Depends on which Total War we’re talking about. Capturing prisoners for ransom was how many European noblemen made their bread in the Middle Ages, and is the reason many of them showed up to a given battle in the first place. Quite a few local wars and raids got off the ground simply because a passel of nobles wanted to make a quick spot of cash that way.
Fact is, in M2TW you can pretty much float your empire just by capturing kings or heirs and turning them over for ransom (the cheating AI is almost always flush, especially in the harder difficulties). Then capture them again a turn later
The Japanese however didn’t really go for the prisoner thing at all, I’m given to understand.
Fallout 2: sleep with Miria or her brother Davin (they seem to swing both ways). Get caught by their dad, and if you can’t convince him you were playing doctor, be subjected to a shotgun wedding. Now you have an utterly worthless companion who can’t be left behind, and takes a follower slot. You options now are to a) kill him/her, b) divorce (considered a bad thing for some reason), of c) sell your spouse into slavery. You can then tell their dad, who will have a heart attack.
You can also give chems to your heart-problem companion, killing him instantly. Booze and radioactive soda is okay.
The only time I ever nuked a city in a Civ game was just to see what they do. Turns out, they’re really not worth it (at least, in Civ3). However, starving captured cities is now such a standard part of my MO that I don’t even feel guilty about it: The fewer enemy nationals there are in a city, the lower the chance that they’ll revolt and revert to their previous allegiance. Besides, often a captured city will be either starving or rioting anyway, since most happiness structures get destroyed in conquest.
In Skyrim, I enjoy coming with all kinds of maniacal behavior:
When we’re about to go to war in Windhelm, the General assembles the men on a bridge to give them a pre-battle pep talk. I take the opportunity to Fus-Ro-dah (magical shout force blast thing, for the non-Skyrim players) the entire army off the bridge. The general doesn’t seem to notice.
Whenever I assassinate someone, I leave the corpse in bed with a sleeping family member.
Of course, this is a game where some of the quests involve helping or rescuing an NPC, only later to betray and murder them at the behest of a diabolical demigod, so it’s all pretty much par for the course.
Command HQ: nuke most of the Middle East’s oil fields and station large garrisons on the rest. Wait for the other side to run out of oil and become immobilized.
Red Dead Redemption: tie criminals to the tracks and wait for the train.
Just Cause 2: never could get the hang of towing someone behind a vehicle but I’ve done pretty much everything else. Including being a one-man demolition squad with the help of a trainer set to invincible (only possible ways to die are by being exploded or drowned).
Fallout 3: yeah, one of my characters nuked Megaton and enslaved people.
Not really evil evil, but way back when there was a cowboy game on the Commodore 64 where you go to different conversations with the townspeople and you have a list of responses to select from during these interactions. I remember goading the local doc and calling him a drunk, then being an ass to the cute schoolmarm, then bullying the guy with a new rifle until he shot me. Then the game got dark and the conversation continued with the doc, who was stammering and hiccuping, who then pronounced that there wasn’t anything he could do for me.
I’m a complete monster when games are more abstracted. I’ll happily commit widespread nuclear genocide in Civilization, but god forbid I hurt a shopkeeper’s feelings in an RPG.
That said, I think I did some pretty dickish things in Dark Souls. I think I killed Priscilla, for instance. As well as a few named NPCs that really didn’t deserve it.
In at least one of the Might & Magic games, there was a spell that would do a lot of damage to every creature in the zone. A powerful enough party could cast it enough times to kill every single creature in the zone that didn’t happen to have a couple clerics in the party…
This included all the civilians walking around town. Once they repopulated, they tended to take a dim view of the party.
In WoW, most of my human characters spent most of their early levels running around Elwynn Forest exterminating all the chickens, bunnies & cows with a shovel. It is worth noting that Rift rewards this behavior.
In Deus Ex, if you set people on fire, they run around with their hands in the air before they fall over and die. I used the phosphorous grenades and incendiary rockets even when it was overkill just to watch this.
In Morrowind, you could craft an expensive piece of gear that would do a steady damage-over-time to the wearer. I’d make one and sell it to a vendor, who would then put it on and slowly die, at which point I could loot his shop with relative impunity.
In the Eschalon RPG, there’s a place where an old man has a chest with items in it for you. The catch is that if you leave and come back later, the game no longer treats the items as yours. He thinks you’re stealing from him and he attacks you. If you kill him, the entire town attacks you. Well shoot… it’d been a long time since I last saved, and I didn’t really need anyone in that town anyway… So I butchered my way out of town through a crowd of old men, little girls, priests and shopkeepers.
