[ADRP] What’s do you think is wrong with Villain/Evil RP (Yes crime counts)

[Clovus-argent-dawn (Clovus)]

On the subject of alts, now would be a good time to bring up what actually makes a villain. There are a lot of “heroic” characters out there – most people, by default, RP someone with a “good” alignment – but I would be hard-pressed to categorize many of them as full-blown “heroes”. The Spear of Wrynn/Lionheart is arguably the most hero-focused guild we have had the past couple of years, but even there you have characters that have committed immoral acts if the situation calls for it – something I feel is lacking sometimes in villain RP.

The heroes aren’t just one-note, “save the world” characters that only ever do what’s right: they have personalities and goals of their own. If confronted with a villain, they usually act as one would expect, but when they’re not they often break away from the norm and do their own thing. Villains, in my experience, often exist only for the sake of antagonizing the heroes. If you RP a demon or other such monstrous races as a villain, then of course it might be difficult for you to do other types of RP, but at that point I wonder what the difference really is between a player-villain and a well-written villain in an event/campaign DMed by another player.

If you only show up for confrontations between your own group of unsavoury misfits and the “heroes”, is it really unfair to expect that you would be beaten and then forgotten about? Personally, I think even a villain should have a character outside the realm of “instilling fear/hatred” in their enemies, because much like the heroes treat the villain as just another obstacle, the villain shouldn’t revolve entirely around the heroes. I’ve been in a few evil guilds like this in the past, but I honestly can’t see much point of them today – especially not when it’s gotten increasingly common in recent years that guild members/friends RP as NPCs for another guild’s event.

[Irelsia-argent-dawn (Irelsia)]

The best villains are the ones you don’t know about.
…Ignore my transmog. It’s for pve, I promise.

[Duraiel-argent-dawn]

Looks at Guild name.

[Linrick-argent-dawn (Linrick)]

Stormwind criminal chars with trash motivations or attitudes which are totally at odds with what you’d need to be a successful career criminal

it’s like they’re weird anime people

[Yury-argent-dawn (Yury)]

One of the bigger problems in my opinion is the stale and tediously predictable trope of heroes win, villains lose. I think this is largely to blame on male human paladins glorified self-inserts whose plot armour is so thick their characters will emerge from any situation virtually unscathed because they’re just that formidable

Another gripe of mine is the one-dimensionality and complete lack of subtlety of a large portion of villain RPers, but that’s just personal taste and doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with being bad

[Rakihu-argent-dawn (Rakihu)]

Your Ability to win is tied to the quality of your emotes!

Go read Useful Threads Archive 1 - #6 by Halthrakk-argent-dawn for starters!

[Slerk-argent-dawn (Slerk)]

1. The complete lack of goals and motivation.

“Why is your character evil?”
“Because he is evil!”
“Ok, but what is his backstory that made him evil?”
“Well, his backstory is that he is evil!”.

U wot m8?

Villains in media usually have a background that turned them to what they are. Circumstances or events that led them to their goals, not because they are just evil out of pure evilness. Which blends into having no goals too.

In order to be on the “evil” side there has to be another side first who controls the setup of what is “evil” or “good” in their view. The person who persues “evil” then in the eyes of the good-doer is in their spectrum on the other end.

The whole villain thing is just a meaning of perspective. What is good, what is bad and so forth.

Prominent examples:

Voldemort. Why is he evil? Because he feels different to others and is hungry for power. In addition he can’t feel true love. Possible making him miserable as you can get and focusing his entire being on gaining power and immortality.

Arthas/Ner’zhul. Is he evil? Sort of. In the eyes of the light believers and good-doers, yes. In his own eyes? Wishing to unite everyone in undeath so that they can stand against the Legion is an idea. In his mind he is not evil and just tries to get the means of defeating the Legion in his own way.

Pain/Nagato. Getting a super weapon to just occasionally bomb a city or two to preserve peace forever in fear of the same fate happening to them. A very extreme measurement but it also is a way to accomplish a goal: peace.

So what a guild or in general a villain in RP needs is a goal and why he wants to get to that. Why is he (for example) persuing the void? Being united under the void because Horde and Alliance will never stop their war? Maybe joining the Scourge (or whatever remnant is there still of the Cult of the Damned) in fear of dying? To persue personal goals of might and power because your character is just fascinated by X thing?

Many possibilites and yet oftenly I see villains roleplayers just existing for the conflict with “good” sided characters. The motivation burns high first and then quickly dies down because there is no longtime goal to fulfill or persue.

