White hats or black hats.

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Stumpydave

Stumpydave

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What do you prefer playing, good guys or bad guys? I've always been a fan of revisionist stories so will usually default to bad guys or, at the very least, anti heroes. But I know some people will only ever play Dudley DoRights.

So what's your camp? And if you're like me, where do you draw the line? Murder? Arson? Slavery? Rape?

(For the record, I'm not advocating actual crimes but I figure fictional crimes against imaginary people - whilst being unpleasant - are a matter to be resolved between consenting adults).
 
I much prefer white hats and heroes; people who generally protect the little guy and try to make positive difference. Most adventure games involve things that are hard, dangerous and probably violent. I like to feel at the end it was all worth it and mere survival or gettting more stuff doesn't quite cut it.

I can play bad guys for shorter adventures, and some have been memorable. But I quickly lose interest. I find I just don't bond with my character or the other characters in party and I just don't really care about the outcome of the adventure.
 
I prefer heroes on the whole. Villains are all right every once in a while as a change of pace, but I can never get as invested in such characters. Heroes are more compelling to me.
 
Big fan of ambiguous heroism fueled by enlightened self-interest, or what some might call “murderhobos” — people who may be moved by self-interest but stick to a code of ethics, however minimal (e.g. no arson, slavery or rape but not above murder as a means to an end) and end up doing the Right Thing.

Real life has taught me that sometimes, if you want to fix the really seriously wrong things in a system, you’re going to have to break the rules and get your hands at least a little dirty. Not necessarily “murder” dirty, but playing by the rules only gets you so far — that being said, some rules you just don’t break, never, ever.

This is the heart of the classic Western, where peaceful civilization is a fragile thing and the bad guys, the men with guns, are the barbarians at the gates. The heroes are men with guns, barbarians themselves, soiling their souls and giving up peace so everyone else doesn’t have to.

Conan is literally a barbarian who becomes a force for order and civilization.

There’s also shades of Ramon Llull’s writings on chivalry, where you have a soldier (miles) for every thousand men (mille), taking up the sword so the other 999 don’t have to.

And figuring out which are which sometimes makes for interesting gaming fodder.

(Except baby orcs. I don’t do baby orcs, or baby anything for that matter. Violence against children is something I just can’t cope with in any media.)
 
Good guys. I've had fun doing bad guys as one-offs in LARPs, but I don't find playing a rotter fun for more than the briefest of bursts.
 
The Butcher said:
Real life has taught me that sometimes, if you want to fix the really seriously wrong things in a system, you’re going to have to break the rules and get your hands at least a little dirty. Not necessarily “murder” dirty, but playing by the rules only gets you so far — that being said, some rules you just don’t break, never, ever.
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C47D1332-0847-4584-B772-BC989223578C.png
 
Typically heroes.

We've been blurring the lines recently. The biggest example is with two separate supers campaigns set in a world where registered heroes are the only legal ones and they work for a fascist government secretly controlled by the actual villains. The players tried to stay off grid and work from the shadows, but were actually labeled criminals and were hunted by the authorities. This was all heavily influenced by the Boys (My Homelander is called Commander).

In Between the players are monster hunters in Victorian London, but each is basically a monster in one way or another. The character based on Dr. Frankenstein is building its corpse monster from stolen body parts, the Sorcerer is making deals with evil spirits, the American Werewolf uses violence/kidnapping/intimidation, the Explorer has a dark colonial past, and the Unquiet is a ghost out for revenge. Dark/creepy, but they solve mysteries, fight monsters, and learn about friendship along the way. :tongue:
 
I prefer grey hats, although I accept that's a bit of a cop out answer.

The kind of hero I like is one like John Constantine. Morally compromised, selfish and an element of ruthlessness.

For bad guys I like someone like Ozymandias with motivations that make sense and who might even have a point if you look at them sideways.

In my experience mustache twirling "For the EVILS!" villains get dull very quickly.

Had that problem with Sabbat games back in the day. I was interested in stuff like the inhumanity of their theology and the internal disputes about the true definition of freedom. Most people I ran across interested into Sabbat games just wanted to shout "I eat the baby lol".
 