Actually, quite a few people seem to take perverse pride in wiping out all of the NPCs in that game. The same can be said for my other favorite games, the Geneforge series.
It’s not a video game, but as a kid, I loved the Lone Wolf series of choose-your-adventure books These were sort of a cross between an RPG and a traditional CYA book. Eventually, I decided to add to the challenge and keep score of how many bad guys I killed. Then I decided to color code my kills to track innocent people and animals as well. It’s amazing when you keep track of it just how many kills in those books are people and animals who just happen to get in your way and are not actually enemies.
The only thing I can remember feeling bad about is in Dragon Age: Origins. One of the quests involves finding Brother Genitivi. Nice old fellow, harmless. But, he wanted to tell the world about a legitimate healing miracle. I asked him, twice, to keep quiet.
I actually started a thread about this a while back.
I have caused more Sims to set themselves on fire than I can remember. Set up the barbecue inside the living room, and fwoosh.
I used to make sport of following around lowbies in WoW as a level 70 warlock. I would wait for them to get in trouble, then cast curse of exhaustion so they couldn’t run away. They’d die and take durability damage. Very mean! I don’t do this anymore. I remember a pair of opposite-faction players, a mage and warlock, who would continually fear and root players underwater while casting underwater breathing on themselves. Eventually you would die, never being able to get to the surface! I didn’t do that, but it was very very mean.
It’s been years since I played Everquest, and I may have some of the details wrong, but as I recall, high level druids got the ability to summon a baby bear pet to follow you around and attack stuff on command, or in defense of their master. Many druids called the bears “Boo Boo”. Druids also have the ability to cast a “damage shield” on themselves or others. A damage shield is a spell that causes damage to anything that attacks the person (or cute little bear cub) shielded by the spell. And thus the “Boo Boo Bomb” was born. Summon bear, cast your highest level damage shield on him, and send him in to take one for the team. Monsters would generally kill poor Boo Boo with one shot, but his damage shield would go off, and do some damage in return.
To his credit, Boo Boo never seemed to mind being sacrificed in this way. And the druidic gods (Karana and Tunare) never seemed to notice…
I used to play an old Apple II Nuclear war simulator. I figured out how to hack the game, so I’d get one base hit, and the enemy always got his country carpet nuked.
In the first Assassin’s Creed, I would occasionally make a point of going around town, deliberately beating the hell out of all the mentally handicapped homeless people I could find.
Oh god, that reminds me that what I did in AC2 takes the cake. When you poison guards, they flail around with their weapon and hit people around them. Naturally, guards with giant halberds have larger sweep ranges. Further, when you throw money on the floor guards and people will run to pick up the money, often ignoring danger to do so.
Obvious course of action: poison a guard and throw money at his feet. Instant civilian death wagon with none of the penalties!
I would probably feel bad about it if those people weren’t fake even in the context of the game, and if I didn’t still think that idea was kind of clever.
Oh yes, that damage shield proved awfully evil on PvP servers. I usually played PvE, but would occasionally log in a character on the main PvP server (Rallos Zek) to see a friend.
See, turns out that if someone attacks a shielded target, the damage shield hits before the attacker’s blow. So if there were some known jerks (lowbie killers, etc.) hanging out, my friend (on his druid) and I would have some fun. If we were around guards, he would buff the jerk with the damage shield, then have me punch the guy. The damage shield would register to the guards’ POV as attacking me, and the guards would just instakill the guy.
In GTA 3, I had a saved game where I had huge stockpiles of weapons and ammunition. Hundreds of grenades, dozens of rocket launcher rounds, and thousands of rounds across several guns. I had spent hours running around, hitting all the weapons spawn points. Also on this saved game, my then-roommate managed to steal a speedy black FBI car and one of the Army’s tanks, and stashed it in the garage. (We learned the hard way the helicopter didn’t fit.)
It was a mayhem kit. Start up the saved game, and then do whatever. One day, I decided I didn’t like the way the purple-suited pimps spoke to me, so I ran around for an hour killing every one I saw. (In case you’re wondering, they didn’t seem to drop more cash.) I also would play GTA Crazy Taxi, which meant randomly selecting a passenger to be taken on a joyride, with little regard for where I was supposed to take him. I liked to wrap this up at the beach so I could drown the passengers, who would usually sit obediently in the backseat the entire time. I wasn’t always helpful while driving the ambulance around town either. Mostly, though, I would just shoot random passers-by and toss grenades haphazardly and use the rocket launcher on every helicopter that tried to stop me. I usually kept my wanted level at about 5 stars, because the Army ended the fun too soon.
When done, I would just exit without saving and it’d be ready for my next fit of criminal mischief.
I asked him, twice, to keep quiet.