant characters sometime AFTER the session ends.) Anything _more_ restrictive than that, such as "nobody should do sexual themes, ever," is IMO closed-minded. I've been in games where all players have bern onboard with sexual themes, and it's been amazing because we're interested in doing so in a mature fashion. (It helps that we're all in our 30s and 40s now.) But everyone MUST be okay with it first.
@@myboatforacar reminds me of one of the stories in Rippers' "have you ever insta-quit a campaign?" videos... the crazy DM starts describing, in detail, how the PC is getting gang-raped, IN THE SECOND TURN OF THE FIRST FIGHT... yes, SHE walked out immediately.
@@ericb3157 Yeah. Had a friend who went through a similar experience and was traumatized tor life. :( Good on her for walking out. Of course, the weakness of the X card is that everyone has to be on board with it... but I still think it's a good way to approach things.
I absolutely love playing evil characters that make their evil very subtle and hidden from the party I'm not disrupting the party, no, it just happens that our goals align in a strange way and many of the characters in the party don't mind messing around with evil things The dynamic just works I can't wait to see how they'll react once it's finally revealed Here's hoping I don't get caught before the grand reveal
On playing the same character multiple times: I've played the same character in three different campaigns: a drunken master monk who pretends to be a lush but actually is a spy (after all, who pays attention to the drunken fool in the corner?). The thing is, all three of those attempts the campaign ended (or I left the campaign) by level 3. He ended up a little different in each try mostly due to the interactions between the characters and the players but background/stats he was completely the same. I thought the idea was so interesting that I just wanted to keep trying to see where he would go. On evil characters: I saw a 'how to understand alignment' video somewhere that basically defined evil as 'enjoys the suffering of others' and that's stuck with me as my guide post for what to declare as 'evil'. On the other hand, if you have mature players you know well and are willing to make characters who have a reason to work with the party and not just be an ass, it can be quite the interesting time. There's a while Pathfinder Adventure Path that's centered around an evil party. Really want to play that with a good group of players one day.
For me, I also see 'evil' as selfish and self serving. So, a NE character would travel with the party because strength in numbers but won't share his side of the spoils. Helps save other PCs because if they don't, nobody will travel with them leaving them vulnerable. Etc etc.
It’s fine when it’s basically an incomplete cataract being reattempted, but it’s pretty bad when it’s the constantly reuse of like 3 characters. There was someone in a few of my group’s campaigns and I still see it happening in outside ones where he would play the same 3 OCs over and over. I can understand a comfort zone, but I really don’t the see the fun of it when you just keep playing the same 3 people with no deviation, not even a name change or a personality change, only the class and backstory to fit the campaign
A great way to see how evil good and even neutral characters can work together really well in a party together is watching the Oxventure D&D campaign from the insane folks at outside xbox youtube channel, Their evil warlock is one of my favorite characters.
I had an evil character who's main motivation was acquiring power over others. Halfway through the campaign i had to retire that character. The Dm allowed them to set up shop as a tavern keeper who secretly at first, ran an information hub. Later we were playing in the same setting with new characters and my old character was one of the "optional benefactor NPCs" It was a cool call back.
As a GM for Warhammer fantasy and Warhammer 40k rogue trader campaigns it's hard to exclude certain grim dark elements. Especially when you start involving chaos forces like Slaanesh that have very torturous and overtly creepy and sexual overtone.
My GM was sick of a player who had a history of seducing problems away, and she would be playing a bard in the new campaign. As a response, prior to session 1, the GM wrote an entire flowchart for how to calculate the DC of the Diplomacy check (Pathfinder), including sexuality, marital status, and ultimately leading to a percentile die roll. The player dropped out of the campaign early on, so we never got to use it, but it was an impressive level of effort.
Hulk Hogan voice brings me some nostalgia in the form of my most memorable 5e character: Briken Bloodmist. Briken was a massive tiefling barbarian in a nice suit that fought using unarmed combat 99% of the time, and flavor-wise I decided that he's a demon that works for contract when he's not tending to his flower garden in hell. First session, first roll of the game he nat 20'd an unarmed attack roll to pimp slap two zombies out the window of a run-down mansion.
My variant winged Teifling, who is a wizard, got balanced by situations where having wings weren’t always the best solutions. Such as the earth crumbling down into the cavern of a sunken city in the middle of a salten desert. I could only help lighter party members, which is pretty much me.
It is odd to me that so many DMs are against sex in dnd. Maybe it's because the only tables I've ever played at are me and my friends, who all know each others boundaries pretty well; I can certainly imagine it being weird with strangers I guess
From experience, a lot of players think s*x immediately allows them to go off on certain characters and uh- assault them. It's horrible and I've banned it ever sincve that shit happened cause it's incredibly wrong to have.
Kind of related, I played an LE (originally CG) Fighter/Cleric in Adventurers League, he is lvl 20 and basically completely endgame with legendary gear, his own ship and exotic mounts. He was always gruff but tried to help whom ever was in need, regardless of danger (city watch background) in his CG days, before he was transformed into a yuan-ti and turned LE. I played it so he didn't care anymore for random people and the only thing that mattered to him was his mission/goal without regard for consequences (insanity acquired through the ritual) and the party, since they were his best bet to further increase his power and wealth. The party likes him and he even regularly explicitly protected the female warlock in the party because they became friends before. In short, evil does not mean be an a**hole murderhobo and can be played well :).
It CAN yes, but it's just not worth the trouble as a DM. It won't provide more fun than a neutral/good character would bring, and the problems it causes are far greater than the potential fun it brings. At least that's my jist of it. Characters should get along for the most part and want to save the world for something other than themselves.
I just finished a homebrew campaign, with 3 PCs and me DMing. One of my players was WAY more experienced than the others, and knew how to build a ridiculously powerful character (at one point in the campaign, he beat a Balor in what was basically a 1v1 fight). He was a blade-singer wizard with a few levels in cleric. I ended up restricting which cleric spells he could learn. As I said to him: "I don't care that you're insanely powerful...I care that you are so much more insanely powerful than everyone else." Fortunately, my group has nothing but mature, reasonable people in it, and the wizard completely understood. The other players thanked me for it.
I had a similar experience, except I was the munchkin. For context, it was a Star Wars campaign. My character didn't have to fight to solve situations. He had the skills to sabotage the enemy and achieve mission objectives all on his own. This unfortunately left nothing for everyone else at the table. The GM attempted to rein me in, but I was terrible and loaded my character with several tricks to bypass certain obstacles, and create unique solutions. Fortunately, my fellow players verbally smacked me on the head. I had my character settle into more of an "eyes in the sky" saboteur, but still pull out all stops if a plan took a dire turn for the worst.
My favorite evil character that started off neutral is raistlin from the Dragonlance novels. That's a perfect character who didn't intend to be evil at first but slowly converted.
One of my favourite quotes from Terry Pratchett's book Men at Arms... Something Vimes had learned as a young guard drifted up from memory. If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you're going to die. So they'll talk. They'll gloat. They'll watch you squirm. They'll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar. So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.
My party has a kentaur fighter with polearm master + sentinel feat and a gnome artificer with a magical shield. During battle, the gnome almost always rides on the kentaur's back. Last time they levelled up, the group asked if the gnome could take the mounted combatant feat, which has the following benefits: •You have advantage on melee attack rolls against unmounted creatures that are smaller than your mount. • You can force an attack targeted at your mount to target you instead. • If your mount is subjected to an effect that allows it to make a Dexterity save to take only half damage, it takes no damage if it succeeds and half damage if it fails. I thought about it but said no because it felt exploitative to me, and this murderous duo is already incredibly dangerous in combat.
Talking about evil characters, I had one once. Cleric of some evil deity with war, blood, and deception domains. He was more a trickster type, very charismatic and presented himself as a well-to-do servant of a more acceptable god, ehile behind closed doors he regularly took time to note down guard routes and structural weaknesses in buildings in the event his church was sent to destroy the place he was spying on. Then, after joining the party tasked with delivering a set of daggers to a king, they basically got time warped backward a few hundred years because plot and were captured in these cages without their weapons. Naturally, since his focus is kept hidden, he still had it, and helped the mostly good party escape because he stood no chance alone trying to escape. It all culminated in them being stopped by the chief of these furry goblinoid things and finding out they worshipped the same god as he. Taking the opportunity, he turned coat and sided up to the Chief- only to grab him from being with a flatfooted Inflict Wounds for massive damage, that ended up instantly killing the chief. He knew these pathetic creatures were just that, pathetic- and that he needed to stick with the party for now until they could sort things out. So he told the goblin things to retrieve the party's gear lest they be judged 'unworthy' in their god's eyes, got their things back, and left the clan with instructions on how to properly worship their god before leaving. After all, he was no leader, he was a tool, a knife to be stuck into one important piece in the wheel of society to bring it crashing down. He was fun. Cruel but pleasant towards the party. Took healing spells to sell his whole 'holy priest' image, kept the party going, and was an amazing face. Never actually betrayed the party, either- every time he did it, which was rare, he never hurt the party and usually used it to do something he couldn't with them by their side, before going back for them.
The "no evil characters" reminded me of the first campaign I played. Was with my friend group, and the dm had apparently played in college and wanted us to give it a shot. We all agreed to do an evil campaign, since the dm suggested it. Didn't really think about it at the time, but the fact that one of the players chose a lawful good paladin and the dm didn't stop that should have been a sign things were going to be a bit off the rails. Long story short, my second character (first one died 5 minutes into my second session) ended up being the only one to follow any kind of "evil" story, and after months of playing my character stayed with the intended story while the rest of the group split to join following the paladins God. One massive pvp fight later, with an npc on my side because they were part of this moment when we were supposed to follow the evil God's patron and the rest just noted out, and I'm making a new character again and we're off on whatever the dm could throw together for the derailed campaign. 2 or 3 sessions later the campaign ended with a total party wipe
Just found this page about a day ago and love the content, and tbh its given me some great, fun (albeit devious) ideas abt what to do with DMing, but HOW to DM as well (brand new and literally just DMing for my kids). I especially love and appreciate the positive messages at the end though. It's always good to see putting positivity into the world.
My original DM - Vet - had a rule - no 3rd-party or homebrewed races or subclasses, as he didn't want to deal with any over-powered issues. Only issue I had with this rule was that he only had the Core Rule Books - PHB, MM, DMG - and few had anything else. Then came the Celestial Incident, which you (Mr. Ripper) were nice enough to show, wherein I brought in XGtE, because, he also had, as a rule, bring in an official book, and he'd allow it. My current DM - Horse Trainer - currently has a "No" stance on Flying Races, but I think I could help get this allowed with saying that Flight comes at say Level 3. He also had an issue about Custom Origin's swapping of Stats and such around, as he felt that it could make a Min-Maxed character, to say nothing about some hesitancy with the new/revised races since Tasha's release, saying that it basically got rid of culture. Thankfully, he understands that it's a way in which a character could be made without making them weaker than normal characters in a class or having them pigeonholed into certain classes.
@@tylerhorn3712 1. I'm not a dinosaur 2. No 3. What comment do you think you're replying to? Cuz I said to take care and be safe and you said women take advantage of men.
@@FAFO.K7NG Generally end up trolling on UA-cam tbh. Don't feel like rewatching to explain it so just assume I'm being a dick to get a rise out of you.
there is a 3rd party class called Mysterial, that when RAW, gives you access to all fey feats regardless of race, as well as all fey spells and 6 bonus attribute points every level. while I don't ban it from every game, as I tend to run very high-powered games, I ban it from more than one, and I have zero issue doing so.
Really? Why ban it? If it were me, I'd just adjust the fights the party faced to be a bit more difficult, and/or include more enemies/situations that would prevent the party from staying grouped up in the cleric's auras.
@@themetalone7739 it just gets too much too quickly. 300ft darkvision that can be shared with the rest of the party is fine but there’s a reason why v.human and satyr don’t get darkvision. Then there’s the channel divinity 1d6 + half cleric level doesn’t sound like much but that’s about 4 temp hp at this level but that’s 4 each turn a goblin deals like 7 per attack so it effectively gives them resistance to the damage.
I had an NPC named "Brother Rocky" that was basically a combination of several wrestlers. He had Brock Lesnar's body with Randy Savage's head, wore a fancy robe like Ric Flair with a big gold-plated belt around his waist, and he talked like Hulk Hogan. He was a cleric that used wrestling moves when casting touch-range spells, so when he casts Cure Wounds its a Flair-style body chop or a big slap across the face like The Rock's "smackdown" finisher, Inflict Wounds is a submission hold of some kind, etc. The players loved him and were sad when they had to leave the town he was in because they wouldn't get to visit him anymore.
