Being the Bad Guy

[Pete]

In a lot of games today honor systems exist in one way or another. Personally, I try to be the good guy. I'll help people out when possible and try to take the honorable path. Sometimes, I'll put a bullet or sword in somebody's face that I feel deserves it, but mostly I'll play up the upstanding citizen role. I usually wind up getting the achievements for those things.

I'm also something of a completionist. I think I'm about 92% completion on Red Dead Redemption 2. One of the challenges is to be a bandit- robbing, stealing, killing your way across the map. Essentially completely going against how I want to play my character.

Does anyone else run into "moral" dilemmas like this? Sure I could make a separate save and just go on a rampage, but it still wouldn't technically count towards my challenge completion. I made a separate save for that in fallout 3, where you got achievements for varying degrees of negative karma, but that didn't have to be done in the same save file to get 100%.

[Taco-Calamitous]

Whenever I play an Elder Scrolls game, I start out trying to keep my character "Lawful Stupid," but inevitably, I always end up killing at least one innocent person, or stealing stuff. I gravitate towards sneaking and sniping enemies, so being naughty always comes naturally, heh. Like, I wanna get into that room that I'm not supposed to get into! And there's always that one really rude npc who "had it coming," lol. Plus, the Thieves Guild and the Dark Brotherhood quest always more interesting than the Fighters and Mages Guilds.

I also did a few renegade actions in the Mass Effect games, IIRC.

[Pete]

Oh I gravitate towards sneaking and sniping in pretty much every character build. My Skyrim characters usually wind up being absolutely ridiculous, like max sneak, bows, heavy armor and two handed weapons. Hilarious to picture a guy in 100 lbs of dragon bones silently creeping around a dungeon and then popping off several sneak shots with a bow.

In Mass Effect, I tried to be as good and as accommodating as I would try to be if I was actually in those situations. Some people pissed me off to a point where they got the renegade treatment, but I always try to accommodate my party.

In Red Dead Redemption 2, it's kind of tricky. I've been mostly good, but one of the challenges is being a bandit, so I have to go and steal, rob and probably kill, all things that give you negative karma. There's 10 different challenges, where I have to escalate each time if I want to unlock the full bandit gear and ultimately 100% completion. I'm at like 94% now, and I haven't touched another game in months, so I'm equally determined to finish it and just want to play something else. Yet at the same time, I really don't want the greatness to end