Woo Ha Bad Guys RULE.
By Yva | September 14, 2009
Him: “RAWR! I AM A DEATHKNIGHT THAT IS AN AGENT OF THE LICH KING HIMSELF.”
Me: “Kay.”
Him: “INFANTS WEEP IN MY PRESENCE, WOMEN BEG FOR MERCY, MEN FALL UPON THEIR SWORDS IN FEAR FOR THEIR MORTAL SOULS.”
Me: “Yeah, whoa, okay.”
Him: “I WOULD LIKE TO VENTURE INTO AZJOL NERUB AND PWN N00BS. IC’LY OF COURSE.”
Me: “Heeeeell no. You stay over there /weirdo infant weeper person/. I’ll take you OOC’ly though.”
So, you RP a bad guy, a lunatic, an adulterer, a liar. Excellent, we need flavor in RP, yes? Of course we do. I commend you for your dedication to the craft of roleplay, but I do have a question:
ARE YOU PREPARED? – Illidan, 2007
I mean for the consequences of your RP decisions of course, and a lot of times, I see folks who play an anti-hero looking for ways to get OUT of the social perception of their nefarious deeds. It doesn’t work like that, and it shouldn’t work like that. Let’s say for example you play someone who lies all the time. That’s cool, the world is full of liars. Let’s say you have an incredibly important bit of information, though, and you MUST RELAY IT NOW BEFORE THE WORLD ERUPTS IN FLAMES! You run to your RP circle, you tell them of the terrible terrible that is terribling this way! And . . .
No one believes you.
Why should they? You’ve established yourself as a liar. The consummate roleplayer would laugh that this happens. When the terrible does its terrible thing, your character will be the one sitting on a beach sipping a margarita while everyone else is wondering why they’re dying of plague. (Serves ‘em right, yeah?) Too often, though, this is not the reaction. People get upset that other rp’ers hold past deeds against them.
“But I was really emphatic this time, I mean, I was like yelling and stuff.”
“So? Liars don’t yell?”
“But this was DIFFERENT.”
“Oh? How?”
“It just was!”
And then the liar roleplayer walks off in disgust or emos out in a dark corner listening to The Cure because no one understands how hard it is to RP this character. I have zero sympathy. You can’t relish the attention of being a bad guy and then conveniently see the light. It doesn’t work like that. Either commit to being a heel, accept that it means other people just won’t like you, or don’t even attempt to walk this path. You will find no satisfaction in the long run otherwise.
I’m going to speak to this phenomenon as someone who’s played the ne’er-do-well and had to work for years to get said character ingratiated with other players. Yva Darrows was (and is) a crazy little dead girl. She killed a lot of people in a lot of terrible ways. When I rolled her alliance side, long before deathknights were A Thing, everyone hated her, loathed her, and rightfully so. She was a pretty terrible person. Over time, though, I fostered a few IC relationship that proved key in making her roleplayable. My contacts worked on other people, vouching for her usefulness. All the while, Yva started killing bad guys and putting herself in the line of fire for the very people that hated her. Folks were still wary (and still are in many instances), but I’ve built up some good credit, and now I get invited along IC’ly AND OOC’ly. Sure, not everyone loves her, but after about two and a half years of good credit, she’s finally gotten to a place where people won’t attempt to kill her because she tries to sit at their table.
Progress! This is progress! No one’s throwing forks at me!
I’ve learned over time to embrace the anti-rotter sentiment as it’s flung my way. I like confrontation in roleplay, I invite it, because I feel that it better flushes out my character. It tests her limits, and the type of character I play needs that to keep her on her toes. Others may have different takes on it, of course, but for me, playing a morally ambiguous psycho makes me and (seemingly) most of the rp’ers around me happy. So I suppose my question to the readers is, what advice would you have as a player of a “Bad Guy” or as someone who has seen the “Bad Guy RP” go swimmingly well? I’d love to hear your thoughts and or suggestions.
Ta!
15 Comments
Corise on September 14, 2009 at 4:12 pm.
My best advice to anyone considering playing an evil character is not to forget that a lot of bad guys keep their ill intentions secret. It’s entirely possible to RP an evil character who SEEMS like a good character — until such time as their plans are revealed. (I think that FM has had at least one very famous example of this sort of storyline.) In fact, this is often a really good way to go, because it allows you to interact with other characters IC-ly in ways beyond simple antagonism. It can also be more realistic in some situations, especially if you are just starting out a new character — you have to ask yourself whether, given the circumstances, your uber-villain would really declare him/herself openly to people who will probably try to stop and/or kill him/her.
The problem with this angle, of course, is that you have to be willing to be patient. As in the case of RPing a character with a particularly tragic backstory, it can be almost irresistable to spill the beans to everyone you meet when your character has a big secret (like, say, being evil). And if your evil character exists purely to be a bastard, then the covert approach is probably not going to work so well. But I know several people who do a fabulous job RPing characters who are scheming and evil, with the characters around them none the wiser — for now, anyway.