This was a good video mentioning several points i have to rethink for my game too. Also listening to you trying to read the word simulacrum made me giggle every time because you didn't get it right once. Reminds me of Toni from T&RP podcast and "ambulance"
Going to try to summarize the first campaign I played in as a player. It became a rather large party as we had many people including myself want to play for the first time, we did have some more experienced PCs. Had a range of PCs created, half elf ranger, human paladin, halfling rouge, two elf druid twins (seemed to want to just collaborate on their chars), half elf druid and my trifling cleric. Backstory to the campaign was that the "good" races and "evil" races had completed a long standing war and were now at a time of peace but the evil ones didn't want to keep it that way. As Tieflings were phrased in this homebrew setting as evil, my character was a medic within the evil army, seeing his brothers in arms animated as undead he eventually left the army to start wandering around to find himself. This is what lead him to eventually become a cleric of a being that would help him combat the undead, the Raven Queen as God and became a grave cleric. My character made it a point to seek out and destroy anything that would defy the natural cycle of life and death, which the rest of the party was all for. This majorly derailed the intended campaign because the main forces we were supposed to face was Demons rather than Liches, DM just had to swap out some of the main baddies which wasn't anything to crazy. But after finding a hidden necromancer layer, that was only found after a handful of high rolls and nat 20s, it was cemented that we would seek out and destroy the Liches.
I banned Chaotic Neutral characters in my good campaign's. The main reason being that they were often either unproductive or just playing Evil but claiming it was to bring the party closer to Neutral.
One of my favorite interpretations of what an Evil PC in D&D could and should be is Haytham Kenway from Assassin's Creed III. You start the game introduced to this character, going about the usual Assassin business, and nothing is out of the ordinary from what you know of the "Good" faction. Sure, he kills people, but that's his job. It's only until after getting to know a bit about this character, with hints of his motivations along the way, that you find out he works for the other side. From then on, you play as his estranged son, and Haytham later rejoins the game as the main antagonist to the overall story, leader of the faction that his son opposes. At times they are driven to working together for common goals, but their ideals still clash, and they squabble about their personal ideological differences. It really shows that a character can be "Evil" while still being level-headed, cunning, and just. Good vs Evil is not Justice vs Bloodlust. Lawful vs Chaotic is not Written Law vs Destroy the World and Neutral is not I Do Whatever I Want
I wanted to play a NE Deathmaster/Palemaster for a long time. The backstory was that it was a human that had 2 older sisters that were vampires. The PC would capture/charm/purchase (whatever fit the campaign best) people and send them to their sisters as food/thralls. Basically getting groceries for their family. Instead of becoming a vampire though, they were aiming higher and wanted to be a lich. They would use spells to disguise their undead minions though so they werent discovered as easily. Depending on how the story went, they might be the 'runt' of the family and wants to prove they are better, by becoming more powerful than their family, or they could just be doing it as way to elevate their family in society.
I think the best part of these videos is often the bits behind the curtain at the end of each one. They're always so incredibly sweet. I don't know how I missed this one until now, but the end this time made me tear up a little. Thank you for being so welcoming in your videos and community. I really needed that today.
My friend is currently running a kenku who’s had basically everything ripped from them and constantly getting rolled by life to the point of near emotional muteness.
One party I was in had an evil character. He was a necromancer, I don't remember the details of the his build, but as a CHA caster, he was able to keep the good party members convinced he wasn't doing any nefarious deeds, even after we straight up toppled the government structure in the area. Having players know what he was doing, but having to not meta-game it was a blast.
This was an Evil GM Moment for me and I loved it: The players had just finished clearing out a bandit hideout in the sewers of a town. While investigating the crates and barrels, I described the Goliath Barbarian as finding "a small leather pouch, with a golden clasp emblazoned with a star snapped shut. The pouch feels as if there are contents, and is about the size of a deck of Tarot Cards." The players immediately started freaking out. For obvious reasons. But, no, I am not about to give a party of seven LEVEL TWO PLAYERS the Deck of Kany Things.
I played a Tefling draconic sorcerer. We were playing a homebrew campaign and were having a lot of fun. We had a paladin, rouge, ranger, and a monk with me in the party. My character started reading about undead powers from a book he found in a wizards keep. So he called apon The Great Pazuz to trade his draconic ancestry and make him a wizard school of necromancy. His wish was granted. Now the group was mostly lawful good. So raising undead was definitely looked down on. But that didn't stop my guy from making Hickory, Dikory, and Doc whenever he could. His three gouls with the create undead spell. This party also did not get along at all. We would often infight with each other even while in combat. It was all in game. We all were friends and loved the fact none of us could stand the others. But we all needed each other to survive till the end. At the end of the campaign we found out my character was a son of Orcus God of undead and my father wanted me to join him by his side. So I betrayed the party and made it my mission to kill our party's paladin and make him my undead captain of my hord. Was going to cast finger of death on him. It was fun playing an evil character among good.
I've lost track of the youtube channel, but one of the really good D&D channels recommended Jayne Cobb from Firefly as an excellent example of an interesting evil character. He usually bans evil PCs in his campaign because he's just sick of the crap. But if a player came to him and said "I want to play a character that's like Jayne Cobb" he would be all for it. This is the channel that has regular skits where he plays every person at the table, and he's both hilarious and informative. If anyone here knows the channel, please help me find it again!
Hey, long time lurker first time commenter. I GM Pathfinder 1e for a bunch of friends (as well as a bunch of one page ttrpgs but that's a different story). Personally, the only thing I ban from my tables are characters playing witches and shamans. I've allowed basically everything else. Homebrew? sure, within reason. Massive wild multiclassing? bring it on. Custom magical weapons? if you can figure out the in game costs and acquire that money, have it. But witches and shamans have mechanics that take up too much time for me, personally, and i'm already bad at keeping track of things (I have like, 4 whiteboards and we play online).
Had my player's Homebrew fire based barbarian worship Kossuth. None of the players questioned his obsession with fire and burning bodies, nor did they ever ask him about his warship. Why he was drinking dragon's blood even though it could kill him. They didn't even questioned his slow mutation to something more dragon then human, red mutations at that. Well once he drank the big bad Shadow dragon's blood, it was time to cast himself into the forever burning pit of fire made from a magical nuke. It was made from the dwarfs, to seal a huge rat man hole. That was the last part of the ritual to help release a part of Kossuth into him self, becoming a red greatworm dragon. So they get a new party member, and a new BBG.
Was playing in a campaign that was getting fairly high level when my female blade bard (2nd Ed bard handbook kit) died while the party was in the underdark. I had a chaotic neutral with evil tendencies 1/2 drow fighter thief from previous campaign run by the DM who was about the same levels as the party and so was allowed to bring him in. He came in an hour or so after the bard’s demise; about 3 days game time. He was trying to get out of the underdark as well so they teamed up and eventually got out and by that time he had become invested in the ending of the BBEG as well. He was to become a helpful NPC with contacts, but the bard failed the resurrection check. He never betrayed the party but he definitely did some evil crap behind their backs. Best example is that he followed and eliminated the bards two followers for equipment, money, and prevent them from being used against the party. So yes I think evil can be used in a campaign but have to be played right.
i soft-banned the warlock class and turned it into a prestige system to award characters for completing difficult social encounters against powerful creatures, or otherwise negotiating pacts of otherworldly power. because the class itself already stands apart from literally every other class in the game due to pact magic, a diverse array of patrons for almost any possible alignment, and build-a-class invocations, it can slot really nicely on top of basically any class, including martials. to further separate it from the "core" classes, you can't gain levels in the class through experience or milestone, only by completing specific quests assigned to you by your patron. you also don't gain any hit points, feats, or ASIs from leveling in the class, keeping you otherwise on par with the rest of the party (who has to deal with a level cap of 10). it really is just the boons granted to you by your patron, nothing else. you can also, of course, have those boons revoked should you at any point cross your patron (how much you lose depends on how merciful they are and how severe your betrayal)
Me and my crew were doing a homebrew campaign and had quite possibly the most humorous solution to a problem that I have ever encountered… My crew was tasked with the mission of intercepting an unknown magical item that was being shipped to an enemy city, well we figured the best way for us to go about preventing its entry was to have half of our crew go up into the city and protect the gate while me and my companions would stay in a ship and guard the port, one of my team members had forged documents to make us, by all appearances, be merchants it worked enough to get us into the city but it failed to prevent the enemy shipment (Who rolled a nat 20 on perception) from seeing us and no sooner had they saw us then they began to flee at superhuman speeds away from the city the magic item was a feather that granted remarkable speed to anyone close to it. This was intended to be a setback by the dm, but we had other plans. My friend (who was in the ship) upon seeing that they began to flee used a fully charged max level spell to summon two frog familiars to pull our ship, our wizard had a unique ability to change one letter of any of his spells and if it makes a real word then the spell would take the effects of the new title, given this he cast FLIGHTBEAM (originally light beam) onto our giant frogs causing the unique spectacle of a flying boat being charioted by two, giant, super frogs who were able to help us catch the fleeing troop. In the end we were able to easily outmatch the carefully handcrafted leader (who wielding the feather had super speed) by having our wizard throw our dragonborn unto the air and with some frost gloves he had equipped freeze the leader in a block of ice while he was temporarily submerged in the ocean a very creative solution by by team and a great lesson on limiting the power of spells you give your players.
Actually, I had a funny moment regarding torture. The party was going to crack a Simic scientist for information regarding their recent arrival to the Material Plane and the monster in the lake. But Coins, the Kenku got a low roll and I played it that he had forgot to wake him after he was KOd. So the party ended up using him as bait for the Cat 2 Krasis.
PVP. The closest my party has ever come to any sort of PVP was they were sent to check in on an NPC who wound up being a PC (long story). They wanted to bring Macreadus to Copper so that they’d get paid for checking up on him and Macreadus refused to meet with Copper (backstory reasons). The wizard was about to cast Hold Person on him when he pulled out a letter and did some artificer tinkering to so Copper would know it was real and from him. And that’s the closest I’ll ever let it come unless it’s a whole big plot thing (I.e. 2 PC’s are heirs to a kingdom and they both know betrayal is on the table). Another thing banned is torture. The party did some unsavory things to a captured Duergar and after that I basically said, “ok so we’re gonna have some rolls and some ‘basically they say xyz.’” There’s never really a reason to let your PC’s RP out torturing a character. Also a small red flag (would never refuse a player over it, but it flags my attention) is when someone wants to play some variant of Elf but they’re like 20 years old. 20 is to elves what like 5 is to humans. Elves aren’t adults until around 100, so no, you’re not playing the elvin equivalent of a 5 year old. I’ve only run into it twice, but 1 was a really bad problem player I wound up kicking.
imagine experiencing decades and decades of life within this world, living through years of events, and still only grasping for the same mental development as an 8-year old. A+ for the racebuilding
@@24601st oh ok gotcha! Yeah, if it’s a small change that’s comedic/dramatic I may allow it (one of the first PC’s I ever ran for was “Marwaan the Tall”, a freakishly tall dwarf- and by that, I mean like 5’5”).
On the subject of evil player at one point our gm tried to turn sides and make a big reveal and the group just kinda said no. The person we were suppose to be rescuing had just died so our mission failed in a way. But there was still this large demonic force to fight who used to be possessing our ally to get to said character. Instead of avenging that guy we all agreed it would be better to change our alignments (which was true neutral to neutral evil). We had some of the best convincing rolls of our game and suddenly we were gonna be fighting the main boss with an eldrich entity on our side
"safety tools", as a DM, I've found they tend to limit communication rather than aid in it. lose expectations are set in the first session and campaign announcement with the understanding that players should be comfortable enough to call a time out and speak up if the scenario or another's actions are making them uncomfortable. The vast majority of the time however they can do something in character to pull it back. By gamifying or making a worksheet of it, it paradoxically tends to exacerbate the problem leading to players dwelling on it rather than moving on similar to what happens when you become aware of your breathing and blinking.
Every so often I and my friend take over for our forever DM, he does play on different days as just a player but when we all get together he's usually the DM. Now he loves playing Rogues and anything that pairs well with a rogue, he made the mistake of telling us his exploits so he is now banned from being a rogue or/ and he is not allowed to make another class act like a rogue. He just gets into too much mischief and can harass the party pretty badly.
I made an evil character myself one time, a while ago. But they weren't like some horrible monster, they were just very sadistic to bad guys. For context, he was a ranger who specialized in medical practice. His story was that he was a physician and acupuncturist (that comes into play later). He was lawful evil, he helped the party, and he took joy in the combat and bloodshed, but he never went out of his way to stir up trouble. The sadistic side mainly came out during interrogations, He would purposefully botch an acupuncture with an enemy to make them spill, I never described the pain and gross stuff, I just said I botched it and asked my questions. Making an evil character who can't mesh well in a campaign is just stupid and annoying, nobody actually has fun because you get yelled at for screwing things up, and the party has to babysit you constantly.
How to keep your party on track? The DM gets a one per session to roll a unexpected event to guide the party back on Track Ex: A Nat 20 the DM can say the party suddenly got a tingle in their brain marrow that THIS is not what they where supposed to do and head to the nearest location to continue the original quest. A Nat 1. A Duck is trying to pass the party but get yeeted by (insert Player) because it was in their way. But every time this player yeeted a duck, two more would show up. (It’s up to the DM on how far they will go with this, )
Know what, posting an evil char I have for the va here; Lawful Evil, Gold Shadow Dragon in locked in a weakned human form (Reflavored Amythest Dragonborn/Gold Dragon Sorcerer/Undead Warlock). Their goal, is to fight the BBEG and restore themselves to full power. Every Level that gave them a feat she’d regain some of their old powers or abilities (like flight, stronger scales, etc.) They’d eventually help the party beat the BBEG, thank the party, and if they choose to not let this vile creature escape, they’d have a second boss fight right after. But every turn I’d roll a d20 to see if they just, stop and surrenders to their former comrades since they’d grow an attachment, by which point they’d be wavering on Lawful Neutral.
