In City of Heroes, I will ignore cries of help from the civilians who are being mugged. “Yeah, I’d help, but I have more important things to do.”
Honestly, if you stopped every crime you came across in Paragon City, it’d take you two days just to get to your destination.
I sometimes stop to help if the criminal sees me and hurls an insult my way. Yes yes, you’re being mugged. But he made fun of my cape and must now pay.
(Ok not so much evil as self-absorbed)
I’d say my times as a serial killer of children and the homeless. That was pretty bad.
This was in Fallout 2
edit: sorry didn’t realize this was for pen and paper rpgs
“No capes!” - Edna Mode
As GM of my last Forgotten Realms campaign, I decided that the end result of the actions of the player characters was that the world as they knew it descended into chaos and barbarism, with every major city in the world (Waterdeep included) burning brightly, and the vast majority of the population falling prey to the wild creatures of the night as they fled.
Then I found out that they were planning to do that anyway with the 4E conversion, and I didn’t feel so evil.
The ability of otherwise innocuous people to do trivially evil things is one of the reason why you can’t target NPCs for attacks in World of Warcraft; as it is, every village you pass by, all the cows, chickens and rabbits are dead. If you could add NPCs to the list, all the little kids would be dead, too…
of course, the town guards might not like that so much, but still… if I could go into Stormwind, kill Billy, and give that little girl her doll back… there’d be a line stretching clear to Ironforge.
Half Life isn’t an RPG, I know, but I’m one of those people who enjoyed playing Gordon Freeman as a dangerous psychotic. I made it a point to leave no surviving scientists or Barneys behind me other than the ones whose death caused you to automatically lose the game. It was a severe disappointment to me that in the sequels you can no longer off NPCs.
I’m a DM and I like putting moral conundrums to my players. One of those moral conundrums drove them last week they wiped out an entire village of wild elves, children and all.
This reminds me of the last campaign I played last fall. We were tracking something unrelated in the sewers when we stumbled across underground goblin territory. We must have killed half the clan’s warriors and mages before someone thought to ask if maybe we shouldn’t be slaughtering them wholesale. As it turned out, our face managed to sweet-talk the goblin chief into ending hostilities and providing us safe passage through their territory. We felt guilty as hell on discovering that they weren’t really our enemies.
After that, I and the other front-line fighter would continually ask, “Okay, are THESE guys safe to kill?”
The very, very aptly titled “Demon Path” from Nippon Ichi’s Soul Nomad. You become so fucked up that even the supposedly worse-than-you evil demon who’s using you as a soul jar (long story) is disgusted by your actions. And the Demon Path is generally only feasible after your first playthrough, so see you thwart all the good you did in the Normal Path is disturbing on so many levels.
The two endings for this path are pretty damn depressing, too.
[spoiler]Should you lose the final battle where all of the story characters defect and fight against you, you end up you sealed in the sword that originally held Gig, the evil demon, with your space cadet childhood friend keeping you company forever and ever.
Should you win, you eat Gig, destroy the gods of both your world and the neighboring parallel universe that was running a huge Xanatos Gambit to take over, and then go on to erase all of existence.[/spoiler]
A lot of gaming groups would balk at that sort of thing-I personally like that sort of thing, as basically knowing that everybody in the group can be trusted really Carebears things, but everybody has to be an adult about it when the stab comes down, and many people can’t as they are too attached to the style of game they thought they were playing.
Bah! If I’m not gonna get XP I ain’t stopping. There’ll be another hero along any second. Paragon City is lousy with them.
Its too bad you can’t do something really villainous in the Rogue Islands, though.
Armageddon is the boy. I remember letting that off once in Ironfist just 'cos I was peeved at the Followers of Baa who were making themselves a nuisance. Then I checked my reputation and oooops. :smack:
But you can always Reanimate the peasants back to life again, as long as you haven’t robbed their dead bodies of the few coins they had (which makes the bodies disappear) and they won’t mind (they take grave exception if they see a peasant being killed, but the bad attitude doesn’t last beyond their own death). Saintly is the top reputation and is thoroughly achievable if you’ve a number of good quests left.
Sometimes I’ve found it an amusing challenge to go from Saintly to Notorious without killing anyone. It’s doable, though it takes some work.
Ah, you’ve conflated MMVI and MMVII. Only the latter game has Grand Masters and only it has limits on what spells you can learn… and only in MMVI is it possible to learn both Light and Dark, with the rep requirements for mastership (which increases the spells’ effectiveness).
