How to play an EVIL character WITHOUT ruining DND 

“How upset would I be if my character died next session” is absolutely the spookiest thing I think most players could be asked

probably one of the major hurdles to get over is, if your character is evil, what it keeping them with the party? what is preventing your character from throwing the party under the bus and making an escape in a dangerous situation?

I'm playing an evil character in a campaign and it's the most fun I've had RPing a character because I've had to look at and solve problems from a different angle. The DM seemed worried about me causing trouble in towns by acting evil but he really started to like my character because my character is agreeable most of the time. When I do act evil, it's calculated, decisive and benefits the party because I do evil to get power and influence. The DM originally planned for us to find a lost bear cub whose mother was being held by Kobolds. He wanted a nice touching mother-cub reunion but I tied the bear cub to a tree outside the kobold base 'to keep it safe', convinced the other PCs to knock out the momma bear cuz we didnt know if a wild animal would recognize us as 'friends'. While everyone was looting the camp I double tapped momma bear and took the cub back to our base and now we have a battle bear. The whole table was shocked but now we're stronger cuz we have the bear. They didn't like my methods, but appreciated the power boost. Everyone at the table is wondering what my next big power play is and it's great.

I like to think of “good” as more willing to help others, and “evil” as prioritizing yourself.

The thing to remember is just because your character is evil that doesn’t mean they have to be stupid about it.

Honestly an easy way to find out if your other players or dm are bad is 1. make a character. 2. Tell everyone your playing a Chaotic Evil character. and last 3. Play the character as good, charitable, kind, giving, and agreeable as possible. If the dm and/or players are looking to be hostile with you regardless you should leave that table. they are looking for any excuse to treat someone poorly and it's not good (at least not for you) to associate with them.

I have an idea on how to play an evil character: They will be using the party to their own ends, but either because they grow to care for the party or because betraying someone who’s proven time and time again to be useful to them is something that they’re smart/honourable enough to avoid doing, they will not betray the party once they have what they want, and will only try to kill the party once they start directly interfering with their plans.

the dnd wiki isn't really a very good source man, it'd be better to look at the sourcebooks, where evil really isn't defined in the way the dndwiki does

to answer your question, last time someone did something good for me, my immediate reaction was 'Alright thanks, but what's the catch?"

I interpret good vs evil as serving the needs of others or serving the self. The self can be anything. For my character, it's my crew.

In addition to what has been explained in the video …

I am the dm in a campain where the players are a chaotic evil druid and necromanzer, neutral evil rouge, lawfull evil warlock and a chaotic neutral fighter.

(Written before watching) I have played a semi-evil character before! He left a lot of broken hearts, murdered hobos, was boisterous and had a pact with an unalligned demon queen (Wasn't D&D, but I guess in D&D he would be a warlock as he had a couple of spells and some supernatural boons like insane dexterity, more than the elves, and could shapechange). At night he just went away to have some fun, and the murders only happened when he was away from the group. One time we had to get informations about a warehouse with suspected cultists, my PC split from the group who watched the house to get first hand informations. My PC went into an alley near-by and asked a hobo, gave him a BUNCH of money for the informations and then just stabbed him in the throat before dumping the body somewhere. No one found out about it but I got the informations in minutes while the others wasted hours and learning nothing. He eventually died in combat, I think... not wearing armor and only having a short sword was not the smartest idea I ever had.

I am playing a chaotic evil character in a dnd campaign, and I think this video has hit exactly what a good way to play an evil pc is. Another important thing that needs to be done is creating a good motivation to treat the other party members well.

My evil characters tend to take a more Hanibal Lector kind of approach, coaxing others to do evil (like he did to his therapy patients), killing very minor NPC's that annoy them or that they think the world would be better without like he did with the bad player in the orchestra that he ate. He might also be a bit extra brutal to the party's enemies that they are killing anyway, they ran a few bandits through but he would cast spare the dying to stablize them then bash there skulls in again just for shits and giggles when nobody was looking. Subtle evil characters are my fave as it takes a bit of roleplay to finesse it, like how long will it take for the others to realize that he is evil and when they do what will they do since he has done nothing but help them and has never hurt them in any way.

To me its kinda easy to rolplay a evil character, just make the character someone who priorize itself and its important people over the others and dont have that much problems ignoring the "moral" action with a more..."the most important thing are the final result", "morality and honor dont bring food on the table or pay the taxes" (thats evil in DnD, to me its be a realistic person). After that you just choose if it follow rules (moral/social/or its own rules), ussualy follow them except if it will gain something or have a mentality of "no rules".

Great first video. Love this advice. Simple but really effective because of how we all can really get way too “in character” when trying to make for more “fun” gameplay and then justify bad actions that upset the table by saying well that’s what my character would do.

I really liked this video and that you brought up thinking of yourself as a good aligned player, even if your playing an evil character, was great! One of my DMs is running an evil campaign and I think so far everyones done a good job of being vicious in game, but above table we're all very much chaotic good, even if we didn't think of it in those terms at the time lol. But taking that approach has also lead to really fun ingame things too. Like we're evil/selfish characters, but we gave up looting a goblin tower when one of our party members was in critical condition. Our characters first reasoning was: 'We don't want to try to find someone else to join us when we already trust this guy and he's our tank!!' Which lead to our player characters later realizing: Oh no. I think we all became friends!! Evil friends. But friends!' And above table as players, we were all worried about our friend losing their character they really enjoyed playing, so we were gonna save him!! And we did! : D

I actually have a Chaotic Evil Star Wars character that I'm quite proud of, since not only can I sometimes play him in a villain role in some specific scenarios with other villain characters, but I can also play him as an "anti-hero" in half of the other scenarios, since he knows killing everyone and everything isn't beneficial for earning money. That and he has a hobby of collecting pets from across the galaxy of course lol, along with having a sense of loyalty when it comes to those he actually considers friends or comrades.

In the first campaign i was able to finish. I played as a necromancer, who while helping the party do their quest and defeat the god of death/necromancy. Was using my ability to raise the dead to create lieutenants out of the BBEG's lieutenants so i could dethrone him and take over the world as the new BBEG of the next campaign. The whole time i was sending dms to the DM(we did our campaigns on discord because all of us were in different states and one of us was in England) about what i was doing and he would tell me what i needed to roll/beat for it to work. We got to the end and my plan worked. Everyone was blindsided and i was able to make my character's dream a reality. It was honestly pretty cool. And way easier than people think it is.