I am personally no longer allowed to play cleric with a certain group. The backstory: Our group choose to start our campaign over after a couple players left for one reason or another. I was the only one who didn't want to. I had really grown attached to my current character (a fighter bugbear who was a big softy and just wanted friends). I asked if I could just use him and keep his levels (wasn't high. Like lvl 4 or 5), and the other players could start with lvl 5 characters as well. Everyone agreed to that so I didn't make a new character. I didn't expect to keep loot or found gear. 1 day before we start our new campaign the DM asks me why I have not created a new character. I reminded them that I was going to keep playing my bugbear. DM said they and the rest of the party changed their minds and wanted everyone to make new lvl 1 characters. I was pissed. So I volunteered to be the cleric after I found out no one else choose a character with healing abilities (their class may have allowed it but they didn't go that route). So I made a cleric with no healing spells who was also a kenku which made communicating tricky at best. For other reasons I am also no longer allowed to play a kenku with this group.
That one at the end really spoke to me. I like to play evil characters - not to be a murder hobo or to betray the party. In fact, I don't even like PvP. I just find evil characters to be infinitely more interesting than good or neutral characters. Like, what drove them to be that way? And how can I make it work in a game that is cooperative? So many good questions, so very few opportunities to answer them, unfortunately.
On Evil PCs, Seth Skorakowsky has a great video on how to make evil PCs work. Basically evil people who do good for selfish reasons. One fine example was Jayne Cobb in Firefly
I wasn't the DM in this case, but I was the reason that something was banned. I made the DM ban the word "euphemism" at the table because I kept asking if things people said were euphemisms. Like, it started off as a genuine question in character. Them (a gunslinger): "I like to polish my gun nightly." Me (a formerly seclusive rogue): "Is that a euphemism?" Then it started getting out of character. Them: *pulling out the Rod of Cancellation* "I pull out the Rod and touch it to the artifact." Me: "Is that a euphemism." It got some laughs, and it was fun to see how many times someone said something that could be misconstrued. It got to the point that everyone got in on it and it slowed the game down, so we were no longer allowed to ask if things were euphemisms. Totally understandable and fair. The worst part though: I swear the DM started making double entendres intentionally just to try to get one of us (probably me) to mess up.
Wishes in my setting would be of the Literal Genie variety. Exact words are taken into account, and if the word "and" is used, you only get what you said before the word "and", unless you had two Wishes in which case you spend both.
I banned one race from my pathfinder 1e game. Drow nobles. Drow are a strong race with a ton of abilities in pathfinder, like spell resistance, a few spell like abilities, weapon proficiencies, the standard elf immunities, and a couple other things. Drow nobles have everything Drow have except they also have, if I remember correctly, way higher stat bonuses (+4 Dex, +2 to Int, Wis, Cha and I think a -2 to con), their spell resistance is DOUBLED, And they gain like 9 more spell like abilities, and many of them go from once a day to at will.
I’m currently running Rime of the Frost Maiden and one of the player characters is an evil Triton real estate agent. He was sent by his agency to figure out what is up with this eternal winter and fix it so that the agency can move foreword with their plan to flood the Icewind Dale and sell the newly underwater housing to tritons and other aquatic species. All that to say that evil tends to be pretty great if you’re using the sort of schemes a silver age comic villain would.
Fun story about playing evil characters: I had played an evil character for a campaign, in which the final “villain” was a organization who wanted to take over the world. There was one fact that the rest of the party didn’t realize, in that the org leader was actually a good guy aiming to unite nations for prosperity. So that’s where I come in, playing a parasite homebrew race. The character I played was the former ruler of the organization. After being knocked from power this character named Husk worked to manipulate the party into killing the org leader so they could continue world domination. So over countless sessions we beat the final boss, hurray. Aaaand then epilogue(not exactly played out but narrated), where we realized Husk(who became a nature deity after the prior battle) worked to essentially brainwash the world into a hivemind in which they hold total control, and are potentially a boss raid planned out for players of 2 seperate campaigns from the dm who hosted it TLDR I manipulated the entire party into a bad end and became a raid boss
To the last story: Chaotic Evil character based off of Zaeed Massani from Mass Effect. All I have to say. An egoistic, "end justifies the means", vengence consumed mercenary with zero regard for collateral damage and innocent bystanders. Still a loyal asset to the party, but bad to the bone.
One DM banned me from being an arsonist. I would catch houses and inns on fire sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident by playing with fire in my room. The party members took a long time to figure it out in game bc they rolled bad at investigation and perception. The DM got frustrated at my characters secret obsession messing with the campaign. It wasn't untill I suggested using fire or burning structures with enemies too many times that the party out two and two together and turned me in for all my crimes after getting a confession. I was to be executed but the party members took into account all the good stuff I did in helping stop vampire infestation, rescued kidnapped folks ECT. I spent the rest of my life in prison but put to labor. I was banned from ever playing an arsonist again. I just enjoyed playing someone with a deep flaw.
For wrath and glory we have barred using the psychic power 'grav warp'. There is only so many times you can describe the boss de jure splatting against the floor at terminal velocity before it gets boring.
I have some strict limits on PC/NPC relationships, because of what happened in a campaign I was playing in. Cool story concept, but it was purely online via discord and dnd beyond, with 7-8 players too many. DM was cool tho, just bit off a bit more than he could chew with this one. Other party member, who I'm gonna refer to as "Player", took things in a weird direction and way too far with an NPC (he's actually kinda like this irl too, and I no longer associate with said player). Player (human fighter) wanted to get some info out of one of the bar maids in a town we were at, and is rolling really well on persuasion and insight. So well in fact, he rolled a f*ing 20 to sleep with her. DM let it slide since he rolled that high, and the rest of us thought it was a one night stand, DM included. The next day, after the party had a shared dream, this f*ckers first priority is to go back and HIT ON THE BAR MAID, cuz I guess he wanted to take this "relationship" further (yeah, further than it needed to). DM is trying to tell player (rp'ing as the bar maid) that that's not gonna happen. Player keeps pushing. Eventually another party member gets sick of it, and in character, walks up tells and player to "stop being a horny d*ckbag and help us figure this sh*t out." Player takes this personally, even outside of the game (like, he was ACTUALLY offended) Fight ensues, and lasted for a SINGLE round as player rolls a nat 1 to hit, and proceeds to get hit with a nat 20 mage fist from the other party member, and sent flying into the nearest wall. I threatened to get my Blood hunter into the mix, and Player eventually dropped the whole thing and moved on. TL;DR : 1st campaign session almost got derailed because one player couldn't keep his blasted hormones in check, and I refuse to let that happen to my campaigns.
I started this vid thinking it would be things like "lucky feat", and that is here, but I was surprised by the variety. I totally agreed with the torture and sexualization part; don't play that out, it gets creepy and uncomfortable. I totally wasn't expecting the Hulk Hogan voice. That one made me laugh and smile. As always, thanks for the recordings, and big thanks for the post story encouragement.
My personal favourite at our table is no oodies, 3/5 players have tried wearing it for warmth (room we play in is always super cold) and have fallen asleep so it got banned from the table. Rum is also banned
Back when we were just starting to figure out how D&D worked, we all misunderstood that 3rd level spells could be acquired by reaching level 3 in a given class. My little brother played a real problem character who was a wizard and thought that fireball was the solution to everything. Shamelessly giving in to that dumb stereotype. Not only did he try to cast firebolt at an enemy while everyone was in a cloud of noxious gas (He thought that because it was just a fire BOLT and not as powerful as a fireball, that they would be fine. And I as the DM had to tell him that it was a stupid idea that would kill everyone.), cast fireball on the branch that the bard was hanging on to for his life over a ravine, causing him to fall only surviving because we misunderstood what blade ward was, and directly attack the cleric with magic missile because she shattered into pieces the flying sword that he wanted to keep but was trying to kill them, but he would NOT under any circumstances ever want to give up his 8d6 fire damage at level 3. None of us knew that our magic level and our class level were 2 different things, but I knew that this was super unfair. So I tried to tell him very nicely that I was nerfing the damage of fireball down to 3d6 for this campaign, but he would not relent. We agued all day out of game until our mom said that he would go by my rules as the dungeon master or she wouldn't let him play. (Which is what I would've done, but she has those mom powers, you know?) Even after we found out that we were in fact wrong about the leveling system, fireball continued to be a problem. One campaign ended in disaster after he decided to cast fireball on a devourer that was standing right next to the other wizard. I decided to teach him a lesson and give him the consequences for his actions. The devourer, the other wizard, and the other wizards snake familiar were all ingulfed in the flame, which he should have known would happen since the other wizard had just casted burning hands on the devourer, (You know, requiring him to be close enough to touch it.) but apparently he "wasn't paying attention" to his teammates turns. The snake died, the other wizard was knocked unconscious, eaten by the devourer, pulled out of the devourer's corpse after it was killed, and carried back to a hospital where he woke up to hear his pet was burned to a crisp. We decided to end the campaign afterwards. But he still didn't stop. Just 2 days ago, his character (Jeff Hoxton, another human wizard.) almost killed himself in the first session of our Curse of Strahd campaign. He was inside the room of a house while a shadow had wrapped itself around him. HE TRIED TO CAST FIREBALL ON THE SHADOW THAT WAS IN THE EXACT SPOT THAT HE WAS STANDING!!! I legitimately had to tell him that if he casted fireball, he would not only hit himself, but the house would burn and he would die in the rubble, but he didn't listen! He tried to cast fireball regardless of what I had just warned him. I had the ghost that he had interacted with a little earlier cast counterspell, telling him she doesn't want him to burn down her house. Throughout the time we have played D&D together, I've had to either nerf this spell, or hold his hand so that he doesn't kill himself and everyone around him.
I've got a good Evil Character for you: Timble, the Red Mantis. A halfling baby lost their parents to a goblin raid and was adopted in secret by one of the soldiers. He grew up in secret, but one day the chief discovered him. The clan rallied against them and executed his adoptive parents too. In a rage, he cried out for vengeance and two curved blades shot out from the spilt blood. He passed out and awoke the next day to see the whole clan was dead by his hands. He followed a new instinct inside him and arrived at the Cult of the Mantis Queen, the assassin's guild for this world. There he made a new family, and he would do ANYTHING for them. I felt like Timble was a good example of an evil character because he was lawful evil. He would taunt other party members by hinting that their "righeous orders" had used the Mantis Assassins before, but he never looked down on them. He was ordered by his Queen to aid the party in aquiring a cursed sword to stop a demonic invasion. The first thing he did was swear to never harm another party member. When the paladin became corrupted by the cursed sword and attacked Timble for being 1/64th demon, that meant he could not attack back, only run away.
12:18 I also played the same character -my only character so far - however it was a sequel campaign and we jumped from like level 6 to 18-20 so I had all kinds of fun new toys to play with :3
My roommate/best friend has a chaotic evil warlock I’m letting her play in an upcoming campaign. Except, there are 2 things that make it a bit more complex than that. -He’s not really like, chaotic evil. He sure acts like he is, and he does have the criminal background, but it comes from covering up depression and nihilism. Basically his patron told him that the world he’s in isn’t “real” and that is was all fake. Fourth wall awareness, but from Nyarlathotep who wants you to feel bad. -He’s paired up with a lawful good paladin who is seeking to clear his name of murder (yeah he’s a thief and a mafia member, but he didn’t kill his lover). She’s also about the only thing he really cares about at all. So of course I’ll be exploiting that when the time comes. Also, I trust my friend to not make him a murder hobo. She’s not the type to find that fun or interesting and wouldn’t do that at my and the rest of the party’s expense.
Evil characters can be done right, but they certainly require more thought than the average murderhobo. There are many influential evil characters and "hero to villain" tropes to explore, heck, my favorite example of that is Arthas from Warcraft III. There is something very magical about a hero slowly getting twisted into the villain.
I know I have a character I'm currently playing that I'll likely try and play one day elsewhere if I can. Mostly because I originally built him in Pathfinder, moved to 5e, and had to change how his build worked due to mechanical differences (Natural Weapon abuse) only to learn I COULD do the Nat Weapon Abuse method in 5e. Oh well. And for evil, I remember I had one who was a Chaotic Evil assassin who just liked killing and making people suffer. On the upside of that kind of character, Adventurers get REWARDED for killing people! Plus she was a pupper (Dungeons and Doggies. Pomeranian Assassin) yes the entire point was to take what's usually used as an excuse to disrupt but do it WELL for once.
Flight is so easy to deal with in combat (flying target gets all the threat from ranged enemies) and it actually comes up super rarely in exploration/ puzzles. Hell just say that bridge is in a windy cavern and have them roll athletics or a str save to fly safely over.
