A Disturbing Lack of Faith

I have come back from a really good session of Star Wars Saga Edition. It was the first session of a new campaign set about 1500 years before the films. The premise? All of the characters were Sith or employed by the Sith.

This made me think of something a reader (laydoth) said back when I wrote about the Black Crusade announcement a while back. In short, he said that playing inherently evil characters could exacerbate any PvP friction in a group; having a party wanting to kill each other does happen, even in a heroic game like Star Wars. Could having evil PCs make the game fall apart? Well...no. This is an account of the playing style of one particular player.

This was the guy who pulled a knife on an angry Wookie and publicly insulted a prominent Jedi master. While I admire the balls it takes to just do stuff in an RPG (I see no better motivation, really), it does often put his characters at odds with the rest of the party. Put simply, out of character we're laughing, in character we're facepalming. At least we could stop him from killing everyone in the room by reminding him of his character's assumed heroic nature, as per the themes of the game. Now his guy is acknowledged as being evil, I did fear we'd lose him to shooting all the NPCs and stealing their stuff, teabagging the corpses as he went.

Not so it seemed. Sure, he did pull a gun on one of the other PCs when he realised he was being paid way too low (the price of Intelligence 9, I afraid), but he also stuck with us even when offered a better job. He didn't just kill everyone, rather he thought about whether or not that would have been best for the group first, as you do when making a decision as to whether or not you should instigate something you can't stop.

If this proves anything, it's that role-players aren't always the violent animals their play style makes them seem. Their characters might bitch and moan at each other, and maybe use one another as meat shields, but none are out to get the rest killed just 'for the lulz'. Role-players are competent enough to consider actions before their characters take them, instead of just doing silly stuff and claiming it was "in character", even when they have every legitimate excuse to. I think Yahtzee Croshaw said it best when he said that "being a dick in a game is only fun when the game doesn't want you to be a dick; being a dick in a dick-simulator is just going along with it".*

So, I think a re-evaluation is in order: Black Crusade might be fine, folks won't be stupid when they can be. If Fantasy Flight make a heroically-themed 40k game, that's when the trouble will start.