I can never get into playing evil characters in RPGs. I thought about why this is today. My conception of the terms goes something like the following.

I see people in real life and in stories as being somewhere on a scale from moral/benevolent to immoral/selfish. This is as close as I get to having a gut feel for traditional “alignment” in RPGs like DnD.

So what about good and evil? It seems to me like Good and Evil can best be seen as consequences in the world that result from the actions of characters.

A character acting selfishly may cause a result that is neither good nor evil, but still brings them great personal benefit while ignoring the fate of others.

There is a separate axis which I see as sadistic/schadenfreude. This is a property of characters, not consequences. You want to see other people suffer, even if it takes a lot of work for you to make that happen.

From the perspective of playing a character in an RPG, it seems to me that a clasically “Evil” character would have to be both immoral/selfish and also fairly sadistic.

The reason all this analysis is important to me is that in order to play a character in an RPG or to write a good story for a non-player character, I need to understand something about what drives the character, so this is how I think of it.

So I guess an “Evil” character in my stories would have two attributes, a selfish factor and a sadistic factor.