I banned Daern's from my games, but not because it got exploited. I have had dungeons wiped and even some creative uses involving Daern's Instant Fortress. That being said, when the Bard tricks the owner of said magic item to speak its command word in a cave. I'm sure it isn't the only self inflicted TPK, but it was a glorious one. P.S. I once had a Dms wife ban the Dm from using Deniro and Pesci
Furries, Artificiers, Warforged, Silvery Barbs (in fact all Strixhaven content). Multiclassing: must retain any class taken for a MINIMUM of 3 levels or lose class features on a switch)
Polymorph into t-rex. Its just so devastatingly strong. I've had encounters just curb stomped by that thing. It makes other level 9 characters look like toddlers throwing a tantrum.
I have a rule restricting animal taming and befriending where, each wild animal my players try to tame has a DC of, 5+CreatureDC+X for taming an animal so it wont attack you, or 10+CreatureDC+X for befriending them as a pet. In both cases, X is a counter for how many pets they have plus how many they've tried to tame this session. I implimented it because in my last campaign they tried to tame almost everything and I wanted a set rule so I didn't have to keep coming up with DC's on the fly and it dissuades them from trying to tame everything since this way even a failure makes future potential pets harder.
An old manager of mine got banned from everything except a commoner, and somehow still won against the BBEG by getting the curse of the chicken with his bag of holding, pulling out a chicken about a quarter of the time, he abused this by dragging it on the beach, filling it with individual grains of sand. BBEG died via suffocation under chickens.(Edit) Side note, the mind control deck of many things stuff? A dm I played with once decided to basically force us to draw from one unless we could roll against drawing, whether we wanted to draw or not.
I have a lawful evil character ready to play. Her name is Froide L'hiver (quite literally cold winter in French) who is a winter eladrin and the heir to a noble family. Her mother died when she was young, leaving only her father to care for her. He was quickly shown to be psychologically abusive and always expected perfection from her, only for her to never be good enough. She was raised with the stereotypical noble values, making her fairly snobbish to practically everyone aside from other elves or nobility. Eventually the weight and pressure made her snap, vowing vengeance and destruction on everything that he ever built, starting her journey as a wizard to completely dismantle her own family name. If she ever meets her goal, I don't really know where to go with her, so I think it will be very interesting to see how the players interact, maybe warming her cold heart ever so slightly. Edit: grammar
One D&D game I'm in has the players creating a D&D adaptation of a character from an existing IP, like Goku from Dragonball, Garrus from Mass Effect, or Artorias from Dark Souls. Naturally, our DM has a list of characters he has explicitly banned, which includes such characters as Spongebob Squarepants, Garfield the cat, Pepsi-Man, and the Kid Cuisine Penguin.
I resource limit and restrict the Renegade subclass. To the unfamiliar its a subclass for fighters released in the Legends of Runeterra rulebook that was a collaboration with League of Legends, it's about using Hextech firearms and the flavour is neat if you're okay with it in your setting. The problem is the balancing. The two things that define this subclass is the _gunfighter form_ and _firearm upgrades_ One of the possible forms is a sniper form that allows you to make a singular shot with increased range that gets around the extra attack benefits lost by being restricted to a weapon with the loading property. The damage here is fairly balanced, capping at 6d10 + Dex Mod at 20th level, but you only get one so miss and nothing. No extra attempts like with a longbow. But then comes the firearm upgrades, at 5th level you can upgrade your weapon to have a double-barrel, you can now fire the shot twice. So thats a potential 12d10 + dex × 2. Thats some disgusting damage, but still kind of an all or nothing deal. Have you noticed by now that I haven't mentioned any restrictions on using either feature? Well they don't have one. You can do 12d10 + Dex × 2, every turn, and then you have action surge to do the same again. Being a ranged weapon, firearms work with Archery, and Sharpshooter. So that's another +20 potential damage, +40 with surge, with a positive modifier to hit. This subclass is busted, completely and entirely, and can be optimized at 6th level being a fighter with access to feats. So I limit the Sniper Form to being useable only proficiency bonus times per long rest. Oh and I forgot to mention that at 7th level their shots surpass immunity to piercing damage. Period.
On the subject of evil characters: I was talking to a friend of mine (a DM) about a character concept I had. He's a Tiefling cleric with a terminal illness that desperately want to extend his life by any means. The consequence of this is that he will end up being the party's healer and given his motivation isn't murderous. However, he is not above experimenting on the dead and dying hence a somewhat evil character.
Lmao why am I the dm for a tiefling bard/cleric with a terminal illness who’s a healer 😭 that’s so funny
That's not evil (yet), that's just morally grey.
I do not see evil in your character. Just someone desperate to live
So the reason my friend and I landed on evil is when the question of "what wouldn't he do to extend his life?" came up the answer was pretty much that he would do anything bar none. Not to say the character would revel in it but there really is no moral line he won't cross to get what he wants. Dark Sev's comment was pretty spot on with the "(yet)" as a lot of the evil alignment will come later should the opportunity present itself.
@@piketheknight2581 Neutral would probably work ? Maybe chaotic one(but not chaotic stupid)
My favorite character was evil, necromancer that believed in, what was effectifly post mortem community service. Because "Killing a bandit doesn't unburnt the town they destroyed, they deserve rest once they pay for their crime." Absolutely obsessed with burial rights and making sure the dead are put to rest outside of that though.
thats . thats just based(tbh from a spell list kind of veiw necromancy isnt the most evil school. enchatmant is
Interesting.
Didn't get a chance to play it but I had something similar planned for a lawful evil necromancer that ran a funeral home. The labor of the deceased was out towards burial fees and he would upsell things to families. The idea was thet he was a scummy guy but he paid his taxes, didn't do anything illegal and would want to protect the land because...well he just put in a new wing on his Villa so we can't have monsters running a muck or megalomaniac necromancer drawing attention from the church and the crown
A few notes on the “evil characters” discussion:
Evil characters can be so much fun. The murder hobo archetype has really ruined the alignment, and doesn’t do it justice. Evil characters don’t have to be constrained to “steal steal stab stab”.
Lawful evil characters can want the same things as a lawful good character, but with no qualms on how those goals are achieved. Quote Peacemaker; “I love peace, and I don’t care how many men, women and children I have to kill to get it.”
Neutral evil characters (obviously) fall between chaotic and lawful, half way between being purely self-concerned and wishing to impose their ideas on others. Perhaps they’ve decided to go adventuring solely for the wealth and fame that’s promised.
Chaotic evil can be the hardest to get right. People often interpret the alignment similar to the Joker; someone who steals and murders regularly without any qualms. However, I find this to be an edgy and quite boring interpretation. Think of the chaotic aspect as you would for a chaotic neutral character. They’re concerned only for their well being. However, while a chaotic neutral character may operate on the idea of “everyone do what they want, I don’t care”, a chaotic evil character would think more along the lines of “might makes right”. Chaotic neutral characters are just that - neutral. They’ll stay out of conflict that doesn’t concern them, and any harm that comes of it wasn’t out of malice. Chaotic evil characters know what they want and will step over anyone to get it.
Now, the most important part of play an evil character is making a _smart_ character. Will killing the shopkeep really be beneficial? Could you really take on all 30 town guards at once? People often forget that being selfish entails having a lot of care for your own well-being.
Now, be smart, have fun, and be evil!
Yeah my favorite evil character i played, only DM knew was a player so lawful good that it become evil.
He was not much about killing everyone, but he just push the laws to his limites.
Same rules for everyone. The 4 years old that "steal" a toy in a store should see his hand cuts as much as the young man doing for living.
Being fair was important and truth too, but only his truth matter. He did not bend it. A fact was a fact. He would never break the laws unless it is to give someone the punishment for his crime even if it was not is job.
It also forced my allies to respect the laws when they understand that law is law.
@@akki40000 The Knight Templar archetype. That's also quite hard to pull off successfully, because it can very easily devolve into the Lawful Stupid territory, but can be very rewarding if done right and everyone is on board with the concept.
Am tired so probably crappy explenation but one of my favorite characters was a Chaotic Evil Bard. See. She only wanted power and didn't care what she had to do to get it bit also understood that thier are many ways to gain power and the greatest was allies. So she spent the whole campain being selfless to earn allies for the sake of being selfish manipulating them for her own benigit
You! YOU GET IT. I have a Lawful Evil guy as my Pathfinder 2e character. Most of the actions he does read as good. Know why? BECAUSE PEOPLE LIKE GOOD GUYS. He doesn't want to kill women and children, that doesn't help him. But he DOES want to poison the lord keeping him from having relations with said lord's wife and taking care of his daughter (who the Lord claims as his own). If my guy has to kill some innocents or do some evil things to get where he needs to get, he might not LIKE it, but he'll do it. He's not gonna kill the party (unless he really has to), he's not gonna slaughter the shopkeeper, hell he might even give the single working mother some extra gold to keep her kid fed. Because people like heroes, and if people think you're a hero, they're a lot more likely to speak up for you when the crown guard comes down looking for a guy who looks suspiciously like you.
Maybe it could be fun to try to rehabilitate a character. IE start off as very selfish and out for themselves but circumstance forces them together with the heros. So when the heros runs off to save some villagers attacked by beasts he misses the first round of combat trying to work out why the rest of the party would risk their lives for strangers. It could open up some interesting discussions on motivations after the fight. With enough good rp points and the agreement of the GM the alignment might shift from evil to neutral to good over the course of the adventure. Or everyone ends up neutral. Who knows?
The way ripper says “simulacrums” makes me scream inside.
Edit: woah that is a lot of likes, thanks a lot
For those who are wondering: it should be pronounced _simyəˈlākrəm_ or _simyəˈlakrəm._
@@evenmoor what ever symbols those are, they don't help at all with the pronunciation.
Sim You Lah Crumb
Hearing "Simucarum" over and over was rough.
He did it the last time it came up in a video too.
The concept of a suddenly evil metallic dragon is so fascinating, given the nature of alignment in dragons is squarely divided straight down the Metallic-Chromatic divide due to their respective divine compelling their alignments to good and evil.
It's like... if suddenly, in a crowd of humans, one person like three rows back suddenly began falling UP. the amount of sheer terror that would inspire in the rest would be AMAZING.
screw gravity lmao that mental image is great thank you
And, of course, even if a dragon is good-aligned, that doesn't have to mean it'll just give the PCs items from its hoard just because they ask nicely.
Me (the DM): I'm nerfing goodberry.
Druid: "What? Oh, I guess that's fair, considering how I burn all my slots on it every rest."
Me: "The spell now needs to consume one fruit, nut, or berry and produces clones of that item."
The party: *FORAGE CHECK*
A simple nerf is making the sprig of mistletoe consumed on casting if the DM wants survival to be part of the campaign. Good berry covers all the food needs for the day and heals them some so they have to find a sprig for each day or find food.
@@nobodyimportant2470 Unfortunately that concept while good in theory becomes tricky to work... That is also literally a spell focus for durids, and consuming a spell focus is a lot more mean than just banning the spell.
My friend changed good berry into a magical means to temporary suppress hunger. Nothing can live off good berries alone. If you do not get real food in you your going to die
@@billywillaims293 how about a not insignificant chance to consume the sprig? That way there must be a legit need to risk using it up.
reminds me of a gag where someone was on a long flight (much longer than he expected) and did have a spell to copy food,
BUT he had only Beans and Milk to copy.
Once had an paladin in a game who was evil because of his beliefs telling him mixing races was bad and technology was bad. Never hurt my character an artificer homebrew race. But always made it clear that he disliked her. That was until she sacrificed herself to save the party. He broke his oath when his god refused to let him bring her back. Coming to the conclusion that she saved him despite him being a jerk by switching his faulty teleport pack with her working one. And that nobody evil would have done that. So he became good in the epilogue.
No way, Oath of the Boomer Paladin
After a guy who used to be part of my group spent roughly half his starting gold in a 10th-level one-off on sheep, my group has had a standing ban on owning livestock.
I would like to know the story behind this....
Meat, wool, (giant) bait, Druid PC, DEAR GOD NO, or other?
Lame! I yearn for a player to get invested in the livestock economy.
@@SodaPopBarbecue I'm betting on Trap Detector...
Send it down a corridor and if it doesn't trip a trap or get jumped by a monster, the corridor is safe...
😄😁😆😅😂🤣
But why
baaaaaaa...d baaaaaa...d baaaaaa...nned
I actually had an evil character that was implemented pretty well. It was a different setting (Modern world but with magic, mystery, and time collapsing so that different eras are colliding together). We had a party of three and my friends were playing as classical elf archer and a huge beast-hybrid who could create real items from drawings and they both were chaotic-good.
Meanwhile, my character was a lawful-evil dark slime controlling a plague doctor costume. They had some special abilities such as taking a "mind" of any shape they take: if they wear a doctor's costume - they want to heal and research, if they wear armour - they want to fight, and if they happen to get a shape of, I dunno, a potato, they would behave like a potato. But when this thing loses any shape... it becomes a huge abomination of dark slime and teeth that mindlessly attacks and devours everyone around without discriminating, so one of the huge parts of the gameplay was to keep my costume safe to protect the allies.
They also were insanely vulnerable to any light and fire and had the ability to learn the abilities of any dead creatures by dissecting their corpses to tiny bits and researching them deep to the cell level. As a result, they had a very simple goal: to grasp the ultimate knowledge of living nature... and they needed tons and tons of corpses for it.
