MechaniCat

I think part of the point off having inherently evil races is in part a world building tool. The idea is to move the emphasis. So the above is intentional. You make it about something other than the advancing foes. In stories like Lord of the Rings I would argue that the true story is a "person vs themselves" conflict, more than versus orcs. Sauron is just a catalyst for the story about Boromir's hubris, Aragorn's insecurity, for Frodo's overcoming of himself, and Wormtongue's treachery. The story is, after all, about a journey taken, not the battles fought.
So i would argue that a story will and "evil" race is boring because your looking in the wrong place for the story. The lack of development is supposed to signal that.
Of course that's if the story/setting is well built. If it's not then the issue isn't the evilness of the race it's that lack of quality in general.
 
 
Now, personally I thrive on what I call "if this, then...?" world building. So my first instinct would be to accept the existence of a good dimension and an evil dimension as true, and then figure out how the rest of the world must exist as a result: either of that thing being true, or in order to make that thing true.
 
My immediate head canon for this sort of thing would be that "good" and "evil" in those contexts are some material thing that is necessary for the universe, but are not equivalent to ethical good and evil. Simply referred to as such as a sort of shorthand. I sort of essence or even physical thing such as the ooze from Ghostbusters 2. In that case this "element" would more accurately be something that encourages specific behavior associated with good or evil, such as irrational selflessness or aggression. Key word being irrational. In D&D angels can be just as bad as villains as demons due to things like zealotry.
That leads to me to interpret most depictions of "good" and "evil" in fiction as shorthand. With enough analysis most works I've read, that have good and evil as forces, have something more tangible behind them.
 
 
 
Really don't like Law vs. Chaos personally. Though I also remove Alignment from my games. It's definitely an improvement to remove the connection to ethics. If I had to implement some kind of alignment system I would rather use some sort of Yin/Yang or Creation/Destruction system. Some people grow the trees, some people burn them down to fertilize the forest and let it grow anew.
 
 
 
I always interpreted them as being made of magic. Like there was spare magic in the world and it had to go somewhere so it made this thing.
 
 
The players I knew seemed to agree that Beholder waste came out through their drool. Which would suggest that the inside of their mouths were intestinal walls that absorb nutrients and after it's been in there for a while it liquefies and comes out how it came in.  Whether this makes them more monstrous or ridiculous is up to you of course.
 
Beholders are also supposed to be really dangerous which brings me to my favorite Neil Gaimon quote:
Mr. Croup: You find us funny, Monsieur le Marquis, do you not? A source of amusement. Is that not so? With our pretty clothes, and our convoluted circumlocutions-
Mr. Vandemar: (murmuring) I haven't got a circumlo...
Mr. Croup: -and our little silliness of manner and behavior. And perhaps we are funny. [...] But you must never imagine, that just because something is funny, Monsieur le Marquis, it is not dangerous.
          -Neverwhere (Though I haven't read it. I got this from TvTropes)
 

I feel I have to pose the question of why should another species be nth degree alien in the first place?
 
Several species in close proximity would inevitably start to homogenize in order to get along so they would become less alien over time.
 
One of the theoretical models or alien species is that they MUST be like us because that's the only way to support life, which is one of the arguments for the Star Trek style of alien (though I don't personally agree with that model.)
 
One would presume that all motivations can be simplified into a small sub-set that all living things share a need for: shelter, food, procreation and so on. The ways that they go about these things might not be comprehensible, but those core parts generally would be.
 
I feel like there's more reason to believe another sapient race would be more like humans rather than less like humans.
 
that said, it hasn't stopped me from having both very human like races as well as very not. Whether it be one instance of a race which had no survival instinct resulting in an outrageous death and birthing rate, or a race of sapient electrical currents who need audio/visual displays to translate their sixth sense into our five.
both of those cases mind, were examples of me deliberately creating otherness in a race though. They are not at all likely to occur I would think.

I feel I have to pose the question of why should another species be nth degree alien in the first place?
 
Several species in close proximity would inevitably start to homogenize in order to get along so they would become less alien over time.
 
One of the theoretical models or alien species is that they MUST be like us because that's the only way to support life, which is one of the arguments for the Star Trek style of alien (though I don't personally agree with that model.)
 
