What's the nature of that society though? :)
I suspect it's a velvet glove over an iron gauntlet kind of thing...
Sounds pretty standard to mine as well.
The exception being the one evil game where we were an invading army's scouts and just causing mischief for the heck of it.
Sounds like your evil group has a better PR campaign going vs your good group.
Or more that a good group doesn't need a good PR campaign.
If you're a good guy, you generally get enough good PR just by saying "I defeated the monsters that threatened this town, I slew the dragon ravaging this land, I overthrew the tyrannical lords of this kingdom". Sure it's just a chain of kill-loot-kill-loot-and so on ad nauseum. But as long as the things you kill are either evil or wild beasts and untamed monsters, no one's going to think twice about it.
An evil group on the other hand needs to do extra things to make a good face for themselves, more often than not. Yes they'll kill-loot-kill as much as the good party, but their targets tend to be a little less limited - they'll off good guys who they see as threats or troublemakers, blaspheme against goodly gods, and other things that normal people would be turned away by very quickly. To make up for this, many evil groups go out of their way to set things up so that it looks like - at least openly - they're in it for the better good of others... so long as the better good has them at the top of the totem pole somewhere.
In my experience it is far more common for my evil characters to care about "good vs evil" than my good charcters. Of course I don't play paladins much.
Most of my good or even neutral characters are usually on quests or missions, and as such they are goal focused and more or less assume that killing the bad guys, or rooting out the monsters, or driving back the undead hordes is universally acclaimed as a positive activity that will be appreciated by society.
My evil characters aren't usually on some mission, they are usually seeking some means of achieving their own selfish goals which need to be hidden from the ultimate victims. So my evil characters tend to be far more concerned about their public image and do a lot more to convince people that they are "doing good".
There is actually a life lesson in this observation, if you think about it.
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My evil characters aren't usually on some mission, they are usually seeking some means of achieving their own selfish goals which need to be hidden from the ultimate victims. So my evil characters tend to be far more concerned about their public image and do a lot more to convince people that they are "doing good".
I'd have to agree with that. In the evil campaign I ran, the PCs were very much concerned that overall, good should defeat evil.
They figured that if evil took over the world, they'd have a much harder time succeeding in their dastardly plots, since people would be less trusting. They had no loyalty to their alignment, only to their own self-interest.
(That was also a funny campaign because each player decided, independently, that they would play an evil character, but they all thought that all of the other characters were good. They even went so far as to each have a 'public' character sheet and a 'true' character sheet. They made it all the way to second or third level before some of the players started to catch on and compare notes.)
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Good or evil I like to play my alignments to the hilt.
My good guys have overdeveloped sense of justice, an aversion to compliance with evil doers and a a willingness to die for all the right reasons.
When I play evil I betray, rob and manipulate anyone and everyone who stands in my way or can further my goals of ultimate power.
How productive and "nice" a party is is largely dependent on the characters and options presented in a story and less then alignment. Ive had plenty of good guys who take their time to help people, donate gold to poor towns, train soldiers to defend innocent folk and free slaves left and right. If you think about it most of the things the typical D&D good guys kill would eat someones babies without a second thought let alone a list of other evils they would unleash on the world if given the chance.
I tried to play an evil rogue, but non-violent thief once, alas the adventure pushed him to having to fulfill a melee role. Manic and unpredictable is also very fun to roll with.