And yet, I balanced the creature in such a way so that it simply couldn't be a murder hobo or a betrayer by making it incredibly weak physically when having a form. Since it was a bunch of slime operating a humanoid costume, it didn't have any bones or serious force to move so basically even a child could push them away and one flaming spark could annihilate them in seconds.
As a result, they really needed their comrades as they couldn't survive without them. And of course, a creature actively seeking the death of others and not understanding human morals caused some serious problems with authorities so they needed help with it, too.
This sounds awesome
That sounds pretty clever!
@MoonDrip@@3rdCharcoal Thank you, it's been a blast to play them and convince my team to avoid any brightly lighted places while also trying to inspire them to kill someone secretly... Can't wait to return to that campaign :D
What system is this?
@@Reginald_Ritmo Well, it's a brand new system developed by me and my colleagues. It's based on the Backrooms (and no, we started it long before it became mainstream) but we focus more on using the levels of the world as puzzles - there's always so much to explore. We're going to publish the rulebook for it pretty soon but unfortunately, there's no English version yet.
i think it's important to know that the evil alignment can simply mean someone is selfish, or uncaring, not that they're genuinely a terrible person or are MANIACALLY evil. i played in a campaign with an evil-aligned character who basically just didn't care about anyone but himself and his boyfriend who lived in the forest (log cabin, wilderness-y guy). he wanted to adventure primarily because he was bored, and ended up being sucked into our group's conspiracy to overthrow the tyrannical government (the player joined the group part-way through the campaign). a particularly impactful scene was when a village just outside the woods where the character's lover lived had been set on fire. this character tries to run away from the scene to go find and check on his lover, but my character stopped him and I had possibly my greatest improvised speech ever. summarized: "so what, you only help people close to you, and everyone else can burn? I wonder what your friend in the woods would say if he saw you right now? you're pathetic." the character silently turned around and came with us to help carry people out of the burning buildings, and over time began to change his ways, eventually becoming a great friend to the party and changing his alignment to good. personally i think it's a great way to write a character: evil-aligned person who either wants to redeem themselves or becomes willing to do so over time.
This. A lot of people underplay selflishness and empathy in their characters and play them as "good" purely because they do good deeds occasionally. Like no, treating other people like shit is evil, especially your own party. Hoarding loot and stealing from your group is evil (maybe neutral at best). You don't have to be a complete murderhobo to be considered evil
thats just most players. tbh this is why the dm should have a meta way to reward / punnish this kind of stuff. if you say that your charcter love halping peaple. but than steals from the poor baker, or is law abading .but then kills a sherif thats whants to quantion them. some real punshiment to there charcter mechanics wise should be in put
Regarding player characters fighting other PCs, I am in a game where one player got stuck with an ancestor ghost-thing that routinely tries to possess him. This made for some great and tense RP early on, but it wore the player down because they were unsure if the ancestor ghost would make another attempt again. So the DM worked out with the player how to send the character off on a high note: he got possessed one last time, and the BBGG (Big Badass Good Guy) that brought the party together and only rarely shows up when absolutely needed literally sent the possessed PC to the shadow realm, and that was that for the character… for now. He was a character that had a good heart and nature, but kept messing up or getting into awful situations because of that ancestor ghost, so narratively there’s still the slimmest chance at redemption for the poor guy with all the shite he’s had to endure, while not subjecting the party to constant possession attempts. The player is happier now and is gonna bring a new character to the table, one not constantly consumed by angst and possession attempts.
I'm a player, though I think everyone at the table agreed to the rule the DM made: DO NOT RIP OFF GENITALIA AND THEN PROCEED TO EAT IT
No, I shall not elaborate.
I think everything is understandable from this comment itself
@@skell6134 It was a one-shot that we (as a group agreed to), we all lacked a part of our souls after that one-shot, there are more weird anti-degeneracy rules made because of this one-shot, but this was the most memorable.
PS: Yes, I know this is elaboration, but I did not give proper context to what led up to this rule being made (except the obvious).
@@en-men-lu-ana6870 I understand if you don't want to share, but now I'm morbidly curious as to why the player responsible for the rule did so.
@@Lordmewtwo151 BBEG was doing a monolgue, and a gremlin of a player (goblin rogue), decided to do a sneak attack on his dick, the while the BBEG was writhing on the ground the player decided to eat the severed penis to establish dominance.
I am amused that it is not specified that a character did this, so I like to imagine that a player just tore off his own dick and chowed down, traumatizing all witnesses.
I remember when going through a shop, and before buying anything my DM explained he banned buying a bunch of candles at once because a previous player a long time ago found a way to exploit candles to god hood levels of over powered. I tried to ask what it was but told me: "NO! I don't want you to destroy some other DM's game!"
Considering the other stuff we did and how he's only shown mild disappointment but lets keep going with it, him being that serious about not buying a bunch of candles meant something.
So to this day, I know that candles are super cheap and in large quantities can be overpowered, but I have no idea how.
If I had to guess it's by using excessive fire dmg
Like the other guy, probably excessive fire damage, or dnd allows wax fires by the book somehow
I played an evil character once. He was fun. The trick is to, as you said in the vid, have the same goal as the party for selfish reasons. My evil character was a goblin who, due to events that transpired in a previous game with another of my characters, was forced to have to EARN his shinies. He was cursed to never be able to steal and so the only way he could get his hands on shinies was to help humans somehow and hope they would pay him.
The thing is that he didn't care who he was helping, why he was helping them or what he was doing to help them. So he found a party of adventurers and since he was a rogue, he was helping them by doing "The Poke-Poke". He didn't care to remember anyone's names that he traveled with. He didn't care what the party was doing. He would just get excited when people would raise their voices because as long as he helped the party fight whoever was mad at them and they shared their gold with him, he was earning his shinies just as the curse made him.
Another spin on it is having the evil character be more of an anti-hero. Out to do good in the world but having no problems with doing reprehensible things to get the results.
Elder god needs a child breed specifically for a ritual for them to inhabit to enslave the world? Instead of trying to rescue the kid and protect them until the time of the ritual passes, kill the kid in a way that makes it very hard to bring them back in time for the ritual.
Sex stuff in an RPG is only okay if EVERYONE at the table is into it, and generally, it's best if the game is upfront about that from the start. I actually got in trouble with a player because I was going to have a bait and switch. (Looks like sex, turns out to be a spy who is going to brief him)
And the guy wanted to fade to black a BIT too soon.
So, my evil character story? One of the players wanted to betray the party. I arranged it all with her, she was ready...
Only she decided to, before the betrayal, have the character be an ABOSLUTE jackass. Just...spend the entire time grumbling all but going "You'll pay! You'll all pay." And being standoffish, rude, and a jerk.
...I told her I was killing the plan. She'd overplayed it.
One of the best inventions I've ever seen is the X card. By all means, be upfront about where the boundaries are at game start, and make sure everyone is okay with those boundaries before continuing.
Then, hand everyone a card with an X on it (either real or hypothetical, such as a safeword, or both). Someone is uncomfortable in the middle of a scene? Hold up or trigger the card, and the scene IMMEDIATELY wraps up, with a synopsis only if absolutely necessary. Otherwise, by all means keep going!
(Edit: alternatively, since so many games are online nowadays, if the uncomfortable person is not directly involved, fade to black immediately and go through the rest of the scene with only the relevant characters sometime AFTER the session ends.)
Anything _more_ restrictive than that, such as "nobody should do sexual themes, ever," is IMO closed-minded. I've been in games where all players have bern onboard with sexual themes, and it's been amazing because we're interested in doing so in a mature fashion. (It helps that we're all in our 30s and 40s now.) But everyone MUST be okay with it first.
@@myboatforacar reminds me of one of the stories in Rippers' "have you ever insta-quit a campaign?" videos...
the crazy DM starts describing, in detail, how the PC is getting gang-raped, IN THE SECOND TURN OF THE FIRST FIGHT...
yes, SHE walked out immediately.
@@ericb3157 Yeah. Had a friend who went through a similar experience and was traumatized tor life. :( Good on her for walking out. Of course, the weakness of the X card is that everyone has to be on board with it... but I still think it's a good way to approach things.
I absolutely love playing evil characters that make their evil very subtle and hidden from the party
I'm not disrupting the party, no, it just happens that our goals align in a strange way and many of the characters in the party don't mind messing around with evil things
The dynamic just works
I can't wait to see how they'll react once it's finally revealed
Here's hoping I don't get caught before the grand reveal
On playing the same character multiple times: I've played the same character in three different campaigns: a drunken master monk who pretends to be a lush but actually is a spy (after all, who pays attention to the drunken fool in the corner?). The thing is, all three of those attempts the campaign ended (or I left the campaign) by level 3. He ended up a little different in each try mostly due to the interactions between the characters and the players but background/stats he was completely the same. I thought the idea was so interesting that I just wanted to keep trying to see where he would go.
On evil characters: I saw a 'how to understand alignment' video somewhere that basically defined evil as 'enjoys the suffering of others' and that's stuck with me as my guide post for what to declare as 'evil'. On the other hand, if you have mature players you know well and are willing to make characters who have a reason to work with the party and not just be an ass, it can be quite the interesting time. There's a while Pathfinder Adventure Path that's centered around an evil party. Really want to play that with a good group of players one day.
I'm all up for Pathfinder 1. What's your timezone?
For me, I also see 'evil' as selfish and self serving. So, a NE character would travel with the party because strength in numbers but won't share his side of the spoils. Helps save other PCs because if they don't, nobody will travel with them leaving them vulnerable. Etc etc.
It’s fine when it’s basically an incomplete cataract being reattempted, but it’s pretty bad when it’s the constantly reuse of like 3 characters.
There was someone in a few of my group’s campaigns and I still see it happening in outside ones where he would play the same 3 OCs over and over.
I can understand a comfort zone, but I really don’t the see the fun of it when you just keep playing the same 3 people with no deviation, not even a name change or a personality change, only the class and backstory to fit the campaign
A great way to see how evil good and even neutral characters can work together really well in a party together is watching the Oxventure D&D campaign from the insane folks at outside xbox youtube channel, Their evil warlock is one of my favorite characters.
I had an evil character who's main motivation was acquiring power over others. Halfway through the campaign i had to retire that character. The Dm allowed them to set up shop as a tavern keeper who secretly at first, ran an information hub.
Later we were playing in the same setting with new characters and my old character was one of the "optional benefactor NPCs"
It was a cool call back.
Simulacrum is pronounced "Sim--you-lack-rum"
As a GM for Warhammer fantasy and Warhammer 40k rogue trader campaigns it's hard to exclude certain grim dark elements. Especially when you start involving chaos forces like Slaanesh that have very torturous and overtly creepy and sexual overtone.
Yeah, Torture is literally a skill in Dark Heresy. You're 100% supposed to torture people. It may not *work*, but it doesn't matter.
My GM was sick of a player who had a history of seducing problems away, and she would be playing a bard in the new campaign. As a response, prior to session 1, the GM wrote an entire flowchart for how to calculate the DC of the Diplomacy check (Pathfinder), including sexuality, marital status, and ultimately leading to a percentile die roll. The player dropped out of the campaign early on, so we never got to use it, but it was an impressive level of effort.
The way this guy talks to us is pure serotonin I kid you not. Much love to y'all, I hope your week is fantastic
Hulk Hogan voice brings me some nostalgia in the form of my most memorable 5e character: Briken Bloodmist. Briken was a massive tiefling barbarian in a nice suit that fought using unarmed combat 99% of the time, and flavor-wise I decided that he's a demon that works for contract when he's not tending to his flower garden in hell. First session, first roll of the game he nat 20'd an unarmed attack roll to pimp slap two zombies out the window of a run-down mansion.
My variant winged Teifling, who is a wizard, got balanced by situations where having wings weren’t always the best solutions. Such as the earth crumbling down into the cavern of a sunken city in the middle of a salten desert. I could only help lighter party members, which is pretty much me.
It is odd to me that so many DMs are against sex in dnd. Maybe it's because the only tables I've ever played at are me and my friends, who all know each others boundaries pretty well; I can certainly imagine it being weird with strangers I guess
It's one of those 'I can absolutely understand a rule against it, but also understand doing it.' things
From experience, a lot of players think s*x immediately allows them to go off on certain characters and uh- assault them. It's horrible and I've banned it ever sincve that shit happened cause it's incredibly wrong to have.
@@solredqueen yeah we had a guy do that once. He wasn't a part of the group after that
Kind of related, I played an LE (originally CG) Fighter/Cleric in Adventurers League, he is lvl 20 and basically completely endgame with legendary gear, his own ship and exotic mounts. He was always gruff but tried to help whom ever was in need, regardless of danger (city watch background) in his CG days, before he was transformed into a yuan-ti and turned LE. I played it so he didn't care anymore for random people and the only thing that mattered to him was his mission/goal without regard for consequences (insanity acquired through the ritual) and the party, since they were his best bet to further increase his power and wealth. The party likes him and he even regularly explicitly protected the female warlock in the party because they became friends before.
In short, evil does not mean be an a**hole murderhobo and can be played well :).
It CAN yes, but it's just not worth the trouble as a DM.
It won't provide more fun than a neutral/good character would bring, and the problems it causes are far greater than the potential fun it brings. At least that's my jist of it. Characters should get along for the most part and want to save the world for something other than themselves.