2. The anime self insert.

Yes, evil characters can be powerful. Yes, they might also have a following or group. No, you don’t have to win every single fight and then head into the tavern.

If your character is a self-insert then please stop that. Yes, we know you got a little peepee and somhow try to compensate that with your character and his actions. However crying over /w OOC when one of your spells don’t hit is part of the roleplay. We aren’t in an anime where you are the protagonist. Please get that in your head.

3. The destruction of on going roleplay.

So at the end we will face two situations.

The villain character either gets killed somehow and the people cheer. Though OOC the guy got so hard hit with toxicity that he doesn’t want to continue playing on this character anymore.

Or the villain does not get killed because that character means something to him, however, the good-doers see that as a portray of powergaming and then mass ignore him because small peepee, self-insert, ego hurt and so forth. You know the drill.

Some villains just bring their character back. I don’t see an issue with it though if it happens on a regular basis it becomes a problem or how I say it:

4. Miscommunication between the rivals.

Communicating that your villain character will come back is a great way on how to establish on going roleplay. Communicating how important that character is to you and that you may even get a rivalry going between your guild / your character and another guild / another character is a great thing.

Though many do not know how to properly communicate such things.

Good guild kills X villain.
Villains is the next week back.
Good guild is asking how that is possible and villain guy says “oh, I got a soulstone haha!”
Good guild is upset because mentioning that would have been cool.

Letting your character come back is cool and all. If it happens every week however… it becomes stale and boring very very quickly. It even removes the entire danger part of your villains identity. In the context it means why not just attack Stormwind or whatever? Kill everyone on sight. You die, who cares? You will return.

There is a reason why the Cult of the Damned disguised themself as normal villagers my boi. And you should do the same with your villain character.

Here’s a crazy idea: join a house guild as a villain. Like Deathwing did. And then you climb the ladder slowly under the disguise of just some random peasant. You use your cunning, charm and methods to bring that guild into wars with others and why? Because your character got betrayed by a house guild in his life. Now you got a motivation, a reason and a neat backstory. Of course this is only an example. There are many more. Which brings me to my last point.

5. “I am evil, you are good, fight me now m7”

Palpatin. Voldemort. Albert Wesker. Hannibal Lecter. Ursula (The Little Mermaid).

I could go on and on with villains that used their charm, cunning and wits to trick everyone. No, doing spooky things in Duskwood will not help to portray your character as a true villain. Rather it is your actions that may bring OTHERS to do the evil deeds. Form a goal and then a plan what you wanna do. Maybe your character spots a naive character in some guild you dislike. Become a friend with that person and try to persuade them to do the evil things instead of you going full blown “I AM THE VILLAIN BTW!!!1”.

Of course a direct “I am the villain approach” can be done easily and is the way to get an instant response. Though how often does that work out for any villain roleplayer? Not so long, I can tell. Otherwise we would have a balance between good/evil people but currently we don’t.

[Vixí-argent-dawn (Vixí)]

Very similliar to some of Slerk’s points above, one thing I find to be bad, and particuarly in the current villian scene from what I have seen myself and heard, is extremly one dimensional characters.

Large, hulking monsters that just stand about and talk to eachother and have conversations like this:

“Grr…I’m so evil, I want us to go out and kill things.”

“Yes, I agree…its so fun to be evil and rip puppies apart and kick children, hahaha”

“Muhahahah”

“We’re bad.”

This is one of the more common villian styles and its kinda bad.
But, one counter-argument why this is the case that I have been told, and also makes sense, is that the good guy/hero rpers have this magical meta knowledge, and will just appear in mass and kill the villians, even if they are somewhere secretly or hasnt even gone out to make a big name for themselves yet. Thus the energy to put effort in is lost.

[Renford-argent-dawn (Renford)]

I think a lot of the difficulty really comes from the best types of “villain” in any given trope having to have one of three things to really make an impact.

The first is conflict. It’s the natural reaction, and quite rightly so, that we’re all the heroes of our own story so conflict and the concept of “losing” even temporarily is one that’s alien to a lot of RPers. As such, conflict is often out of the picture.

The second is grimdark “I R so Ebul!” RPers making villainy something of a joke to roleplay. You can do that, but only if it’s done well i.e. you don’t stand around populated cities full of guards walking by you every 30 seconds going “I’m gonna kill the king!” because realistically, that wouldn’t happen and even if you said that and got away with it you come off sounding like a Saturday morning cartoon villain.

The third is being a mastermind behind it all. This loops back to the first point that you are the hero, the protagonist, of your own story. Being the mastermind naturally means having followers, but having followers is difficult when no one wants to follow even for the purposes of pushing RP forward.