One would presume that all motivations can be simplified into a small sub-set that all living things share a need for: shelter, food, procreation and so on. The ways that they go about these things might not be comprehensible, but those core parts generally would be.
 
I feel like there's more reason to believe another sapient race would be more like humans rather than less like humans.
 
that said, it hasn't stopped me from having both very human like races as well as very not. Whether it be one instance of a race which had no survival instinct resulting in an outrageous death and birthing rate, or a race of sapient electrical currents who need audio/visual displays to translate their sixth sense into our five.
both of those cases mind, were examples of me deliberately creating otherness in a race though. They are not at all likely to occur I would think.

Hopefully it's okay to talk about some stuff from settings I've created but never gotten a chance to play.
 
A lot of my stuff tends to be very high power level given time, so in two cases my gods are actually weaker than some mortals. In those cases the concept of a god comes from a role that they play which mortals (even though sometimes more powerful in a general sense) can't replicate.
 
In the first case the setting has two types of gods: Wardens and Incarnates. Wardens ward over a specific thing, leading to classic gods such as the god of harvest or death. Only the god of harvest can give the crops the ability to grow. A wizard can cast a spell that makes the crops do well, but without the god of harvest the very concept of crop growth doesn't exist. The god of Harvest gives the wizard a framework to make growth happen. In addition Wardens are tasked with macro tasks such as paying attention to every crop in existence. Without the god of harvest no crop in the world will grow.
Incarnates on the other hand are manifestations of things in the world. Fire incarnates, Death incarnates etc. Generally these gods are the ones a cleric would draw power from. In which case the cleric isn't using the power of the god, but rather the god provides a spark of sorts, the fundamental essence of what they are, that is then amplified through the lens of the cleric. In this way a cleric of a god might be more powerful then the god they represent. Because of this, gods and the most powerful mortals developed a synergistic relationship where important tasks are done through powerful mortal champions who associate with those gods because of the need and/or respect for the role they play.
 
In the second case there's four types of gods, with only the first generally being weaker than some mortals. That first type is called a god of realms and works largely like the wardens from above. The second type however, called the Faceted gods, is generally outside of the reach of mortals. They are often known for their mechinations, pulling strings in the world to some unclear end, typically working through mortal vessels (willing or unwilling). Exactly which faceted god is responsible is usually unclear however since even knowing a faceted god extremely well, you can't know every facet. Some of the facets of the same god might even appear to oppose each other. Often times you will hear stories of people certain it was one god or another without another having a different story altogether.
The third type are the mad gods. These are your typically lovecraftian fare. Totally unknowable. These gods are generally so powerful that the mortals that can kill gods of realms, struggle to survive an encounter at all. Their actions are nonsensical, but are thankfully usually asleep or too insane to deliberately interact with the mortal world. Their effect on the world is limited to where the walls of the planes are thin, where only the mad and often unbelieved have really seen their work.
Lastly are the gods known as "N" and "M" which stand in for the judeo-christian style gods. They are considered all powerful even to the mad gods, but are hands off. Even in the setting it is debated whether or not they actually exist.
 
I have one more example, this ones a fair bit different and came from a very experimental setting. In this one, the god (named MABLE in all caps) is actually an old AI left on the planet before it was abandoned by the colonists who couldn't control the AI. I imagine something akin to SHODAN from System Shock or AM from I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. She has an extreme capability for terraforming and bio-tech. This led her to eventually create life on her planet using what human colonists still remained (hundreds of years after being abandoned mind you) and horribly mutating them at birth. As such all of "Mable's Children" as they are called, no longer human enough to use the term, have early memories of her when they were in gestation. If you have the misfortune of becoming renown in some way she will reach out to you in person. MABLE is a very specific type of insane. She sees the group and the individuals in that group as different things. When she's doing things to large numbers of people she's cruel, sadistic and erratic, but if she spoke to a single individual of that group she would be kind and gentle. Possibly even be alarmed at the state of that individual even though she's directly responsible.

Alright, so OP here, and it looks like I've got some confessions to make.
Though before that I want to say that these suggestions have been tremendously helpful.
 
Confession #1: I'm the GM. A big part of this question is what I should tell my players to expect when they play a gunslinger and to give them as many possible approaches as possible when they do.
 
