DARK Characters?

[Alibear]

I don't know if this happens often in other campaigns, but it is a staple of the comics.

 

Players come and go but characters don't always have a good excuse to leave a campaign. Sometimes the demons that the characters have been wrestling win.

 

One character in our campaign, Cyclone, was the half-human daughter of Ithaqa the Wind Walker. All campaign she was wrestling with her personal demons, and her father was trying to turn her to the dark side. Heard this before?

 

Anyway, when the player, picked up sticks and moved away from our home town, it was the perfect excuse. She lost the final battle with her father and she turned.

 

Enter Dark Cyclone.

Steppenwolf was the next to turn and so it went.

 

Is this normal? Or was our campaign wierd in this respect?

[winterhawk]

In my 5th campaign, I'm saying the old 4th campaign is Earth 4 ala the DC multiverse...so I'm also doing an Earth 4 Minus, with evil versions of all the old PCs. Sort of along the same lines as the original post.

[TheTemplar]

It doesn't seem all that abnormal to me. Shoot, we had a character in our last campaign who went from Dark to Light to Dark back to Light again before all was said and done....and his player never left or changed characters! We also had a player switch characters and her old character showed up again substantially "darker," though not a villlain by any means.

As campaigns come and go, and suffer attrition and adding of new players, so will PC's come and go. Having some PC's turn into villains when this hapens just seems like a natural flow of events to me, especially if there was something present in the PC when they were a hero that might bend them to the dark. (Lex Luthor on Smallville, anyone?? )

 

-T

[Blue]

Ya know, these are the kind of twists I *love* in a campaign. But it's never happened with a player character in one of my superheroic campaigns. I've switched an NPC or two, but that's it.

 

But now I have evil thoughts running through my head. I think I need to build some temptation into my game...

[JohnTaber]

I had a similar situation happen in one of my games.

 

A robot PC named Blue Max flew into a hovercraft full of agents. (He is a move through PC.) Accidentally the hovercraft exploded killing everyone on board! The other players were stunned. The guy playing Blue Max did not know what to do! It was GREAT!

 

I pulled the PC aside and told him to play out the adventure and we would talk afterwards. We decided to convert the Pc into a villain. The explosion and shock of the deaths turned the hard coded life loving Blue Max into a sort of Mechanon death dealing threat. It was tons of fun!

[Klytus]

In a Champs game I ran in college, one of our players had a mentalist who was known as "Genius". This fellow wouldn't know humble if it was Grond giving him a haymaker. He was not easy to get along with. He found fault with everyone and made sure they knew how he felt about their flaws. Genius was a hero because he was so full of himself, he believed that he was the only one smart enough and capable enough to protect humanity from the consequenses of its own stupidity.

 

Naturally, he eventually "turned to the dark side". He'd gotten so fed up with human idiocy, he reached the point where he felt that they were no longer worthy of his protection. They were suckers to be exploited, not sheep to be guarded. He was a very straight-forward criminal: he simply used his powerufl mind control to force banks to give hime large amounts of cash. So great was his contepmt for law enforcement and super-heroes, he had no worries about being caught. But even when he was a villain, he never lost his Code Vs Killing. To his mind, only idiots needed to kill, and he was not an idiot.

[zornwil]

I don't think this is abnormal, characters do change. Re the PC to NPC change, I suspect it happens a lot given other comments here. One player in my current group abandoned his Superman-like character, The Captain, out of a lack of interest and adopted another character (actually a couple since then, though the interim one was short-lived, the "rebound PC"). The Captain became extremely powerful overnight due to exposure to some special material, and as he always had some ego/security issues, those grew out of proportion as well. He became condescending to his old team as he struck out on his own and forged an alliance closely with the White House as "Mr. Good Guy" but behind the scenes an arrogant jerk. His path has continued to where he recently nearly killed the team's "pet dog" (well, an NPC whose brain they put in a dog) after it peed on his leg. The Captain however is also powerful enough to go toe-to-toe with Magneto, nearly defeating him once but getting defeated by Magneto with a team of mutants on Magneto's side and high-level agents on The Captain's.

[bubba smith]

Re: DARK Characters?

 

In a Champs game I ran in college, one of our players had a mentalist who was known as "Genius". This fellow wouldn't know humble if it was Grond giving him a haymaker. He was not easy to get along with. He found fault with everyone and made sure they knew how he felt about their flaws. Genius was a hero because he was so full of himself, he believed that he was the only one smart enough and capable enough to protect humanity from the consequenses of its own stupidity.

 

Naturally, he eventually "turned to the dark side". He'd gotten so fed up with human idiocy, he reached the point where he felt that they were no longer worthy of his protection. They were suckers to be exploited, not sheep to be guarded. He was a very straight-forward criminal: he simply used his powerufl mind control to force banks to give hime large amounts of cash. So great was his contepmt for law enforcement and super-heroes, he had no worries about being caught. But even when he was a villain, he never lost his Code Vs Killing. To his mind, only idiots needed to kill, and he was not an idiot.

sounds a bit like marvels sentry turned sour

[jkwleisemann]

Re: DARK Characters?

 

Hardly abnormal - I've got several characters with twists like that pending, and I've seen it a couple times in games.

 

Of course, I'd want to keep the character and play the dark side version too, but then, I'm weird that way.

 

It's certainly a staple of the comics, it's just a little harder to pull off in-game without ruffling feathers.

[Vondy]

Re: DARK Characters?

 

A five year hiatus...

 

I'll post, anyways!

 

A group I played in and left did this with one of my characters. I was less than amused because it was done as spite, but that group was dysfunctional in the extreme to begin with, which is why dumped them. I continued with the character in another group, so that was just a weird "what-if" verse. Badly written, no less.

 

In general, I don't do this. I just find a reason for the character to logically exit stage right. I do this because I work under the assumption that players have characteright ©. Normally, I ask the player what they want to have happen with the character. Either we have an event happen that would explain their departure before the player moves, the character becomes a once in a blue moon cameo character, or they go out in a blaze of glory.

 

Insofar as the player were to agree that their character went rogue I would have no compunctions about it, but that hasn't happened. Different groups have different sensibilities, however. YMMV.

[mojo_bones]

Re: DARK Characters?

 

I have had it happen to one of my characters as well as done it to a PC before, so I really don't think it is all that uncommon. And while I was not told before my character showed up as a bad guy, I had no problems with it. There was no way I was going to be playing him again so whatever happened was fine.

I think the player I did it to was miffed about it, (even more miffed then when he first thought I had just killed the character) but he was no longer playing in the campaign and it made for a great adventure for the other players.

[Alibear]

Re: DARK Characters?

 

Who brought this sucker back from the dead? :zombie:

[Vondy]

Re: DARK Characters?

 

Who brought this sucker back from the dead? :zombie:

 

That'd be this post.

 

http://www.herogames.com/forums/showpost.php?p=1575032&postcount=8

 

It happens. The search function doesn't sort by date as the default.