I just finished a homebrew campaign, with 3 PCs and me DMing.
One of my players was WAY more experienced than the others, and knew how to build a ridiculously powerful character (at one point in the campaign, he beat a Balor in what was basically a 1v1 fight). He was a blade-singer wizard with a few levels in cleric. I ended up restricting which cleric spells he could learn.
As I said to him: "I don't care that you're insanely powerful...I care that you are so much more insanely powerful than everyone else."
Fortunately, my group has nothing but mature, reasonable people in it, and the wizard completely understood. The other players thanked me for it.
I had a similar experience, except I was the munchkin. For context, it was a Star Wars campaign. My character didn't have to fight to solve situations. He had the skills to sabotage the enemy and achieve mission objectives all on his own. This unfortunately left nothing for everyone else at the table. The GM attempted to rein me in, but I was terrible and loaded my character with several tricks to bypass certain obstacles, and create unique solutions. Fortunately, my fellow players verbally smacked me on the head. I had my character settle into more of an "eyes in the sky" saboteur, but still pull out all stops if a plan took a dire turn for the worst.
My favorite evil character that started off neutral is raistlin from the Dragonlance novels. That's a perfect character who didn't intend to be evil at first but slowly converted.
I'm playing a lawful evil character and my dm loves it lol He often is the only reasoning character to not commit horrible crimes lol
One of my favourite quotes from Terry Pratchett's book Men at Arms...
Something Vimes had learned as a young guard drifted up from memory. If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you're going to die. So they'll talk. They'll gloat.
They'll watch you squirm. They'll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar.
So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.
My party has a kentaur fighter with polearm master + sentinel feat and a gnome artificer with a magical shield. During battle, the gnome almost always rides on the kentaur's back. Last time they levelled up, the group asked if the gnome could take the mounted combatant feat, which has the following benefits:
•You have advantage on melee attack rolls against unmounted creatures that are smaller than your mount.
• You can force an attack targeted at your mount to target you instead.
• If your mount is subjected to an effect that allows it to make a Dexterity save to take only half damage, it takes no damage if it succeeds and half damage if it fails.
I thought about it but said no because it felt exploitative to me, and this murderous duo is already incredibly dangerous in combat.
Talking about evil characters, I had one once. Cleric of some evil deity with war, blood, and deception domains. He was more a trickster type, very charismatic and presented himself as a well-to-do servant of a more acceptable god, ehile behind closed doors he regularly took time to note down guard routes and structural weaknesses in buildings in the event his church was sent to destroy the place he was spying on.
Then, after joining the party tasked with delivering a set of daggers to a king, they basically got time warped backward a few hundred years because plot and were captured in these cages without their weapons. Naturally, since his focus is kept hidden, he still had it, and helped the mostly good party escape because he stood no chance alone trying to escape. It all culminated in them being stopped by the chief of these furry goblinoid things and finding out they worshipped the same god as he. Taking the opportunity, he turned coat and sided up to the Chief- only to grab him from being with a flatfooted Inflict Wounds for massive damage, that ended up instantly killing the chief. He knew these pathetic creatures were just that, pathetic- and that he needed to stick with the party for now until they could sort things out.
So he told the goblin things to retrieve the party's gear lest they be judged 'unworthy' in their god's eyes, got their things back, and left the clan with instructions on how to properly worship their god before leaving. After all, he was no leader, he was a tool, a knife to be stuck into one important piece in the wheel of society to bring it crashing down.
He was fun. Cruel but pleasant towards the party. Took healing spells to sell his whole 'holy priest' image, kept the party going, and was an amazing face. Never actually betrayed the party, either- every time he did it, which was rare, he never hurt the party and usually used it to do something he couldn't with them by their side, before going back for them.
As a DM, I will never have more than five people at my table at a time
The "no evil characters" reminded me of the first campaign I played. Was with my friend group, and the dm had apparently played in college and wanted us to give it a shot. We all agreed to do an evil campaign, since the dm suggested it. Didn't really think about it at the time, but the fact that one of the players chose a lawful good paladin and the dm didn't stop that should have been a sign things were going to be a bit off the rails. Long story short, my second character (first one died 5 minutes into my second session) ended up being the only one to follow any kind of "evil" story, and after months of playing my character stayed with the intended story while the rest of the group split to join following the paladins God. One massive pvp fight later, with an npc on my side because they were part of this moment when we were supposed to follow the evil God's patron and the rest just noted out, and I'm making a new character again and we're off on whatever the dm could throw together for the derailed campaign. 2 or 3 sessions later the campaign ended with a total party wipe
Just found this page about a day ago and love the content, and tbh its given me some great, fun (albeit devious) ideas abt what to do with DMing, but HOW to DM as well (brand new and literally just DMing for my kids). I especially love and appreciate the positive messages at the end though. It's always good to see putting positivity into the world.
My original DM - Vet - had a rule - no 3rd-party or homebrewed races or subclasses, as he didn't want to deal with any over-powered issues. Only issue I had with this rule was that he only had the Core Rule Books - PHB, MM, DMG - and few had anything else. Then came the Celestial Incident, which you (Mr. Ripper) were nice enough to show, wherein I brought in XGtE, because, he also had, as a rule, bring in an official book, and he'd allow it.
My current DM - Horse Trainer - currently has a "No" stance on Flying Races, but I think I could help get this allowed with saying that Flight comes at say Level 3. He also had an issue about Custom Origin's swapping of Stats and such around, as he felt that it could make a Min-Maxed character, to say nothing about some hesitancy with the new/revised races since Tasha's release, saying that it basically got rid of culture. Thankfully, he understands that it's a way in which a character could be made without making them weaker than normal characters in a class or having them pigeonholed into certain classes.
Love you man, and everyone in the MrRipper community. Please be safe, take care
They are great. But, some disregarded homeroom rules. I've watched so many women that take advantage of men that I'm sick of it.
@@tylerhorn3712 what the hell are you talking abohtb
@@FAFO.K7NG well, you ever have rex with a woman that got caught In a crossfire?
@@tylerhorn3712 1. I'm not a dinosaur
2. No
3. What comment do you think you're replying to? Cuz I said to take care and be safe and you said women take advantage of men.
@@FAFO.K7NG Generally end up trolling on UA-cam tbh. Don't feel like rewatching to explain it so just assume I'm being a dick to get a rise out of you.
there is a 3rd party class called Mysterial, that when RAW, gives you access to all fey feats regardless of race, as well as all fey spells and 6 bonus attribute points every level. while I don't ban it from every game, as I tend to run very high-powered games, I ban it from more than one, and I have zero issue doing so.
I'm surprised that was ever able to come into existence
@@aboogala4678 the joy of third party publishers!
@@thecrocco5572 I know right!
I ban 1 subclass when I dm. Twilight domain cleric. No need for justification. No need for regrets.
Really? Why ban it?
If it were me, I'd just adjust the fights the party faced to be a bit more difficult, and/or include more enemies/situations that would prevent the party from staying grouped up in the cleric's auras.
@@themetalone7739 hell no it isnt, bladesinger wizard isnt even the best wizard subclass.
@@themetalone7739 it just gets too much too quickly. 300ft darkvision that can be shared with the rest of the party is fine but there’s a reason why v.human and satyr don’t get darkvision. Then there’s the channel divinity 1d6 + half cleric level doesn’t sound like much but that’s about 4 temp hp at this level but that’s 4 each turn a goblin deals like 7 per attack so it effectively gives them resistance to the damage.
I had an NPC named "Brother Rocky" that was basically a combination of several wrestlers. He had Brock Lesnar's body with Randy Savage's head, wore a fancy robe like Ric Flair with a big gold-plated belt around his waist, and he talked like Hulk Hogan. He was a cleric that used wrestling moves when casting touch-range spells, so when he casts Cure Wounds its a Flair-style body chop or a big slap across the face like The Rock's "smackdown" finisher, Inflict Wounds is a submission hold of some kind, etc. The players loved him and were sad when they had to leave the town he was in because they wouldn't get to visit him anymore.
This was a good video mentioning several points i have to rethink for my game too.
Also listening to you trying to read the word simulacrum made me giggle every time because you didn't get it right once. Reminds me of Toni from T&RP podcast and "ambulance"
Going to try to summarize the first campaign I played in as a player. It became a rather large party as we had many people including myself want to play for the first time, we did have some more experienced PCs. Had a range of PCs created, half elf ranger, human paladin, halfling rouge, two elf druid twins (seemed to want to just collaborate on their chars), half elf druid and my trifling cleric. Backstory to the campaign was that the "good" races and "evil" races had completed a long standing war and were now at a time of peace but the evil ones didn't want to keep it that way. As Tieflings were phrased in this homebrew setting as evil, my character was a medic within the evil army, seeing his brothers in arms animated as undead he eventually left the army to start wandering around to find himself. This is what lead him to eventually become a cleric of a being that would help him combat the undead, the Raven Queen as God and became a grave cleric. My character made it a point to seek out and destroy anything that would defy the natural cycle of life and death, which the rest of the party was all for. This majorly derailed the intended campaign because the main forces we were supposed to face was Demons rather than Liches, DM just had to swap out some of the main baddies which wasn't anything to crazy. But after finding a hidden necromancer layer, that was only found after a handful of high rolls and nat 20s, it was cemented that we would seek out and destroy the Liches.
I banned Chaotic Neutral characters in my good campaign's. The main reason being that they were often either unproductive or just playing Evil but claiming it was to bring the party closer to Neutral.
One of my favorite interpretations of what an Evil PC in D&D could and should be is Haytham Kenway from Assassin's Creed III. You start the game introduced to this character, going about the usual Assassin business, and nothing is out of the ordinary from what you know of the "Good" faction. Sure, he kills people, but that's his job. It's only until after getting to know a bit about this character, with hints of his motivations along the way, that you find out he works for the other side. From then on, you play as his estranged son, and Haytham later rejoins the game as the main antagonist to the overall story, leader of the faction that his son opposes. At times they are driven to working together for common goals, but their ideals still clash, and they squabble about their personal ideological differences.
It really shows that a character can be "Evil" while still being level-headed, cunning, and just.
Good vs Evil is not Justice vs Bloodlust.
Lawful vs Chaotic is not Written Law vs Destroy the World
and Neutral is not I Do Whatever I Want
I wanted to play a NE Deathmaster/Palemaster for a long time. The backstory was that it was a human that had 2 older sisters that were vampires. The PC would capture/charm/purchase (whatever fit the campaign best) people and send them to their sisters as food/thralls. Basically getting groceries for their family. Instead of becoming a vampire though, they were aiming higher and wanted to be a lich. They would use spells to disguise their undead minions though so they werent discovered as easily. Depending on how the story went, they might be the 'runt' of the family and wants to prove they are better, by becoming more powerful than their family, or they could just be doing it as way to elevate their family in society.
I think the best part of these videos is often the bits behind the curtain at the end of each one. They're always so incredibly sweet.
I don't know how I missed this one until now, but the end this time made me tear up a little. Thank you for being so welcoming in your videos and community. I really needed that today.
My friend is currently running a kenku who’s had basically everything ripped from them and constantly getting rolled by life to the point of near emotional muteness.
One party I was in had an evil character. He was a necromancer, I don't remember the details of the his build, but as a CHA caster, he was able to keep the good party members convinced he wasn't doing any nefarious deeds, even after we straight up toppled the government structure in the area. Having players know what he was doing, but having to not meta-game it was a blast.
This was an Evil GM Moment for me and I loved it:
The players had just finished clearing out a bandit hideout in the sewers of a town. While investigating the crates and barrels, I described the Goliath Barbarian as finding "a small leather pouch, with a golden clasp emblazoned with a star snapped shut. The pouch feels as if there are contents, and is about the size of a deck of Tarot Cards."
The players immediately started freaking out. For obvious reasons.
But, no, I am not about to give a party of seven LEVEL TWO PLAYERS the Deck of Kany Things.
I played a Tefling draconic sorcerer. We were playing a homebrew campaign and were having a lot of fun. We had a paladin, rouge, ranger, and a monk with me in the party. My character started reading about undead powers from a book he found in a wizards keep. So he called apon The Great Pazuz to trade his draconic ancestry and make him a wizard school of necromancy. His wish was granted. Now the group was mostly lawful good. So raising undead was definitely looked down on. But that didn't stop my guy from making Hickory, Dikory, and Doc whenever he could. His three gouls with the create undead spell. This party also did not get along at all. We would often infight with each other even while in combat. It was all in game. We all were friends and loved the fact none of us could stand the others. But we all needed each other to survive till the end. At the end of the campaign we found out my character was a son of Orcus God of undead and my father wanted me to join him by his side. So I betrayed the party and made it my mission to kill our party's paladin and make him my undead captain of my hord. Was going to cast finger of death on him. It was fun playing an evil character among good.
I've lost track of the youtube channel, but one of the really good D&D channels recommended Jayne Cobb from Firefly as an excellent example of an interesting evil character. He usually bans evil PCs in his campaign because he's just sick of the crap. But if a player came to him and said "I want to play a character that's like Jayne Cobb" he would be all for it.
This is the channel that has regular skits where he plays every person at the table, and he's both hilarious and informative. If anyone here knows the channel, please help me find it again!
