RE: Gathering ideas for a new Dungeons & Dragons campaign
If you're going to play D&D, I generally suggest 5th edition. It's a lot smoother and I think it does a lot better job of giving players options in how to develop their characters without involving a bunch of false choices and the balance is much improved from 3.5.
With that said, I think that it fails a little in some of the play styles that were uniquely developed around 3.5. It doesn't allow hyper-optimization unless you start bringing in all the supplemental content, and there's not even that much even then. A lot of the ramp up to really high-power play doesn't feel quite as important as it used to, though I could just be jaded and cynical.
If you do 5e, I suggest starting at level 3 if players are experienced. This represents seasoned adventurers and lets everyone have access to what makes their class interesting.
The big thing about an evil campaign is figuring out what sort of evil is going to be the focus. Mercenary plundering bandits can be fun, in a sort of "Robin Hood, but we steal from the rich and give to ourselves" way.
Having a cult or deity that fosters such behavior keeps players from going too far off the rocker in pursuing the same general goals, and can help keep you from having half of the players playing the bad guys from Mad Max and the other half playing Hannibal Lecter. It sets the tone as it were.
A simple way to do this would be to have the cult have a number of divine (evil) spell slots that can be added to by expanding its influence. Characters who are of higher rank or importance (or just do cooler things or things that are in line with the goals) get to cast one of these spells.
Ok then it's an easy choice - I will try the 5th edition for this campaign. If it doesn't feal right for us we can always change afterwards.
They have experience in 3.5 but it's a good idea to start with lvl 3 so they can start learning how their new characters are working but aren't that weak as a lvl 1 char. That's maybe better than giving them lvl 10+ chars without knowing what the class can really do.
For the kind of evil group I am imagine the villain type of an evil sorcerer with his undead army - the real bad guys. And a big goal they have to achieve like helping an evil but almost forgotten deity to get more power hmmm so they could get their order from this deity. That would let them work together, in most cases I think and still let them fight amongst them to get more power of the deity.
And these evil spell slots are a good idea. With these spells I can also add more stuff that would not be possible mhhh.
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