# The Evocation of Evil tags: #thoughts/tweets ![[Icon of Evil (illo).jpg]] > [!info] > This is actually a follow-up, purely by accident, to [[Curse of Strahd and the Decline of Depicted Evil|a post I made just earlier tonight.]] It's as though evil is a thing that's constantly on my mind. Who knew? Apparently, thinking about the role of evil in your RPG is just something in the air these days, as this just came across my feed from a few days ago. Yes, I have a feed that keeps me up to date on evil.  Something crucial occurs to me as I think about what we've been talking about today and the content of this video, and that is that it's impossible to demonstrate evil within the context of a story without protagonists who care about things. Now, note that I'm not saying that they need to care about traditional things. Everybody loves puppies. Most people hate war. A good kebab is a joy forever. These are not really things to care about. Characters need to care about more elemental things, more personal things, in order to have evil be something that you can represent within the context of storytelling. Because if they don't, evil has nothing to threaten. And evil that can't provide a threat isn't really evil. It's a momentary discomfort. It's a distraction. It's an obstruction. It's unpleasant but tolerable. This goes back to the three core questions that I put before any character. Any character worth seeing on screen needs to be able to answer these three questions. And they need to have interesting answers. - What do they want? - Why can't they have it? - What are they going to do about it? These are critical questions, not just so that the characters have some sort of motivation, but because they provide an emotional attack surface for the antagonist of a story to move against. Why are your evil antagonists not coming across as evil? Because the characters don't want anything that the evil can move against. There's nothing that makes the characters, and by proxy the players, uncomfortable because it flies in the face of what they believe and what they desire. Note that this is true even for stories with evil characters as the protagonist. I know that sounds strange, but antagonism requires characters to care about something. Evil characters, in particular, must care about something in order to be motivated to be active enough to be considered evil. To be considered evil, a landmine that blows up a child is not evil; it's untoward. Placing a landmine intentionally in a place where children are going to play is evil. What is the difference? Intent. What drives intent? Desire. We find a problem with this not just in modern media, though it has reached a painful crescendo, but in classically structured tabletop roleplaying games in general, in part because they treat protagonist characters as pawns rather than characters. They have combat stats and a couple of skills, but they don't have desires. They don't have lacks. They don't have wants outside of the very narrow architecture of game mechanics. The characters are unassailable. This is the kind of character design traditional RPGs have encouraged because traditional game masters go out of their way to abuse these hooks rather than to use them to make the story come together. Players have been trained to avoid character vulnerability because they haven't been taught that characters with vulnerabilities are characters with interest. Evil antagonists require vulnerable targets. In the absence of vulnerability, evil really has no way to express itself. Calling back to *Curse of Strahd*, why are all three of these arguably most character, most evil character elements related to children? Because the protagonists are traditional *D&D* characters who don't have any particular wants, needs, or desires and will aggressively avoid forming any. So we have to go to the most obvious way of demonstrating a vulnerable character: a child. It is, to use the terms of modern wrestling, a way to generate cheap heel heat. It is a clear and notable exploitation of vulnerability. It allows the antagonists to demonstrate their evil. The rest of the campaign actively avoids that vulnerability, and thus the antagonists come across as toothless, misunderstood, mischaracterized, misguided, including Strahd. If you want evil antagonism which motivates not just the characters within the context of the story, but the players, then there needs to be vulnerability that has to be built in, that has to be baked into the cake. Then you have to be willing to evoke it.