Itanya Blade on September 14, 2009 at 4:15 pm.
LIES! Pill still throws forks! Well she would, but Davien won’t let her. /pout The real frustration that I had with the Yva storyline was all OOC. I know that Pill wanted to go after Yva over Mirandella’s death. She still hates Yva with a blindingly hot passion that hasn’t been dampened. In her mind, Yva needs to die.
But, I know (and Pill does too) that even at her best, Pill is not match for Yva. It’s part of what has made playing Pill a little off for me over the past few years. If I completely gave into the character, she’d die. And I’m not willing to sacrifice her, not yet.
Unless you’re playing someone who is just nice, there is always going to be someone that doesn’t like you. It’s the way things work.
But hey, remember when Pill rode the edge of bad taste, right when she first got involved in Nox? When she hated everything? She did change, but it was slow and it involved a lot of interaction and Pill had to prove herself. In the end, the truth is what most people know. That Pill is mostly harmless.
I often jokingly say that Dorri is psychotic. Though I am not sure that is the best definition for her. I think part of the problem is that we really do not live in a world like Azeroth. Humans are humans. Dorri is a racist, certainly. She’s also unbalanced. But is she psychotic? I don’t know. She’s definately not an anti-hero
Yva on September 14, 2009 at 4:17 pm.
Dorri’s not right, Dude. I’ll say that.
Itanya Blade on September 14, 2009 at 4:56 pm.
I don’t know what you mean? /halo
Bricu on September 14, 2009 at 4:57 pm.
I agree with Corise: Patience is the key virtue for the non-virtuous.
Given she’s a completely different race, its hard to say if she is psychotic. That being said, what do you mean by psychotic?
Also, yva, you dated yourself with the Cure. I think the kids listen to something other than Robert Smith these days.
Aleros on September 14, 2009 at 5:24 pm.
Nobody likes Xionn, I’ve gotten back into him, and it’s just fun to make people dislike him. I’ll say one thing, if it’s difficult but not fun you shouldn’t be doing it. I’ve noticed that I have a hard time with confrontation on Ale, because he’s not supposed to be disliked, whereas having gotten back into roleplaying Xionn, and to some degree roleplaying Vadras, my little shit heel noble – both of which are supposed to be disliked – it’s incredibly fun to play them.
Itanya Blade on September 14, 2009 at 6:01 pm.
I got told that they listened to Linkin Park.
And Bricu about Dorri, as I recall, psychotic is extreme socially deviant behavior teamed with narcissim (I’m sure something is spelled wrong in there somewhere). Given what I know about the Sin’dorei, I don’t think Dorri’s behavior is extremely deviant now. I will concede that since some of her less than pleasant traits started before the rise of the Sin’dorei, it may merely be the idea that blood elf society moved closer to her rather than the other way around.
And she is not narcissitic.
Is Dorri off? Yeah, there is really no way to argue that. But I still am not sure I would classify her as psychotic.
Arrens on September 15, 2009 at 8:50 am.
Arrens the rogue is violent, brash and an extreme narcissist. In his mind, there are few that can best him. And even with those that can/have beaten him to a battered husk of a Forsaken, he’d be loathe to ever admit it, even to himself. This, too, lends itself to being hard to RP at times. People don’t like him. Which is just as well since he’s not a likable character to most normal people. However, it’s opened up avenues for me as a roleplayer that many don’t like: It encroaches upon my comfort zone, which in turn opens up different types of writing.
My guild, Da Doctas, is essentially a school of medicine for the Horde. Arrens has no use for medicine or healing in general. If someone is too ill or injured to do their part in battle, he’d just as soon kill them to stop their bitching. He’s been threatened on numerous occasions with being removed from the school, but has always had the silver tongue to stay within his Headmistress’ good graces and find a way to blame the other party.
Being ICly called a bad guy has led to some of the most fun RP I’ve ever experienced. A Blood Elf warlock did that one time and mentioned how Arrens frequently threatened students on the campus and at our Clinics. Arrens turned the blame around and mentioned how a Blood Elf, one who used to consort with the Alliance many years ago, was consorting with demons and whose leader (pre-killing of Kael’thas) was a certified nut job. Ergo, in Arrens’ mind, it stood to reason that all Blood Elves were of the same ilk. It left the warlock stunned, dumbfounded and unable to defend herself.
Destril on September 15, 2009 at 5:12 pm.
Personally – and mad props to Pill for this – I think one of the best villains I’ve seen played in a while was Razkiel.
The little bugger was so damned *nice* to people while he was gathering information at the Nox fire from their gossip, all the while trying to destroy Dorri and Keltyr both. And seeing his behavior, knowing OOCly that he was a little snake in the grass, you let yourself hope that just maybe it wasn’t going to be all that bad, what he did…because the guy was so nice.
Even I was shocked when I read the first draft of the scene that described Dorri’s memory of what he’d done to her.