Hey, long time lurker first time commenter. I GM Pathfinder 1e for a bunch of friends (as well as a bunch of one page ttrpgs but that's a different story). Personally, the only thing I ban from my tables are characters playing witches and shamans. I've allowed basically everything else. Homebrew? sure, within reason. Massive wild multiclassing? bring it on. Custom magical weapons? if you can figure out the in game costs and acquire that money, have it. But witches and shamans have mechanics that take up too much time for me, personally, and i'm already bad at keeping track of things (I have like, 4 whiteboards and we play online).
Had my player's Homebrew fire based barbarian worship Kossuth. None of the players questioned his obsession with fire and burning bodies, nor did they ever ask him about his warship. Why he was drinking dragon's blood even though it could kill him. They didn't even questioned his slow mutation to something more dragon then human, red mutations at that. Well once he drank the big bad Shadow dragon's blood, it was time to cast himself into the forever burning pit of fire made from a magical nuke. It was made from the dwarfs, to seal a huge rat man hole. That was the last part of the ritual to help release a part of Kossuth into him self, becoming a red greatworm dragon. So they get a new party member, and a new BBG.
Was playing in a campaign that was getting fairly high level when my female blade bard (2nd Ed bard handbook kit) died while the party was in the underdark. I had a chaotic neutral with evil tendencies 1/2 drow fighter thief from previous campaign run by the DM who was about the same levels as the party and so was allowed to bring him in. He came in an hour or so after the bard’s demise; about 3 days game time. He was trying to get out of the underdark as well so they teamed up and eventually got out and by that time he had become invested in the ending of the BBEG as well. He was to become a helpful NPC with contacts, but the bard failed the resurrection check. He never betrayed the party but he definitely did some evil crap behind their backs. Best example is that he followed and eliminated the bards two followers for equipment, money, and prevent them from being used against the party.
So yes I think evil can be used in a campaign but have to be played right.
i soft-banned the warlock class and turned it into a prestige system to award characters for completing difficult social encounters against powerful creatures, or otherwise negotiating pacts of otherworldly power. because the class itself already stands apart from literally every other class in the game due to pact magic, a diverse array of patrons for almost any possible alignment, and build-a-class invocations, it can slot really nicely on top of basically any class, including martials.
to further separate it from the "core" classes, you can't gain levels in the class through experience or milestone, only by completing specific quests assigned to you by your patron. you also don't gain any hit points, feats, or ASIs from leveling in the class, keeping you otherwise on par with the rest of the party (who has to deal with a level cap of 10). it really is just the boons granted to you by your patron, nothing else. you can also, of course, have those boons revoked should you at any point cross your patron (how much you lose depends on how merciful they are and how severe your betrayal)
Me and my crew were doing a homebrew campaign and had quite possibly the most humorous solution to a problem that I have ever encountered… My crew was tasked with the mission of intercepting an unknown magical item that was being shipped to an enemy city, well we figured the best way for us to go about preventing its entry was to have half of our crew go up into the city and protect the gate while me and my companions would stay in a ship and guard the port, one of my team members had forged documents to make us, by all appearances, be merchants it worked enough to get us into the city but it failed to prevent the enemy shipment (Who rolled a nat 20 on perception) from seeing us and no sooner had they saw us then they began to flee at superhuman speeds away from the city the magic item was a feather that granted remarkable speed to anyone close to it. This was intended to be a setback by the dm, but we had other plans. My friend (who was in the ship) upon seeing that they began to flee used a fully charged max level spell to summon two frog familiars to pull our ship, our wizard had a unique ability to change one letter of any of his spells and if it makes a real word then the spell would take the effects of the new title, given this he cast FLIGHTBEAM (originally light beam) onto our giant frogs causing the unique spectacle of a flying boat being charioted by two, giant, super frogs who were able to help us catch the fleeing troop. In the end we were able to easily outmatch the carefully handcrafted leader (who wielding the feather had super speed) by having our wizard throw our dragonborn unto the air and with some frost gloves he had equipped freeze the leader in a block of ice while he was temporarily submerged in the ocean a very creative solution by by team and a great lesson on limiting the power of spells you give your players.
Actually, I had a funny moment regarding torture. The party was going to crack a Simic scientist for information regarding their recent arrival to the Material Plane and the monster in the lake. But Coins, the Kenku got a low roll and I played it that he had forgot to wake him after he was KOd. So the party ended up using him as bait for the Cat 2 Krasis.
PVP.
The closest my party has ever come to any sort of PVP was they were sent to check in on an NPC who wound up being a PC (long story).
They wanted to bring Macreadus to Copper so that they’d get paid for checking up on him and Macreadus refused to meet with Copper (backstory reasons).
The wizard was about to cast Hold Person on him when he pulled out a letter and did some artificer tinkering to so Copper would know it was real and from him.
And that’s the closest I’ll ever let it come unless it’s a whole big plot thing (I.e. 2 PC’s are heirs to a kingdom and they both know betrayal is on the table).
Another thing banned is torture.
The party did some unsavory things to a captured Duergar and after that I basically said, “ok so we’re gonna have some rolls and some ‘basically they say xyz.’”
There’s never really a reason to let your PC’s RP out torturing a character.
Also a small red flag (would never refuse a player over it, but it flags my attention) is when someone wants to play some variant of Elf but they’re like 20 years old.
20 is to elves what like 5 is to humans.
Elves aren’t adults until around 100, so no, you’re not playing the elvin equivalent of a 5 year old.
I’ve only run into it twice, but 1 was a really bad problem player I wound up kicking.
imagine experiencing decades and decades of life within this world, living through years of events, and still only grasping for the same mental development as an 8-year old. A+ for the racebuilding
@@24601st What’s racebuilding?
@@Jessie_Helms instead of worldbuilding i said racebuilding, the design of the race in specific
@@24601st oh ok gotcha!
Yeah, if it’s a small change that’s comedic/dramatic I may allow it (one of the first PC’s I ever ran for was “Marwaan the Tall”, a freakishly tall dwarf- and by that, I mean like 5’5”).
On the subject of evil player at one point our gm tried to turn sides and make a big reveal and the group just kinda said no. The person we were suppose to be rescuing had just died so our mission failed in a way. But there was still this large demonic force to fight who used to be possessing our ally to get to said character. Instead of avenging that guy we all agreed it would be better to change our alignments (which was true neutral to neutral evil). We had some of the best convincing rolls of our game and suddenly we were gonna be fighting the main boss with an eldrich entity on our side
I banned variant human and gave everybody a level 1 feat. -nobody played base human that game.
"safety tools", as a DM, I've found they tend to limit communication rather than aid in it.
lose expectations are set in the first session and campaign announcement with the understanding that players should be comfortable enough to call a time out and speak up if the scenario or another's actions are making them uncomfortable. The vast majority of the time however they can do something in character to pull it back.
By gamifying or making a worksheet of it, it paradoxically tends to exacerbate the problem leading to players dwelling on it rather than moving on similar to what happens when you become aware of your breathing and blinking.
Every so often I and my friend take over for our forever DM, he does play on different days as just a player but when we all get together he's usually the DM. Now he loves playing Rogues and anything that pairs well with a rogue, he made the mistake of telling us his exploits so he is now banned from being a rogue or/ and he is not allowed to make another class act like a rogue. He just gets into too much mischief and can harass the party pretty badly.
I made an evil character myself one time, a while ago. But they weren't like some horrible monster, they were just very sadistic to bad guys. For context, he was a ranger who specialized in medical practice. His story was that he was a physician and acupuncturist (that comes into play later). He was lawful evil, he helped the party, and he took joy in the combat and bloodshed, but he never went out of his way to stir up trouble. The sadistic side mainly came out during interrogations, He would purposefully botch an acupuncture with an enemy to make them spill, I never described the pain and gross stuff, I just said I botched it and asked my questions. Making an evil character who can't mesh well in a campaign is just stupid and annoying, nobody actually has fun because you get yelled at for screwing things up, and the party has to babysit you constantly.
How to keep your party on track?
The DM gets a one per session to roll a unexpected event to guide the party back on Track
Ex: A Nat 20 the DM can say the party suddenly got a tingle in their brain marrow that THIS is not what they where supposed to do and head to the nearest location to continue the original quest.
A Nat 1. A Duck is trying to pass the party but get yeeted by (insert Player) because it was in their way. But every time this player yeeted a duck, two more would show up. (It’s up to the DM on how far they will go with this, )
The "Lucky" feat. Too good. So good, you'd be nuts to not take it.
Know what, posting an evil char I have for the va here; Lawful Evil, Gold Shadow Dragon in locked in a weakned human form (Reflavored Amythest Dragonborn/Gold Dragon Sorcerer/Undead Warlock). Their goal, is to fight the BBEG and restore themselves to full power. Every Level that gave them a feat she’d regain some of their old powers or abilities (like flight, stronger scales, etc.) They’d eventually help the party beat the BBEG, thank the party, and if they choose to not let this vile creature escape, they’d have a second boss fight right after. But every turn I’d roll a d20 to see if they just, stop and surrenders to their former comrades since they’d grow an attachment, by which point they’d be wavering on Lawful Neutral.
I am personally no longer allowed to play cleric with a certain group. The backstory: Our group choose to start our campaign over after a couple players left for one reason or another. I was the only one who didn't want to. I had really grown attached to my current character (a fighter bugbear who was a big softy and just wanted friends). I asked if I could just use him and keep his levels (wasn't high. Like lvl 4 or 5), and the other players could start with lvl 5 characters as well. Everyone agreed to that so I didn't make a new character. I didn't expect to keep loot or found gear. 1 day before we start our new campaign the DM asks me why I have not created a new character. I reminded them that I was going to keep playing my bugbear. DM said they and the rest of the party changed their minds and wanted everyone to make new lvl 1 characters. I was pissed. So I volunteered to be the cleric after I found out no one else choose a character with healing abilities (their class may have allowed it but they didn't go that route). So I made a cleric with no healing spells who was also a kenku which made communicating tricky at best. For other reasons I am also no longer allowed to play a kenku with this group.
That one at the end really spoke to me. I like to play evil characters - not to be a murder hobo or to betray the party.
In fact, I don't even like PvP. I just find evil characters to be infinitely more interesting than good or neutral characters.
Like, what drove them to be that way? And how can I make it work in a game that is cooperative? So many good questions, so very few opportunities to answer them, unfortunately.
On Evil PCs, Seth Skorakowsky has a great video on how to make evil PCs work. Basically evil people who do good for selfish reasons. One fine example was Jayne Cobb in Firefly
I wasn't the DM in this case, but I was the reason that something was banned. I made the DM ban the word "euphemism" at the table because I kept asking if things people said were euphemisms. Like, it started off as a genuine question in character.
Them (a gunslinger): "I like to polish my gun nightly."
Me (a formerly seclusive rogue): "Is that a euphemism?"
Then it started getting out of character.
Them: *pulling out the Rod of Cancellation* "I pull out the Rod and touch it to the artifact."
Me: "Is that a euphemism."
It got some laughs, and it was fun to see how many times someone said something that could be misconstrued. It got to the point that everyone got in on it and it slowed the game down, so we were no longer allowed to ask if things were euphemisms. Totally understandable and fair. The worst part though: I swear the DM started making double entendres intentionally just to try to get one of us (probably me) to mess up.
Wishes in my setting would be of the Literal Genie variety. Exact words are taken into account, and if the word "and" is used, you only get what you said before the word "and", unless you had two Wishes in which case you spend both.
Whenever I would ban or restrict something, it would have to be campaign specific.
I banned one race from my pathfinder 1e game. Drow nobles. Drow are a strong race with a ton of abilities in pathfinder, like spell resistance, a few spell like abilities, weapon proficiencies, the standard elf immunities, and a couple other things. Drow nobles have everything Drow have except they also have, if I remember correctly, way higher stat bonuses (+4 Dex, +2 to Int, Wis, Cha and I think a -2 to con), their spell resistance is DOUBLED, And they gain like 9 more spell like abilities, and many of them go from once a day to at will.
I’m currently running Rime of the Frost Maiden and one of the player characters is an evil Triton real estate agent. He was sent by his agency to figure out what is up with this eternal winter and fix it so that the agency can move foreword with their plan to flood the Icewind Dale and sell the newly underwater housing to tritons and other aquatic species. All that to say that evil tends to be pretty great if you’re using the sort of schemes a silver age comic villain would.
Fun story about playing evil characters:
I had played an evil character for a campaign, in which the final “villain” was a organization who wanted to take over the world. There was one fact that the rest of the party didn’t realize, in that the org leader was actually a good guy aiming to unite nations for prosperity. So that’s where I come in, playing a parasite homebrew race. The character I played was the former ruler of the organization. After being knocked from power this character named Husk worked to manipulate the party into killing the org leader so they could continue world domination. So over countless sessions we beat the final boss, hurray. Aaaand then epilogue(not exactly played out but narrated), where we realized Husk(who became a nature deity after the prior battle) worked to essentially brainwash the world into a hivemind in which they hold total control, and are potentially a boss raid planned out for players of 2 seperate campaigns from the dm who hosted it
TLDR I manipulated the entire party into a bad end and became a raid boss
To the last story: Chaotic Evil character based off of Zaeed Massani from Mass Effect. All I have to say. An egoistic, "end justifies the means", vengence consumed mercenary with zero regard for collateral damage and innocent bystanders. Still a loyal asset to the party, but bad to the bone.