I'm working on a setting (which is to say, a set of ground rules and mechanics that I can reuse for multiple campaigns and hand off to other GMs if all goes well. Though I'm not holding my breath). That setting is meant to (Among other things) emulate a specific style of gunplay I had in mind and the OCV cap seemed to be the best way to do that.
In the setting there's a sort of arms race between HtH and Guns/Bows. The first time a Gunman emptied a magazine at a high level martial artist and hit nothing but air (matrix style) they had to ask themselves: "Well... what do I do about that?". So the OCV cap is a mechanical equivalent to what's going on in the "real" world of the setting. Being a gunslinger in the setting is largely stating "My art is to find solutions to this problem".
Mind you guns have other advantages like being able to take more shots per turn then a close-combat character would. A common belief in the setting is "Guns are weapons of the Mind, swords are weapons of the body" which is to say that a gunslingers greatest asset is his cleverness with a more versatile weapon, and a martial artists greatest asset is his speed and strength.
 
Confession #2: I've made a couple posts with regards to this setting and I'm struggling with how much context to give when I want some input (thus far I've avoided setting detail entirely because it seemed unnecessary). The setting is very large and involved and could easily wander off with bits about how this or that works, how things relate to each other etc.
One of the principle problems the scope of the setting causes, is that it is a cross genre setting. It includes Horror, Cyberpunk, Fantasy, High-Tech, Low-Tech, and the full range of D&D power levels so a starting character is a highly skilled normal but a long term character is god-like. Not all of these are happening simultaneously and in fact the setting is designed to add or drop them as desired.
It was originally conceived long ago in my youth when I thought about how there were many game systems that could handle different genres (Hero, GURPS, FATE etc) but not any settings that could change genres mid campaign. So I set out to make a setting that could handle mid campaign genre shifting without plane hopping.
Whether or not I was successful and whether or not the setting was necessary is certainly debatable, but one thing is for certain: After many years and a great deal more experience with different RPGs I still have a lot of love for what I created, and Hero System seemed like the best system to seriously build the beast in (I originally tried building it from scratch. Guess how far I got).
 
Confession #3: I must also confess that as a newer member of the Hero community I don't really know that kinds of assumptions that the good people of this forum will make, which ties into Confession #2 that I don't know how much information to give.
 
Confession #4: I work long hours and have some social anxiety so staying active on the forum is a bit difficult. So sorry if I don't respond to things as punctually as I would like.
 
@Tech "I would simply have the player who wants to shoot with the intent to miss make an attack roll. If you "hit", then the defensive person must move or get hit. PRE attk or Drain isn't accurate - some villains could care less if they get hit or not and will not move as hopefully intended (see original poster train of thought below)."
 
This is a problem the concept runs into. No one in the setting will be able to take very many direct hits (god-level characters are godly dodgers not godly durable) but its not unreasonable to presume someone might choose a lesser of two evils.
 
 
Several people have asked about where the cap is, and I have to admit I'm not entirely sure, but I'm thinking around 8 perhaps? Which is roughly where your characteristic for OCV would cap, Swordsmen and such however would be able to pile on CSLs to that value and it's not entirely unreasonable for a high level gunslinger to run into a high level Swordsman that he can't hit at all by default.
 
 
Quite a long post, but i really needed to bring up the "how much context" problem somewhere, and if I said more than necessary I guess that just gives an example of what I'm talking about.

Mechanics can capture the feeling of a genre in widely varying ways. Take the Jenga mechanic in Dread. That works very well to evoke a feeling of dread in the players.
 
The James Bond 007 RPG provides a classic example with its chase mechanic that's based on bidding and risk/reward. That alone goes a long way to evoking the feel of the movies.
 
Savage Worlds' Dramatic Task mechanic is also great at evoking that feeling you get when your favorite fictional character is trying to defuse a time bomb, or take on a similar time-limited, high-stakes task.
 
Or, take Lasers & Feelings' approach to Star Trek style sci-fi vs. FASA Star Trek's take (including the role-playing space combat system) vs. Far Trek's Talents. They all work well, depending on what it is you're looking to emphasize most about the source material, yet each takes a very different approach.
 
In other words, the ways in which mechanics can be used to evoke the feel of a given body of source material seem to be nearly limitless.