I would make a distinction between playing black hat characters and edgelordism (i.e. 'it's what my character would do.'). Play characters who don't do that shit - it's not much fun for the other players.

OTOH playing characters who are criminals or do morally ambiguous or compromised things is not bad in itself, but it's not the be-all and end-all of role playing and it's not necessary to make for an interesting game. One could base a paladin on Robert Baden-Powell, Sir Gallahad, Roger Ramjet or Guy of Lusignan and make a perfectly interesting character.
 
I prefer to play heroes. I don't mind flawed and slightly dark heroes, but they're still heroes.

A GM from back in the day once started bitching about how all we ever played were "goody two shoes." He claimed we needed to be "harder" and more "realist" meaning that we needed to play evil characters. You know, Evil. Universally known to be the most practical and pragmatic of moral outlooks.

So, when he ran TMNT, we did. We decided to play a pack of mutant wolves. We tossed morality to the wind, and based our characterizations solely based on what was good for the pack, and anyone external to us was either an ally, a temporary resource, or something to be eliminated.

And if I dare say, we played these characters good. We were absolutely ruthless and devious. Years of playing together had made us extremely good at coordinating our actions without explicit directions. We were a well oiled machine of complete self serving lupine supremacy.

The GM literally begged for mercy. He could not handle us with characters who acted in the way he had wanted us to act. We just told him that he had wanted us to not play good characters anymore, so we weren't. We were just operating in the way that was most expedient for his campaign. We were being extremely practical in his world without morals. He wanted a dog eat dog world, we were three big fuckin' dire wolves.

He gave up on the game, and insisted we go back to the old game and continue playing good guys. Those of us who played the wolves have fondness for those characters to this day.
 
The Butcher said:
Big fan of ambiguous heroism fueled by enlightened self-interest, or what some might call “murderhobos” — people who may be moved by self-interest but stick to a code of ethics, however minimal (e.g. no arson, slavery or rape but not above murder as a means to an end) and end up doing the Right Thing.

Real life has taught me that sometimes, if you want to fix the really seriously wrong things in a system, you’re going to have to break the rules and get your hands at least a little dirty. Not necessarily “murder” dirty, but playing by the rules only gets you so far — that being said, some rules you just don’t break, never, ever.

This is the heart of the classic Western, where peaceful civilization is a fragile thing and the bad guys, the men with guns, are the barbarians at the gates. The heroes are men with guns, barbarians themselves, soiling their souls and giving up peace so everyone else doesn’t have to.

Conan is literally a barbarian who becomes a force for order and civilization.

There’s also shades of Ramon Llull’s writings on chivalry, where you have a soldier (miles) for every thousand men (mille), taking up the sword so the other 999 don’t have to.

And figuring out which are which sometimes makes for interesting gaming fodder.

(Except baby orcs. I don’t do baby orcs, or baby anything for that matter. Violence against children is something I just can’t cope with in any media.)
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“Men can only be highly civilised while other men, inevitably less civilised, are there to guard them.”
George Orwell

I’d say that is the basis of the majority of classic RPGs.
 
Stumpydave said:
What do you prefer playing, good guys or bad guys? I've always been a fan of revisionist stories so will usually default to bad guys or, at the very least, anti heroes. But I know some people will only ever play Dudley DoRights.

So what's your camp? And if you're like me, where do you draw the line? Murder? Arson? Slavery? Rape?
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Yes.
I mean...drawing a line:shock:?

(My first PbP characters ever acted as a mercenary, because he was. The patron our GM introduced us to was a half-demon who was fighting against the Evil Cult.
So we played the first scene, where we agreed to fight the Evil Cult, effective immediately. I act like what I consider a realistic medieval mercenary.
At the end of it the GM observed: "your character is so evil, you could scare the poor half-demon".
And that was one of my Grey Hats, actually. He just didn't let much stand in the way of expediency...:gunslinger:).

Stumpydave said:
(For the record, I'm not advocating actual crimes but I figure fictional crimes against imaginary people - whilst being unpleasant - are a matter to be resolved between consenting adults).
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"There is a technical term for someone who confuses the opinions of a character in a book with those of the author. That term is idiot." - S.M. Stirling.

