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[nenjin]

Well, I'd pay attention to what drives your religion. What is Tiamat all about? Crushing other gods so they can be King Dick of Shit Mountain? A sense of being misunderstood, or just demonized? Good roleplaying to me is partly motivation, but also partly just delivery. If you can't really move beyond a motivation other than "get powerful" at the very least you can play the part of a priest of an evil dragon god. Contempt for your lessers. A total disregard for the virtues that define their beliefs. Challenging those characters to try (and fail) to convince you of the purpose of their cause.

What SHOULD be going through my head at those very basic interaction to make the game more immersive for me and our group?

What should be going through your head is: "How does [my character] actually feel about this?" Which it kind of sounds like you're having a hard time thinking about stuff as them rather than as you. You the player can ignore 90% of what is going on in game because it's not relevant mechanically (at least not yet.) Weeping poor person trying to engage your character? As a player, you know that NPC effectively offers you nothing because they have nothing to take.

But your character has feelings one way or another. Maybe those are the most base, uninteresting feelings. (Power gamers typically go with go contempt at best or total disinterest at worst. There is nothing more soul-sucking as a GM to have your players completely ignore your NPCs.) But what makes your character interesting for the rest of the group is that they HAVE character. Their responses are couched in something about that character, some trait or attitude, that brings the character to life. So maybe you might convince this poor sod of an NPC to kill themselves because they're just that pathetic. Maybe you tell them they need to look into your religion as a way of finding their power. Maybe you try to recruit them to your cause. ("The world and being good has given you shit so far, maybe you should try something different. I might be able to help with that.")

There is a philosophy of gaming that if PCs don't find interacting with NPCs interesting to the point they won't do it, it's the GM's fault for not making them interesting enough. It's a two-way street though. The GM has to try but the player has to try too; they can't simply ignore the game unless it fits exactly what they want. I'm currently dealing with that issue from some of my players and it's super frustrating.

[quekwoambojish]

("The world and being good has given you shit so far, maybe you should try something different. I might be able to help with that.")

I'd love to be able to come up with that on the fly, but more often than not I say instead. "I'd like to do a persuasion check to convince the hobo to join us." And kinda hope the DM brushes up what I specifically said /:

But you're right, I think I'm thinking as a dice roller who's goal is to progress. Really the only mechanics that are relevant is during combat, so I should keep my 'player' head out of most of the game.

[nenjin]

You as the player and your character as a character have to be in agreement for the kind of fun you want to have. Some people are driven almost entirely by enjoying their character concept; combat utility barely matters to them. Others are the COMPLETE opposite. Character be damned in the end, this is a game and the point of games is to WIN!

Learning to balance those two motivations while playing games takes time and is never fully resolved. I have friends I've roleplayed with for years who, despite being excellent at roleplaying, are still motivated by dice rolling and numerical superiority. (Also no one likes being a fan of combat but being total shit at it, mechanically speaking.)

Then again, I have other players who at the end of the day are happy as long as they can be part of a good story and bring their own character's twist to said story. Combat effectiveness, magic weapons and loot? Nice but not ultimately what brings them to table. Getting a +3 sword under boring and uninspired circumstances actually saps fun from the act of receiving phat lewts.

Try thinking about what it means to be functionally lawful evil. To be evil within some kind of moral framework. To be evil WITHOUT being a mustache twirling villain who wants to watch the world burn. That's easy to pull off, and case in point, a lot of player characters REGARDLESS of their alignment end up falling into that role. (I basically interpret "YOLO SWAG" style gameplay as falling somewhere on the evil part of the alignment chart, because it's a super selfish motivation that usually has costs for the rest of the world.)

If you think on your character long enough and execute well....you get the best of both worlds. A character where the rest of the party cares what you do (and is even interested in seeing what you do with a given situation) AND you get to increase your power mechanically.

Either without the other is missing part of the equation that makes for well-rounded character ideas and a fun experience playing the game at table.

Another really useful tool for learning to understand your own character and get invested in them is....backstory! Many players find creating backstories tedious and time-consuming, probably because they're experienced roleplayers and after a while you become pretty good at whipping something up out of whole cloth quickly. "Why do I need to write down all these details when they're not germane to the game at hand and I already have an internal sense of these things anyways?"