Now all of these can work really well, but the inherent problem is the ability of other RPers to actually accept you as being a villain and a credible threat, which they won’t because as the hero/protagonist in their minds they’re untouchable.

That’s my two cents on the matter in any case.

[Nithsethel-argent-dawn (Nithsethel)]

Crime/Evil RP is very hard to pull off well in WOW.

1. Crime guilds/criminal characters need crimes to be able to go commit, the bulk of the player base have characters that don’t want to be victim of a crime or if they are they want to get some sort of payback on the criminal/s either during the crime or after. So that in the main leaves criminals having to commit crimes against NPC’s and then having some sort of guard guild interaction to generate the RP.
2. You can’t go rob a bank, attack a merchant convoy, pillage a village, set fire to a building outside of a DM event, which is fine but again ideally you need victims of the crime, not that fun doing any of them if no one is there to witness it.
3. Criminals and evil characters will generally end up getting caught at some point, often the players don`t want to suffer the consequences of this, i.e IC imprisonment or death.
4. If your character is truly a master criminal or an evil genius then you would assume no one will ever know who committed any of the crimes, which ends up not generating much RP for anyone. If you are a good criminal you won`t brag about your actions down the local tavern, if you are a master assassin you won’t go around advertising it to anyone and if you’re an evil genius you won’t go round telling everyone that wants to listen what your evil plans are.

Having said that its not impossible to do it, you just have to do it in very subtle ways, instead of going round and advertising to everyone you are a wanted criminal, or the next evil mastermind plotting to take over the world. And ideally you need to link with other guilds with which you can do joint events and have people that are prepared to play the victims but equally have all the criminals prepared to take consequences for the crimes committed.

And finally and probably the biggest mistake made by many playing an evil or criminal character is, that evil characters generally do not think of themselves as evil, they have justified to themselves that everything they are doing if for a morally good reason (to them), criminals also should have a compelling reason as to why they are doing what they do, and a player should RP carefully on how the crimes they commit are then dealt with by them and how it effects the character. If you fail to build that into the RP of an evil or criminal character you tend to end up with a cartoon type character over an authentic evil/criminal character with a motivation/reason for being as they are.

[Thuzar-argent-dawn (Thuzar)]

@Alyndaria-argent-dawn

But say a villain makes use of your character to reach their own objective, while lying to you consistently and discarding helping too often on your objective unless it is to keep up the apparent “trust”. I believe that’s also, in some form, villainy. It doesn’t make a character lose, but they do not win either. That is what I think a lot of people do not see in villain characters, that there is potential.

@Irelsia-argent-dawn

The best villains are the ones you don’t know about.

/wave
Hello.

I been playing advanced 4d chess for years, at this point.

[Vervaina-argent-dawn]

@Irelsia-argent-dawn

The best villains are the ones you don’t know about.

However, that isn’t terribly encouraging as far as antagonistic narratives go. I absolutely get your meaning, but a totally and utterly unknown ‘villain’ might as well not exist as far as all other players are concerned. Some might be into that but to me personally, that sounds lonely and unfulfilling.

Now an antagonist that is known of but generally shrouded in more questions than answers? That is something for others to engage in.

[Wikkin-argent-dawn (Wikkin)]

Also important to note that Villain doesn’t need to mean EVIL/DESTRUCTIVE/ETC.

A villain is simply a person who’s goals are opposed to the goals of what is commonly viewed as the correct approach. An antagonistic force due to opposing views, rather than “lul, I’m -evil” — There’s hardly ever a reason to self-identify as evil, unless you’re on a particularly self-destructive streak.

For example, an innkeeper who charges outrageous prices, and refuses to serve specific people, all in an effort to get less customers to his establishment (which he inherited after murdering his grandmother, who previously owned it) – because he doesn’t want to pull attention to the fact that he uses the cellar to store and sell Murloc slaves, which he does because he’s saving up money so that he can ask a highborn (or whatever) childhood friend to marry him, and to do that he believes he must first be a wealthy man – Is by all accounts a villain, but moreso, he’s an antagonistic force due to his clashing views with society. He would justify his own actions along the way, because they’re not -that bad- compared to “true” villains. It’s not like he’s burning down cities! The end goal is a noble one, surely!

Eh?

Point being, “villain” isn’t always appropriate, and “evil” is almost never the way to go. Evil is what people identify you as based on their own morals compared to yours, not something your identity is built around.

