RE: Your Stories Should Have: Nuanced Evil
For me it's hard to create a npc who is evil and still appears more or less as a good guy when interacting with the players. The problem for me is that I have to give them some little hints about his true intentions but they shouldn't be able to instantly identify him as an evil char.
In my current fantasy campaign I have an counselor of a murdered king who helps the players with managing the country because one of them is the son of the former king.
Well the counselor is the one who killed the king and I hope that he gets enough time until they discover his motives.
So I have to try and maintain a balance between good and evil with him: helping the players, giving them advice and possible quests and at the same time that has to be part of his bigger plot like for example sending them on a quest to hunt down someone who tries to stop him. And it all has to be in harmony with his motives.
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I think that the best thing to do with nuanced evil is to use it as a source of internal conflict for the players.
A lot of games overlook the notion of creating a conflict within the audience, but it's a perfect place to explore the concept because it's not just a question of "who exactly is this character, and can I relate to them?" like in passive media but goes a little deeper into "what do I do in this situation?"
One of the things that I find helpful is to frame the players' actions with an evil character as tangential to the character's evil. That is, they can help the character and do what is right in their faction/culture's point of view, or oppose them and get in trouble. Either way, they're not directly doing evil, though they may have some really hard questions to answer about why they acted the way they did.
I will have to try this with my next evil char, thank you. Maybe I will begin with a simple one and watch how the players will react
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