For people without as much roleplaying experience though, I think writing (or at least talking through them with the GM) backstories is essential to helping them understand their character as more than a set of numbers. It helps them understand their place in the world, and by extension, the party. You can't know where you're going unless you know where you've been. That sort of thing. Those are the kinds of exercises can help elevate a simple motivation (Power) to an complex motivation (Power so they're never powerless again like they were that one time; Power so they can take revenge on those that ruined their lives; Power so that something can be done or undone; Power as a counterbalance to something; Power because Tiamat is the bestest and you don't want to disappoint Tiamat.)

[Kadzar]

Everyone here has made great points, especially about the importance of goals and motivation, and I'll just add something that I think may have been hinted at, but wasn't outright stated: If you're not happy playing your character as is, you can tweak them somewhat. Beyond fleshing out established details, you can introduce new aspects of your character that aren't a product of what you've established about your character but don't contradict it either.

Best example I can think of right now is Darth Vader in the original trilogy. He started out just an evil dude doing evil things in the first movie, but, with the revelation that Luke was his son, his motivations became more understandable.

That's sort of what the Bonds part of your background in 5e is supposed to be about. Your character should have things that they care about, that drive them to do what they do, and it's usually not a bad idea to tie this into a person in some way, whether living or dead, possibly even someone they've never met.

[mainiac]

Characters can also evolve as their experiences change them.  Being different from they are before doesn't have to be a contradiction.  If it feels forced to have them stick to some worldview then maybe they should ditch the worldview and replace it with something more nuanced.

[TempAcc]

Yea, you should try to evolve your character during play, if its appropriate. One can change behavior, worldview, feelings and even alignment during play, as long as it makes sense in context. Traumatic experiences (near party wipe, plot things, etc), disillusionment, spiritual awakening, int/wis/cha stat loss, etc; can all contribute to a change in a character's persona.

[birdy51]

I'd love to be able to come up with that on the fly, but more often than not I say instead. "I'd like to do a persuasion check to convince the hobo to join us." And kinda hope the DM brushes up what I specifically said /:

Perhaps if it helps... Put down the dice. They are a ultimately a tool.

Improvisation is sort of like a muscle. It needs trained, but training only happens through experience. If you're bored and you have nothing better to do, try going through scenarios that might happen. Walk yourself through what might your character do and say. Let yourself consider the world from their point of view and try not to judge their voice too harshly. You might be doing better than you think.

[quekwoambojish]

Ok, so I took some time and wrote up a solid few pages that had everything about his appearance, a detailed briefing of his background and how each certain moment relates to his personality, and a personality section that includes an explanation of what specific lesson he took away from a moment that helped him acquire that personality. I also left a tragedy kinda open ended for the DM to kinda fill in to make him a bit more relatable to the world.

Atleast now when I try to mentally picture him I've got a good image kinda going on.

I also made sure(background wise) he has a lot of anticipation for what he discovers in this campaign, so it's likely his personal character can go through some changes.

It's Tuesday here, our next sesh is Saturday so I'll let you guys know how it goes. Thanks! Any more advice is always appreciated.

[quekwoambojish]

Just had the session today and it went really well!

My character has a hard time distinguishing the living from the dead at times, and when one of our party members had half their body dissolved off by an ooze while being drowned, I insisted to go rescue her and now I carry half of her with us. (even though she is clearly dead) and I was awarded inspiration for it

I really do feel like writing up a more descriptive background behind the reasons why they have particular personality traits helped. Also, before making any dice check,  I made sure to atleast try and speak in my characters voice before rolling.

Kinda having a hardy time really bringing out the evil in him instead of 'good intentioned taboo' though. Thanks a lot though you guys! I had a lot of fun listening to your advice 

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Playing evil characters is a somewhat difficult exercise compared to good or neutral ones, much in the same way that playing a genuinely chaotic character is difficult compared to lawful or neutral. Given your other difficulties with the RP that'll almost certainly exacerbate the problems with playing evil.

The thing is this: Most people really do shy away from the very mindset of evil. Being evil is not merely being selfish, chaotic neutral rogues are selfish, but they aren't evil. A selfish person might take as much as they can get their hands on, but one of the defining qualities of an evil person is that they go fully into infringing upon others.