And RPing poor Dandill’s reaction as he realized what exactly he’d been harboring in the Vanguard the whole time was great fun – even if the consequences of how he helped take care of the problem have been “interesting” ever since.
Tarq on September 16, 2009 at 3:01 am.
Coming at it from a different angle: in the post, Yva discussed playing a character who was introduced as a little psycho and slowly humanized. I’ve spent the last 4+ years (Jesus fucking Christ) playing a character who’s been introduced to most as a charming, lovable rogue sort, and slowly let his predatory, manipulative nature show.
Tarquin was originally somewhat more of a White Hat than he is now; ingame events about a year into RPing him gave me the opportunity to derail his character and feed his paranoia and selfishness. But the basic recipe remains valid for playing a convincing villain – introduce yourself as someone that /people want to be around/. Hell, it’s quite possible to remain someone people want to be around even as you’re orchestrating and carrying out some pretty reprehensible shit.
Not everyone’s playing a character who thrives on duplicity and manipulation, of course, but I think there’s a bit of that in many effective villains – at the least, lying to themselves. Yva, for instance, is an awful liar, but her own insistence on embracing qualities of a Normal Life keeps her grounded and cordial, even when her life definitely isn’t normal. Another of WFR’s more morally bankrupt members, Laurus, solves every problem with a fireball and refuses to descend to the level of pretending to respect his boss (who is, after all, a commoner); however, his own rampant self-deception (He can’t lose! He’s Laurus Fucking Drachmas!) gives him a strange sort of geniality. Why /shouldn’t/ he be sociable with this pack of criminals and lowborn scum? He’s got nothing to lose.
And then, of course, there’s the Uthas Option – be something COMPLETELY OTHER than what you present yourself as. In this case, play a warm-hearted, fatherly peace preacher for a year, then reveal it all to be a massive setup for a nightmarish supervillain plot, and the character orchestrating it to be a batshit insane fanatic. Doing something like this takes a fuckton of effort and writing skill to pull off right, not to mention the cooperation of the players whose characters you’ve duped. But it’s pretty much the coolest thing ever.
The biggest issue, however, remains consequences. All four of the characters I mentioned in this post have had to address the fruits of their villainy at some point or another, and all taken different options. When Tarquin did his most immediately dire deed (the cold-blooded murder of a member of Order of the Rose), and word eventually got out, things got pretty fucked up. The plot did not go as well as I’d liked due to player miscommunication, really a case of too many cooks and a couple people with very different ideas. However, the gist of it was that Tarquin had to face up to what the murder meant to people he genuinely liked, and perhaps even more damaging, what it meant to the safety and reputation of the Wildfire Riders, the house he built to protect the people he cared about.
A few things going differently, or too far, could have easily made me not want to play him (the floated /suicide/ of one of the other Riders who participated in the murder, for instance.) So you always have to balance good storytelling against stuff that’s, you know, enjoyable in your day-to-day roleplay. With a mixture of accepting consequences and deceiving and charming his way around them, Tarquin was able to re-establish himself as a member of the greater RP community – with some authentic Villain Cred to boot.
He’s certainly fun to play, but to some people, he’s always going to be the guy who slit Hinote Kirase’s throat and threw her into a volcano based on a rumor. Hell, to others who’ve been around a long time – he might always be the Oathbreaker. And that’s cool. Just gotta know how to handle it.
Itanya Blade on September 16, 2009 at 11:31 am.
Razkiel was something of an unusal case for me. I normally do not create characters just to die. However, I knew I wanted to explore the third child and how Dorri ended up like she did.
As for Razkiel being nice, well it only seemed smart to me. This guy knows he’s going to be under suspicion and people are fundamentally stupid. So, he simply smiled and was pleasant.
But, he wasn’t Uthas like. He wasn’t doing any of it as a ruse for some grand scheme. After all, Uthas thought he was doing what he thought was right. Razkiel was singularly selfish.
Ezma on September 16, 2009 at 2:53 pm.
My rogue, Avaryce, is pretty much an outcast and doomed to remain so. She torments her siblings, even when she isn’t trying to kill them, and is the bitchest bitch to ever walk the face of Azeroth. She smirks at Dorri and PoL’s guild chat explodes. There is no redemption for her but I don’t want to kill her off either. The only thing that is going to keep her alive is that her siblings are a much softer touch than she is.
I’m never going to be able to get a group for her when I finally level her. *grin*
Itanya Blade on September 16, 2009 at 3:16 pm.
Well, to be fair, Dorri and Ava started off friendly to each other. It’s always fun to watch the rivalry develop.
Much the same as its been fun to watch Dalomire shine as probably the calmest of the PoL.
Ezma on September 16, 2009 at 3:20 pm.
Dalomire needs to be if he’s going to deal with Ezma!
Itanya Blade on September 16, 2009 at 3:52 pm.
You know saying that calmest of the PoL isn’t exactly like calling him calm, right? Cause they a pretty blood thirsty bunch.