With that necessary preface: I've played all kinds of characters. White hats, admittedly, probably least of all - usually I prefer them, but most groups I've played with have been more mercenary...:grin:
So I make it a point to play well-intentioned heroes whenever possible.

OTOH, what does a "white hat" mean in a different society? One who behaves nobly by Tekumelian standards might seem villainous to us, and vice versa; and even without going for worshippers of Vimuhla, the All-Consuming Flame, a follower of Karakan is still going to be sacrificing people on festival days...
No need for a different society, even - a different time of our own society would present plenty of moral quagmires to those unwilling to adjust their perceptions...CoC players know that pretty well, and that's merely a century ago:devil:!

And so on and so forth. So I'd say most of my characters have been "grey hats"...sometimes "with a heart of gold".

But then I've played "black hats" aplenty, too. Mobsters, assassins, and anything else you care to name, have featured in my games. And I don't mean "as NPCs only":shade:.

Black Leaf said:
"Vimes had heard that good and evil were just two ways of looking at the same thing - or, at least, so said people traditionally considered under the category of "evil".

- Terry Pratchett
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Thank you, man. I was looking for this quote:grin:!
 
I think roleplaying games can have a place for characters akin to revolutionaries such as Michael Collins, coordinating units of guerilla fighters and straight up assassins. I wouldn't necessarily call nationalistic and republican independence a heroic motive as such.

I think there are games where it can also be worthwhile to play somebody like your Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar. There's ruthlessness there, but I wouldn't call it villainous. It's kind of more... there's a social context they exist in that can incentivize violence for political ends and/or at scale, and it's historically far removed that a person can be a bit clinical about it.

And sometimes you might want to just be somebody like a Disney villain; go hard, go at it with panache. Deeply wrong people, but maybe in a manner that is just far removed from reality, even caricatured a bit, as to not trivialise or trigger anything.
 
I tend towards light gray. I find sparkling white good characters kind of dull, being rather limited by rules and the moral high ground.

I'm much more prone towards something like Batman, Han Solo, Sam Spade, Dirty Harry characters more or less law abiding, but pragmatic with no issue bending the rules to reach their desired end.

I could have fun playing a "bad guy" but only to a certain point, a hit man with a code (Leon the professional, no women, no children), a high class jewel thief, a villain with a screwed up moral compass (Dr Doom) who just sees their actions as for the greater good, maybe, but just a brutal killer who kills out of convenience or worse just for fun, a conman who doesn't care about the consequences for those conned I have no interest in that. Hannibal Lector had some standards of behavior which makes him an interesting character on screen but not one I would personally enjoy playing.
 
I've been fairly amoral fellas in Vampire games, since it makes sense in character to think very little of humans in the long run.

Overall I'd have no strong preference, it depends on the genre.
 
I generally prefer the banality of goodness to teflon-coated heroics. As a GM I prefer to accommodate characters who have jobs doing the right thing, but who are labouring at the coal-face of the fight against banal evil while also raising kids and paying a mortgage, rather than saving All That Is Pure And Good with world-changing heroics. I’d rather GM Sam Vimes than Frodo Baggins.

Similarly, when I do set up a campaign for scoundrels I prefer thieves and con-artists to murderous looters.

Like a couple of the earlier posters to this thread I have occasionally been asked by a GM to play a truly evil character in an Evil campaign (e.g. the intelligence officer in a Drow embassy, built as a D&D 3 bard with a hat of disguise), and there, like the others, have startled and rather horrified the GM with a vision of what Evil might be if it were neither vain, nor attention-seeking, nor stupid.
 
It kinda depends on the setting but my default morality in fantasy games is "murderhobo with a heart of gold" based on Robert E Howard's Conan. He has a rough code of honor and justice that is often at odds with the law or customs of civilized lands. He has no qualms about stealing or killing but doesn't take advantage of the weak and powerless (particularly women and children). He keeps his word and can be trusted.
 
