[X] My Assistant

[mfb]

he gets wasted by IC. oh no i gave it away!

[emo samurai]

Then gets turned into a force bajillion blood spirit and sent to kill Dunkelzahn, but Dunkelzahn turns out to be a cyberzombie so he's okay.

[hyzmarca]

[SL James]

Indeed. The sheer amount of celebration and.or admiration for antisocial behavior is nothing short of amazing in this country.

[Glyph]

Not quite.

He's a loveable but gruff antihero if he's on the PCs' side.

He's a selfish jerk villain when he's shooting at them.


NPCs who aren't faceless goons should be created with empathy, but that's just so they are internally and logically consistent. Under most circumstances, the players are not going to care about the motivations of an NPC who falls under the "enemy" category. They just want to blow him/her away.

[emo samurai]

The CK in my game is completely incompetent and evil; he gets drunk and tries to rape women and relies on the competence of his subordinates and corporate father in order to maintain his status.

And as for the glorification of antisocial behavior, it's a much smaller and less deadly trap than the glorification of conformity. At least the glorification of antisocial behavior has a smaller chance of promoting abject uniformity of act and thought.

[Kanada Ten]

Poor kid; they totally made a waste of his life. The only solution is psychotropic beetles.

[emo samurai]

I don't think his life being a waste is the problem.

[nezumi]

It's certainly his problem, isn't it? You sure are heartless sometimes :P What's the poor boy's name? I'll be a little counseling and some time to rethink his life could really straighten him out.

[Kanada Ten]

Yeah, it seriously sounds like he's an undiagnosed sociopath with no conformable prospects in his life. Even his "friends" are just employees paid to babysit him.

[emo samurai]

Takeshi Tanegawa, I made it up on the spot. And they don't have time to let him think out his life.

[Kanada Ten]

The only way this poor kid has passed the compulsory psychological exams is because his father or such arranged it to save face. It's pretty depressing that someone in this day and age (2070) is forced to suffer from a treatable mental illness.

[Kagetenshi]

Treatable?

~J

[Kanada Ten]

[emo samurai]

Mental illness? You mean evil?

[Kanada Ten]

[mfb]

[Kanada Ten]

True, true. But I got the impression that he was failing the corporate skills test, as well.

[mfb]

depends on whether or not the PCs whack him, or if he whacks them!

[emo samurai]

In Shiawase, it's very "family, family, family, blah blah blah." I'm sure, at least this early in his career, having a feather in his cap is more important than making his first independent million.

[Kanada Ten]

[nezumi]

As an aside, I really can't condone using 'evil' as an official personality trait. Mentally disturbed, non-altruistic, selfish, destructive, confused, slovenly, anti-social, perhaps. But not 'evil', not in a world of nothing but shades of grey.

Alright, so the guy is incompetent. Why? Is he simply physically incapable? Does he have an undiagnosed learning disorder? Is he an artist forced to be an accountant due to the expectations of his father? Regardless, it occurs to me that his own incompetence (or more accurately, his self-percieved incompetence) is the root of his problem. He is where he is because he has no power to change his situation (or so he thinks), but was put there by the expectations of his father and his corporation. He's smart enough to get his job done by delegating tasks to those under him and surrounding himself by competent underlings, but he simply has no talent for it himself. Is that 'evil'? I shouldn't think so. And in fact, he shows signs of significant loyalty to his father and corporation, at least to begin with, despite the fact that it is completely undeserved.

His only evil character flaw you've indicated so far is he beats prostitutes (and if the prostitutes are hired knowing they're there to be used in any fashion of the word, which is a real possibility, even that loses it's edge.) But that behavior is simply a symptom of feeling he lacks power in other aspects of his life. He likely also compulsively masturbated as a child for similar reasons, and now has significant problems with self-confidence. And why shouldn't he? His sex life is the only area he was given some freedom (and even there, what are the odds he got to marry or even date his first love? Do you think he can expect to create a stable family, or will his focus always have to be on the job first?)

However, had he been allowed to choose his own profession and develop at his own pace, he could have been a great artist, perhaps the best of the modern world, or a technologist with incredible creativity, or simply a happy father of three who enjoys gardening and model trains. His problem is now simply that he has not yet taken responsibility for his own psychological make-up, and has allowed his perception of the world to be created by his overbearing father and constricting environment.

Evil? No more so than the man that judges him ;P

[Kanada Ten]

Unless he's an ork, in which case he's totally evil.

[hyzmarca]

Evil can work as a personality trait in the right setting. Take, for example, Dr. Evil.
Of course, Dr. Evil was a very sympathetic character so being evil doesn't make it impossible for viewers to identify with the character.

[Wounded Ronin]

I guess the most important thing is to have the NPC have a reasonable reason for being evil instead of the asinine "evil for evil's sake" that is so popular in action movies.

And by reasonable reason I don't mean the highly annoying anime cliches where villians have melodramatic tortured childhoods. Really. Those are just annoying.