[Sainur-argent-dawn (Sainur)]

please… before the expansion is over… stop these tier threads

[Duraiel-argent-dawn]

I wasn’t intending to do more than at least 5, ish… Maybe less idk. And I’ve done that.

That and someone flagged me for something, so… Bit late on that.

[Cállisto-argent-dawn]

It’s as simple as can be, when the question pops up, what is wrong with evil roleplay?
Many do not have what it takes to set ones plans in motion. They have either the aspect of being a softy or sudden “feelings” break through. Pfftugh, amateurs. Not many people with a true heart for agony exist i’m afraid.

[Irelsia-argent-dawn (Irelsia)]

@Vervaina-argent-dawn

I absolutely get your meaning, but a totally and utterly unknown ‘villain’ might as well not exist as far as all other players are concerned.

You seem to be under the impression that RPing is a villain should be for creating a narrative for the benefit of people around you, like an antagonist in a story only being what they are for the readers. I very much enjoy RPing my character! And people usually enjoy RPing with me.

@Vervaina-argent-dawn

that sounds lonely and unfulfilling.

I have many friends. Most don’t know what I get up to, beyond what they’re allowed to know.

@Vervaina-argent-dawn

Now an antagonist that is known of but generally shrouded in more questions than answers? That is something for others to engage in.

Again, I don’t RP a hidden motives character, like some undercover twilight cultist that leaves people clues, like some kind of Duskwood villain of the week. Rather, I just use methods that aren’t very ethical and don’t inform anyone ICly, but those who get to know my character will eventually realise there is more to her than meets the eye. Comes with being a warlock, eh?
_
Wanting to blow up a zone isn’t necessary for villain RP. People think you need to have some intricate plot that leads to events with the end goal of butchering a town or summoning a demon or something, but the truth is that it is just as viable to simply play a character that does things others would find abhorrent, for purely personal gain rather than to inflict harm to the locals.

[Alyndaria-argent-dawn (Alyndaria)]

@Renford-argent-dawn

The third is being a mastermind behind it all. This loops back to the first point that you are the hero, the protagonist, of your own story. Being the mastermind naturally means having followers, but having followers is difficult when no one wants to follow even for the purposes of pushing RP forward.

Regarding this, friend, I disagree – not every villain has to have followers willing to do their dirty work, or rather you don’t have to use people that are devoted to your cause. You can also, manipulate others and use them instead by tricking them. But that does not make them much of a follower.

@Renford-argent-dawn

Now all of these can work really well, but the inherent problem is the ability of other RPers to actually accept you as being a villain and a credible threat, which they won’t because as the hero/protagonist in their minds they’re untouchable.

I sort of agree with this, but then again it is not a huge problem – you can still be a villain and remain hidden, only to choose to backstab people at the right time. They don’t have to accept you as a credible threat, but you can be one. This applies, I think though, to ‘villains’ who aren’t really out-in-the-open necromancers.

But overall, that is a very good post you made!

[Vervaina-argent-dawn]

@Irelsia-argent-dawn

You seem to be under the impression that RPing is a villain should be for creating a narrative for the benefit of people around you, like an antagonist in a story only being what they are for the readers.

No one has an obligation to ensure other players have fun, so you can absolutely play an antagonist with no outwardly villainous impact. Yet role play is a team sport. If none are made even somewhat aware of the villain IC, then I wonder: Why have them be a villain type character at all?

If no one ever knows of the hero/villain, and they never interact with the world around them in such a capacity, nothing will have changed and they might as well not be there. To me (and again this is my personal view, no more or less), you have to apply your character in their entirety. Doesn’t have to be all at once or even to everyone, but you ultimately waste story potential in witholding it indefinitely.

I’m not saying that you have to cackle madly and light puppies on fire in the streets, you can be subtle while still leaving the occasional clue for others to take note of. If you’re already doing that with your friends IC, then we’re ultimately sharing a view on this matter.

[Irelsia-argent-dawn (Irelsia)]

@Vervaina-argent-dawn

If no one ever knows of the hero/villain, and they never interact with the world around them in such a capacity, nothing will have changed and they might as well not be there. To me (and again this is my personal view, no more or less), you have to apply your character in their entirety.

I really don’t understand that view, to be honest. I’d write something about it but it’ll just amount to “I disagree.” One of those fundamental disagreements, y’know. Having more potential for your character in reserve for maybe even a year or more down the line, maybe never seeing the need to use it, seems fine to me. Plus, I really don’t know why it’d be wrong to know more about your character than anyone else, just in general. It’s not as though they’ll regret never knowing about it.