Random, hence why I like random char-gen and some vague form of alignment/path/demeanor structure -- I can dice it! :dice: I find exploring that which I did not anticipate pushes me out of my comfort zone, and I enjoy the unexpected results. It also becomes gaming fodder for how to enliven future NPCs when I GM.

Though you can get a little overwhelmed by playing one mask too often or too earnestly. Stick-in-the-mud Lawful or cloying sweet Goodness or "cluster B!" chaotic or soul-sickening Evil... sometimes wearing the mask feels like it leaves unwanted residuals. Then the toy mask needs to rest in the box for awhile so one can re-center. Many performers know the story when the fiction gets too under the skin, you then need a break.

But yeah, bring on the options, let's explore personality & motivation! :heart: (I guess that makes my hat paisley. :wink: )
 
One of my most notorious villianous character was a private detective in Shadowrun called Paul Cezanne, like the painter. He wasn't a sadist or killer, he just had no morals. He closed on case by pinning the crime he was investigating on another player character because it was convenient. Despite this, the rest of the party didn't quite catch on that this guy was scum.

In the season finale, the party were surrounded by mafia goons becuase he'd come into possesion of a suitcase full of cash the belonged to a mobster. We were totally out manned and out gunned. Cezanne offered to give himself up, not out of altruism but because he figured he stood a better chance of surviving by making a deal with mobster than in firefights. The party would have nothing of it, stood their ground, and engaged the goons. In the confusion, Cezanne grabbed the suitcase, and slipped away why the rest of the party died covering his escape. Go figure, right?

This was a long time ago. I wouldn't play that kind of character these days let alone undermine the other players this way. But if I am going to play a selfish character with no scruples, this is the sort of thing I leads me to.
 
These are great, and a little bit worrying. For years I'd convinced myself that Millenials were a bunch of hippies who believed in absolute good and evil, and it was them who only played heroes and saviours.
Turns out I'm a deviant freak with few morals and less boundaries.

My favourite character type is the lone wolf/antisocial antihero who does the necessary roughness for the greater good.
Those few times I have played unremitting monsters (ok, more than a few) my crimes have rarely gone beyond cinematic torture, murder, theft, fraud and property destruction. I'm not one for sexual crimes or any sexual stuff in game (I'm more likely to fade to black on any sexual stuff that might arise in game) but that's a personal choice. Let's face it, who really wants to discuss the inner fantasies of a fat dwarf with a deep seated little man complex?

However, if I do play an 'evil' character I have few to no bounds. The end justifies the means.
 
I'm thinking about the roleplaying potential of Walter White, who could well be said to have been the most popular character on television for four or five years.

I don't think of Walt as an antihero. I don't think of him as morally compromised. I think of him as a character whose motivations and strength of will were the kind of thing that smashed through his moral considerations and made them irrelevant.

There were maybe some times where he made decisions according to a metric of being a good person or doing right by his family, but looking at him on the whole makes it clear that such things are mostly just extensions of his own ego. His concerns for the image of a father that he'll leave with his son end up overriding any action to actually be the kind of father his son needs emotionally.

Maybe some of the people Walt was opposed to were worse than he was (although not all of them, I think), but in the end he destroyed them because they were in his way or a threat to him and his, not for any kind of greater good. And really, he associates with the worse people as often as he destroys them; if what they do serves his purposes, he can tolerate them, even harness them.

And he manages to pull a lot of it off with panache and audacity and a terrifying but magnetic intensity.

That, to me, seems like a great kind of character to try bringing to life.

On a different track of compelling fictional characters of dubious character, there's the example of Heathcliff. Real prick he was; no one should terrorise their neighbourhood.
 
Isator Levi said:
On a different track of compelling fictional characters of dubious character, there's the example of Heathcliff. Real prick he was; no one should terrorise their neighbourhood.
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I certainly wouldn't want to be on his bad side...

Heathcliff_promotional.jpg

More seriously, I think I would say (like Séadna Séadna) that it depends on the genre and the game. If it's a noir private-detective setup, then my character is going to be very morally gray, probably with Peter Lorre as a model. ('You despise me, don't you...') If it's Pendragon, then I'm much more likely to play the chivalrous knight out to protect the poor and weak.
 