You say you have the difficulty of "good intentioned taboo" instead of actual evil. My response to this is that it isn't necessarily the wrong way to play LE. Your intentions don't really matter for your alignment, at least not by comparison to your actual actions. If you regret being a bastard, consciously recognize that you're bastard, but then go on being a bastard....then you're still a fucking bastard. So in that sense, you can totally have good intentions and be evil. On the other hand, you can take the good intentions to be pure happy enthusiasm for what you're doing, it's just that what you're doing is awful by virtually every metric.

I could go on about the philosophy of evil alignment, but there are as many flavors of evil as there are stars in the sky, so I'll try to limit my advice to your particular character, a Lawful Evil Dragonborn Sorcerer of Tiamat. I would recommend that you relate this to the tyrannical hierarchy Tiamat represents. Tiamat's claw is on the back of her followers, including you, and your claws are on the backs of all the fools that have to be suffered in the world and can't be left to their own devices under any circumstances. Tyranny, is this instance, is a "good" thing from your perspective. Think into it. Dismiss all the things that you in the real world actually believe in and try to emulate the mind of an unapologetic fascist, along with all the best arguments for any points regarding that belief you can think of. That's how your character should go about his life. You take orders from Tiamat because she's superior to you, and all the nobodies of the world should only rightfully take orders from you because you are clearly superior to them, and also carry with you the divine mandate of your goddess.

There are other ways you could play even this specific character's evil, but they should all at least be this far thought out.

[Flying Dice]

To further elaborate, it's often even more difficult to properly play an Evil character than it is to play Lawful Good well, because of the inherent conflicts that that tends to create both in the typical party and mentally/emotionally for any person who isn't a complete bastard. If you're doing it right (and not playing in a full party of people who ignore RP or are also playing Evil of a similar shade) you will come into conflict in-character over your actions, goals, and approach to handling situations. Worse, your conscience is probably going to be bugging you, especially when someone else is pressuring you to literally do the right thing and stop being a reprehensible tosspot. That's because Evil and evil both tend to have logical disconnects even when they've built some justification--unless you can get perfectly into character as someone whose flaws and past experiences allow them to fully buy into their worldview, you're constantly going to be slipping out of character because you, unlike your character, don't actually adhere to it.

That happens with any character to some extent (provided you're not one of those assholes who either self-inserts or uses their character as an empty avatar for them to do shit), but with most alignments your behavior will at least be something you can sympathize with to some degree, something you can justify doing if you were in that situation. That's not the case for most Evil, you just aren't the right sort of fucked up to do more than understand why the character thinks and acts that way. Well-played Evil is both the most satisfying to see and the most difficult to pull off, especially when it's not the sort that leads to PC-on-PC violence.

[Jimmy]

So here's a question from my current game:

If my Wizard cast Dominate Person on a rich old widow and commanded her to rewrite her will to leave everything to myself, then teleported her to my stronghold to act as my personal cleaning lady and cook, would that count as worthy of an alignment shift from True Neutral? Would it be an Evil or a Chaotic shift?

[nullBolt]

So here's a question from my current game:

If my Wizard cast Dominate Person on a rich old widow and commanded her to rewrite her will to leave everything to myself, then teleported her to my stronghold to act as my personal cleaning lady and cook, would that count as worthy of an alignment shift from True Neutral? Would it be an Evil or a Chaotic shift?

That's pretty firmly a lawful evil act.

It'd definitely be an evil alignment shift.

[Flying Dice]

Wow, yeah. Totally agreed with nullBolt on that one. It should be obvious why it's evil. Things which are not chaotic: stealing the widow's wealth through (outwardly) legal means by forging a false will; imposing a new order on her life rather than just taking her stuff and making like a tree. Arguably even the use of Dominate Person as opposed to sneaking around or just blasting anyone who objects. The only way you could make that more lawful was if you did it through contacts within established authority to legally take everything she owns and force her into slavery.

[Tack]

Be an assassin devoted to the ravenqueen and attempt to kill your party members before they can hit 20

So I guess taking what MSH said- the easiest way to be evil is to worship an evil deity. The mindset is easy to follow and you can take your cues from 'WWSD?' which makes things smoother.


Which begs another question. Actually, two.
1. I've tried playing a rogue who has the mindset that lives are easy money, and as long as they're worth the price it's justifiable for him to take them. I said it was lawful evil but companions said it was CN or LN. Thoughts?
2. Should we move this to the DnD/Pathfinder or tabletop threads? Or let dead umbrella-topics lie?