One DM banned me from being an arsonist. I would catch houses and inns on fire sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident by playing with fire in my room. The party members took a long time to figure it out in game bc they rolled bad at investigation and perception. The DM got frustrated at my characters secret obsession messing with the campaign. It wasn't untill I suggested using fire or burning structures with enemies too many times that the party out two and two together and turned me in for all my crimes after getting a confession. I was to be executed but the party members took into account all the good stuff I did in helping stop vampire infestation, rescued kidnapped folks ECT. I spent the rest of my life in prison but put to labor. I was banned from ever playing an arsonist again. I just enjoyed playing someone with a deep flaw.
Your character's "deep flaw" sounds like it was really obnoxious and disruptive. I probably would've stopped it much earlier than your DM did.
I got spider climb at level 2. I’m a Minotaur
For wrath and glory we have barred using the psychic power 'grav warp'. There is only so many times you can describe the boss de jure splatting against the floor at terminal velocity before it gets boring.
I have some strict limits on PC/NPC relationships, because of what happened in a campaign I was playing in. Cool story concept, but it was purely online via discord and dnd beyond, with 7-8 players too many. DM was cool tho, just bit off a bit more than he could chew with this one. Other party member, who I'm gonna refer to as "Player", took things in a weird direction and way too far with an NPC (he's actually kinda like this irl too, and I no longer associate with said player).
Player (human fighter) wanted to get some info out of one of the bar maids in a town we were at, and is rolling really well on persuasion and insight. So well in fact, he rolled a f*ing 20 to sleep with her.
DM let it slide since he rolled that high, and the rest of us thought it was a one night stand, DM included. The next day, after the party had a shared dream, this f*ckers first priority is to go back and HIT ON THE BAR MAID, cuz I guess he wanted to take this "relationship" further (yeah, further than it needed to). DM is trying to tell player (rp'ing as the bar maid) that that's not gonna happen. Player keeps pushing. Eventually another party member gets sick of it, and in character, walks up tells and player to "stop being a horny d*ckbag and help us figure this sh*t out." Player takes this personally, even outside of the game (like, he was ACTUALLY offended) Fight ensues, and lasted for a SINGLE round as player rolls a nat 1 to hit, and proceeds to get hit with a nat 20 mage fist from the other party member, and sent flying into the nearest wall. I threatened to get my Blood hunter into the mix, and Player eventually dropped the whole thing and moved on.
TL;DR : 1st campaign session almost got derailed because one player couldn't keep his blasted hormones in check, and I refuse to let that happen to my campaigns.
I started this vid thinking it would be things like "lucky feat", and that is here, but I was surprised by the variety. I totally agreed with the torture and sexualization part; don't play that out, it gets creepy and uncomfortable.
I totally wasn't expecting the Hulk Hogan voice. That one made me laugh and smile.
As always, thanks for the recordings, and big thanks for the post story encouragement.
My personal favourite at our table is no oodies, 3/5 players have tried wearing it for warmth (room we play in is always super cold) and have fallen asleep so it got banned from the table. Rum is also banned
Had a sorcerer over use mold earth wayyy too much and it made the game extremely annoying for the dm so we all agreed to ban it
Back when we were just starting to figure out how D&D worked, we all misunderstood that 3rd level spells could be acquired by reaching level 3 in a given class. My little brother played a real problem character who was a wizard and thought that fireball was the solution to everything. Shamelessly giving in to that dumb stereotype. Not only did he try to cast firebolt at an enemy while everyone was in a cloud of noxious gas (He thought that because it was just a fire BOLT and not as powerful as a fireball, that they would be fine. And I as the DM had to tell him that it was a stupid idea that would kill everyone.), cast fireball on the branch that the bard was hanging on to for his life over a ravine, causing him to fall only surviving because we misunderstood what blade ward was, and directly attack the cleric with magic missile because she shattered into pieces the flying sword that he wanted to keep but was trying to kill them, but he would NOT under any circumstances ever want to give up his 8d6 fire damage at level 3. None of us knew that our magic level and our class level were 2 different things, but I knew that this was super unfair. So I tried to tell him very nicely that I was nerfing the damage of fireball down to 3d6 for this campaign, but he would not relent. We agued all day out of game until our mom said that he would go by my rules as the dungeon master or she wouldn't let him play. (Which is what I would've done, but she has those mom powers, you know?) Even after we found out that we were in fact wrong about the leveling system, fireball continued to be a problem. One campaign ended in disaster after he decided to cast fireball on a devourer that was standing right next to the other wizard. I decided to teach him a lesson and give him the consequences for his actions. The devourer, the other wizard, and the other wizards snake familiar were all ingulfed in the flame, which he should have known would happen since the other wizard had just casted burning hands on the devourer, (You know, requiring him to be close enough to touch it.) but apparently he "wasn't paying attention" to his teammates turns. The snake died, the other wizard was knocked unconscious, eaten by the devourer, pulled out of the devourer's corpse after it was killed, and carried back to a hospital where he woke up to hear his pet was burned to a crisp. We decided to end the campaign afterwards. But he still didn't stop. Just 2 days ago, his character (Jeff Hoxton, another human wizard.) almost killed himself in the first session of our Curse of Strahd campaign. He was inside the room of a house while a shadow had wrapped itself around him. HE TRIED TO CAST FIREBALL ON THE SHADOW THAT WAS IN THE EXACT SPOT THAT HE WAS STANDING!!! I legitimately had to tell him that if he casted fireball, he would not only hit himself, but the house would burn and he would die in the rubble, but he didn't listen! He tried to cast fireball regardless of what I had just warned him. I had the ghost that he had interacted with a little earlier cast counterspell, telling him she doesn't want him to burn down her house. Throughout the time we have played D&D together, I've had to either nerf this spell, or hold his hand so that he doesn't kill himself and everyone around him.
I've got a good Evil Character for you:
Timble, the Red Mantis. A halfling baby lost their parents to a goblin raid and was adopted in secret by one of the soldiers. He grew up in secret, but one day the chief discovered him. The clan rallied against them and executed his adoptive parents too. In a rage, he cried out for vengeance and two curved blades shot out from the spilt blood. He passed out and awoke the next day to see the whole clan was dead by his hands. He followed a new instinct inside him and arrived at the Cult of the Mantis Queen, the assassin's guild for this world. There he made a new family, and he would do ANYTHING for them.
I felt like Timble was a good example of an evil character because he was lawful evil. He would taunt other party members by hinting that their "righeous orders" had used the Mantis Assassins before, but he never looked down on them. He was ordered by his Queen to aid the party in aquiring a cursed sword to stop a demonic invasion. The first thing he did was swear to never harm another party member. When the paladin became corrupted by the cursed sword and attacked Timble for being 1/64th demon, that meant he could not attack back, only run away.
12:18 I also played the same character -my only character so far - however it was a sequel campaign and we jumped from like level 6 to 18-20 so I had all kinds of fun new toys to play with :3
My roommate/best friend has a chaotic evil warlock I’m letting her play in an upcoming campaign. Except, there are 2 things that make it a bit more complex than that.
-He’s not really like, chaotic evil. He sure acts like he is, and he does have the criminal background, but it comes from covering up depression and nihilism. Basically his patron told him that the world he’s in isn’t “real” and that is was all fake. Fourth wall awareness, but from Nyarlathotep who wants you to feel bad.
-He’s paired up with a lawful good paladin who is seeking to clear his name of murder (yeah he’s a thief and a mafia member, but he didn’t kill his lover). She’s also about the only thing he really cares about at all. So of course I’ll be exploiting that when the time comes.
Also, I trust my friend to not make him a murder hobo. She’s not the type to find that fun or interesting and wouldn’t do that at my and the rest of the party’s expense.
Evil characters can be done right, but they certainly require more thought than the average murderhobo. There are many influential evil characters and "hero to villain" tropes to explore, heck, my favorite example of that is Arthas from Warcraft III. There is something very magical about a hero slowly getting twisted into the villain.
I know I have a character I'm currently playing that I'll likely try and play one day elsewhere if I can. Mostly because I originally built him in Pathfinder, moved to 5e, and had to change how his build worked due to mechanical differences (Natural Weapon abuse) only to learn I COULD do the Nat Weapon Abuse method in 5e. Oh well.
And for evil, I remember I had one who was a Chaotic Evil assassin who just liked killing and making people suffer. On the upside of that kind of character, Adventurers get REWARDED for killing people! Plus she was a pupper (Dungeons and Doggies. Pomeranian Assassin) yes the entire point was to take what's usually used as an excuse to disrupt but do it WELL for once.
Flight is so easy to deal with in combat (flying target gets all the threat from ranged enemies) and it actually comes up super rarely in exploration/ puzzles. Hell just say that bridge is in a windy cavern and have them roll athletics or a str save to fly safely over.
I banned Daern's from my games, but not because it got exploited. I have had dungeons wiped and even some creative uses involving Daern's Instant Fortress. That being said, when the Bard tricks the owner of said magic item to speak its command word in a cave. I'm sure it isn't the only self inflicted TPK, but it was a glorious one.
P.S. I once had a Dms wife ban the Dm from using Deniro and Pesci
Furries, Artificiers, Warforged, Silvery Barbs (in fact all Strixhaven content). Multiclassing: must retain any class taken for a MINIMUM of 3 levels or lose class features on a switch)
Polymorph into t-rex. Its just so devastatingly strong. I've had encounters just curb stomped by that thing. It makes other level 9 characters look like toddlers throwing a tantrum.
I have a rule restricting animal taming and befriending where, each wild animal my players try to tame has a DC of, 5+CreatureDC+X for taming an animal so it wont attack you, or 10+CreatureDC+X for befriending them as a pet. In both cases, X is a counter for how many pets they have plus how many they've tried to tame this session. I implimented it because in my last campaign they tried to tame almost everything and I wanted a set rule so I didn't have to keep coming up with DC's on the fly and it dissuades them from trying to tame everything since this way even a failure makes future potential pets harder.
An old manager of mine got banned from everything except a commoner, and somehow still won against the BBEG by getting the curse of the chicken with his bag of holding, pulling out a chicken about a quarter of the time, he abused this by dragging it on the beach, filling it with individual grains of sand. BBEG died via suffocation under chickens.(Edit) Side note, the mind control deck of many things stuff? A dm I played with once decided to basically force us to draw from one unless we could roll against drawing, whether we wanted to draw or not.
I have a lawful evil character ready to play. Her name is Froide L'hiver (quite literally cold winter in French) who is a winter eladrin and the heir to a noble family. Her mother died when she was young, leaving only her father to care for her. He was quickly shown to be psychologically abusive and always expected perfection from her, only for her to never be good enough. She was raised with the stereotypical noble values, making her fairly snobbish to practically everyone aside from other elves or nobility. Eventually the weight and pressure made her snap, vowing vengeance and destruction on everything that he ever built, starting her journey as a wizard to completely dismantle her own family name. If she ever meets her goal, I don't really know where to go with her, so I think it will be very interesting to see how the players interact, maybe warming her cold heart ever so slightly.
Edit: grammar
Simulacrum = sim-you-laa-crumb
Towards the end of the vid, your voice started morphing into swagger souls
One D&D game I'm in has the players creating a D&D adaptation of a character from an existing IP, like Goku from Dragonball, Garrus from Mass Effect, or Artorias from Dark Souls. Naturally, our DM has a list of characters he has explicitly banned, which includes such characters as Spongebob Squarepants, Garfield the cat, Pepsi-Man, and the Kid Cuisine Penguin.
Pepsi man? LMFAOOOOOO
I resource limit and restrict the Renegade subclass. To the unfamiliar its a subclass for fighters released in the Legends of Runeterra rulebook that was a collaboration with League of Legends, it's about using Hextech firearms and the flavour is neat if you're okay with it in your setting. The problem is the balancing.
The two things that define this subclass is the _gunfighter form_ and _firearm upgrades_
One of the possible forms is a sniper form that allows you to make a singular shot with increased range that gets around the extra attack benefits lost by being restricted to a weapon with the loading property. The damage here is fairly balanced, capping at 6d10 + Dex Mod at 20th level, but you only get one so miss and nothing. No extra attempts like with a longbow.
But then comes the firearm upgrades, at 5th level you can upgrade your weapon to have a double-barrel, you can now fire the shot twice. So thats a potential 12d10 + dex × 2. Thats some disgusting damage, but still kind of an all or nothing deal.
Have you noticed by now that I haven't mentioned any restrictions on using either feature? Well they don't have one. You can do 12d10 + Dex × 2, every turn, and then you have action surge to do the same again. Being a ranged weapon, firearms work with Archery, and Sharpshooter. So that's another +20 potential damage, +40 with surge, with a positive modifier to hit.
This subclass is busted, completely and entirely, and can be optimized at 6th level being a fighter with access to feats. So I limit the Sniper Form to being useable only proficiency bonus times per long rest.
Oh and I forgot to mention that at 7th level their shots surpass immunity to piercing damage. Period.