Lofgeornost said:
More seriously, I think I would say (like Séadna Séadna) that it depends on the genre and the game. If it's a noir private-detective setup, then my character is going to be very morally gray, probably with Peter Lorre as a model. ('You despise me, don't you...') If it's Pendragon, then I'm much more likely to play the chivalrous knight out to protect the poor and weak.
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It does for me, but I think I still mostly end up playing morally dubious characters relative to the setting.

In Blades in the Dark, I'm going to end up playing a full on bastard of a gangster who still loves his old mum. In Pendragon, I'm not going to play an evil knight but I am going to be tempted to play an overly boastful recently knighted Saxon.
 
Séadna said:
Actually in Pendragon it's an interesting case, in the Uther period I'd probably play a rougher, more violent Cymric Pagan knight. However by the Tournament period I'd play a virtuous Christian knight.
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Pendragon is definitely one where I'd go "hero with a notable flaw" rather than "roguish antihero" though, I think it works better for the game.
 
Black Leaf said:
In Pendragon, I'm not going to play an evil knight but I am going to be tempted to play an overly boastful recently knighted Saxon.
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I expect the tone of this game to lead more towards the romantic, but the subject does make me wonder what counts as an "evil" knight in relative and historical terms.

There are ways in which I'd look at it from the knight's perspective; a lot of their livelihood really depends on there being a war going on, so you get a lot of instances of knights inciting wars. Is that evil? I look at accounts of what it's like to be a knight during a period where that hasn't been war for too long, where you can't even make for a decent bandit because your weapon is in shambles, and I can sympathise a bit with the motivation to not end up like that. It's not exactly the knight's fault that the social model doesn't exactly afford retraining options.
 
I lean toward characters who are good-ish... but might go about it in questionable ways.
Like, never steal from an orphan... but maybe rob a bank to fund an orphanage.
Never intentionally hurt a kid... but maybe use them as bait in traps for monsters who have been eating kids.

Whatever color hat THAT is... I'm wearing it.
 
Isator Levi said:
I'm thinking about the roleplaying potential of Walter White, who could well be said to have been the most popular character on television for four or five years ... That, to me, seems like a great kind of character to try bringing to life.
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And as long as you do that archetype in one-on-one gaming, you're likely to be alright.

That's one of the big problems in playing Nasty Bastard characters: that the standard is to game in groups, who all reasonably want a fair share of the face time, and aren't necessarily down with playing the Nasty Bastard's lackeys or targets.

Many years ago, I did an "all-evil" group as an experiment. Only one player truly got into the swing of it; the rest played amoral characters, but nothing that you could call capital-E Evuuuul. Now that group foundered because I was running four groups at the time and players traded off as their schedules required, but ... how long could I have kept it up?

And I wonder how many of us have ever genuinely roleplayed evil? No, I don't count kill-em-and-take-their-stuff -- we've been conditioned for nearly fifty years now to think of the mooks we hack as nothing more than the one-dimensional blips we take out in video games. Nor do I count putative repercussions that we don't actually have to see play out. I'm not even sure I want to count PvP campaigns: betraying your buddy there isn't any more "evil" than bankrupting your buddy in a game of Monopoly. I definitely don't count "My alignment is Chaotic Evil" or "My character worships Beelzebub" -- those choices seldom have any more psychological impact than picking the battleship or the flatiron over the boot or the dog in that Monopoly game.

But how often do we spit babies on our spears, and laugh in the screaming parents faces? How often do we respond to NPCs saying "I left half the virgins for you guys to rape" with "Thankee, don't mind if I do!" Probably not very often at all.
 
One of my favourite types to play is the guy who wants to be the evil overlord someday, but his heart of gold always gets in the way. So he comes across as mean and mercenary, demanding payment to help anyone in need and so forth, but ultimately not actually taking the money for some reason (and then grumbling about being “forced” to do the right thing afterwards).

I’ve gotten a chance to play this character a couple of times, and it’s been very enjoyable and amusing for both myself and my fellow players.
 
Isator Levi said:
I expect the tone of this game to lead more towards the romantic, but the subject does make me wonder what counts as an "evil" knight in relative and historical terms.