As you may guess, I have spent far too much time on these since 1998. I still get mileage out of MMVI - sadly, MMVII doesn’t like the video cards or DirectX or something in the computers I have these days. 
I’m definitely talking about MMVI, because I never played MMVII at all.
I’ll concede I misremembered the titles.
In MMVI there were several schools of magic, and only by receiving teachings from adepts scattered around the map could you grasp enough of the concepts to learn the higher-level spells in each school. At least, that’s what I remember.
Now that’s a story I’d like to hear.
:: pulls up a chair and rests his chin in his hands ::
In Fallout 2, after being dissatisfied with the return my character’s wife brought in from fluffing for pornos in New Reno, I had my character take her into the desert where he shot her dead. Just to watch her die, evidently.
My most evil gaming exploits actually took place in the original Sims. I had a death house (appropriately owned by the Grim Reaper), outfitted with torture chambers and decorated with all sorts of evil paraphernalia. Downloaded teleporters were used to get other characters into the torture chambers where they would starve to death or incinerate themselves with the deadly fireplace/rug/houseplant combination. The latter was particularly funny as the firemen could get into the house but were stopped by the clear, impenetrable walls of the torture chambers!
Strangely, you misremember, and have managed to hit by accident on how it works in MMVII, where you have to be a GM to learn the top-level spell in any school, a Master for the next three down, an Expert for the next three below that, and just need to know the school to be able to learn the four lowest-level spells. (In MMVII promoted Archers and Paladins could learn Light magic to Basic level, which wasn’t wonderful but did include Light Bolt, Paralyse and Destroy Undead.)
In MMVI the spells themselves have to be bought at the Adept guild if you want a chance at the highest three levels (e.g. Meteor Shower, Inferno and Incinerate in the Fire school) but any schmoe can learn even the highest-level spells, although, say, Lloyd’s Beacon is pretty feeble when cast with Basic knowledge of Water magic, and feebler still if your skill level is only 1.
Good point, and it could’ve gone very, very poorly in the end. As it was, everyone knew it was the final game sessions (and the PC’s DID manage to get the McGuffin back by pulling out all their last ‘saved for emergency’ tricks), and the event itself became so popular I’ve had other players ask me if they can do the backstabby thing in other games. I’ve allowed it twice. The first time it ended up very minor and everyone saw it coming, too, so it wasn’t a big deal.
The second time the ‘traitor’ sold the PC’s out to the major villain, who put them in a death trap… And then threw the ‘traitor’ in, too. “They can’t trust you… Why should I?” (The traitor got away with a super-speed punch to the jaw, and an admonishment that he’d better get them all out IMMEDIATELY or he’d not be walking away on two legs.)
Lots of opportunity for mayhem in Oblivion. Lock-picking, stealing, murdering, horse theft, destruction of property. The guards are bad-ass though.
Back in the dim, dark days of tabletop D&D, I used to play regularly with a group of friends. We started a new campaign and for grins, I cobbled up a mostly dwarf character that was a mixture of things, including some minor thieving skills. Shortly after the beginning of the campaign, I slipped a note to the DM that I was picking a buddy’s pocket for practice. Amazingly enough, I was successful and I got a talisman that would restore life.
Needless to say, he didn’t need that talisman all through the campaign until the last minutes. And when he went to invoke it…and didn’t have it…all hell broke loose. He got really pissed at me in RL for picking his pocket 10 minutes into the game.
Heh, heh, heh…
Everquest1
the game has zones, when you cross a zone line the game pauses and loads the new zone where you pop out ready to go
most zones you walk through, there was one into “the hole” that you could fall through, usually ending in your immediate death from falling damage or baring that there were a couple dozen monsters nearby who were happy to finish the job.
(on a side note I am still the only person I know of who not only survived the fall but managed to escape as well)
so I would stand up near the top where players (as in other people) would run past on their way to some place else and I would do 2 things, 1st cast a super fast spell that would lower disease resistance
and 2nd cast a spell that would throw them in the direction I was facing at the time about 30-40 feet you can guess where I was looking.
note that when you die in everquest you spawn naked and must go to your corpse to retrieve your gear…not an easy task when you have no gear and your corpse is deep in the hole
pen and paper I once fireballed about 80 orcs who had decided to worship me…after leading them in a rebellion and winning, then after making them pile up all the treasure and gear and stuff all nice and neat…and using them to round up horses and wagons and all that…come to think of it that wasnt even close to the most evil thing he did but it was fun.