There are ways in which I'd look at it from the knight's perspective; a lot of their livelihood really depends on there being a war going on, so you get a lot of instances of knights inciting wars. Is that evil? I look at accounts of what it's like to be a knight during a period where that hasn't been war for too long, where you can't even make for a decent bandit because your weapon is in shambles, and I can sympathise a bit with the motivation to not end up like that. It's not exactly the knight's fault that the social model doesn't exactly afford retraining options.
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In Pendragon canon (at least the latest edition) the situation is this:

The vast majority of "evil" knights aren't really. Mordred is petty and selfish and arrogant, but he's not actually evil, just human.

But there are a handful of NPC only knights who are what they look like; knights that have sold their souls to the devil. Obviously, that's not historical at all but it fits with some of the Arthurian stories. It's rare, but they do exist.
Ravenswing said:
And as long as you do that archetype in one-on-one gaming, you're likely to be alright.

That's one of the big problems in playing Nasty Bastard characters: that the standard is to game in groups, who all reasonably want a fair share of the face time, and aren't necessarily down with playing the Nasty Bastard's lackeys or targets.

Many years ago, I did an "all-evil" group as an experiment. Only one player truly got into the swing of it; the rest played amoral characters, but nothing that you could call capital-E Evuuuul. Now that group foundered because I was running four groups at the time and players traded off as their schedules required, but ... how long could I have kept it up?

And I wonder how many of us have ever genuinely roleplayed evil? No, I don't count kill-em-and-take-their-stuff -- we've been conditioned for nearly fifty years now to think of the mooks we hack as nothing more than the one-dimensional blips we take out in video games. Nor do I count putative repercussions that we don't actually have to see play out. I'm not even sure I want to count PvP campaigns: betraying your buddy there isn't any more "evil" than bankrupting your buddy in a game of Monopoly. I definitely don't count "My alignment is Chaotic Evil" or "My character worships Beelzebub" -- those choices seldom have any more psychological impact than picking the battleship or the flatiron over the boot or the dog in that Monopoly game.

But how often do we spit babies on our spears, and laugh in the screaming parents faces? How often do we respond to NPCs saying "I left half the virgins for you guys to rape" with "Thankee, don't mind if I do!" Probably not very often at all.
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I don't actually consider Evuuuuuul characters as believable, although I accept there's exceptions in real life (serial killers and others who murder for unfathomable reasons).

But mostly, they're Dark Lord or Supervillain types and assume a morally black and white game world.

Far more scary from my perspective are those whose responses to screaming parents is not a laugh but a shrug. Those who rape the virgins not for the evils but because they don't see civilians from an enemy country as people. Those with an iron clad belief in the righteousness of everything they do.

I've played two characters that come close to that.

Mr Mole, in Unhallowed Metropolis. A local gangster with his fingers in a lot of pies. Always polite and never raised his voice even when angry. Even had a bit of a "heart of gold" trope, with a soft spot for street children. (He'd grown up on the streets himself). He also never broke an agreement for the entire game. He was also utterly ruthless. If you crossed him, he would think nothing of targeting not just you but your loved ones. Everything was "just business" with him and that lack of personal attachment meant he wouldn't think twice about anything if it was in his interests. He was a good boss if you were doing well (he was actually pretty generous to favoured underlings) but for failure he'd switch from "well, that was bad luck" to cutting off fingers with no warning.

Even worse was Oliver Mills, my Toreador in Vampire LARP. He was insane to the point of having blue and orange morality, but was high functioning enough to be the Head Harpy. Everything was either amusing or boring. He had no artistic talent but got round that by getting minions to produce it for him. He'd heavily hit them with presence repeatedly and then when he got bored of them would just disappear from their lives (frequently leading to suicide). The Baali gave up trying to corrupt his mortal followers because they were already too fucked up for it to work. Perhaps his *finest* moment was when the ghosts of people's victims turned up in the domain. Some apologised and felt guilt. Others tried to justify it as part of their existence. Oliver's response was neither of those. He was merely confused at why these people he no longer remembered thought this had relevance. He eventually fell to the beast entirely, which was pretty inevitable.
 
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