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Its something I have noticed. First hand with myself. IRL I'm a very timid and kind person, but in games I always want to be the most evil and depraved faction.

I wonder maybe someone here could tell if its the other way around as well? Maybe you are a very aggressive and dominating person IRL, maybe even evil.? Do you prefer to play "good" armies to explore a side you don't dare to visit IRL?

My brother was/is a pretty big douche and tended to be TFG and WAAC at the same time (I've watched him flip dice on after a roll to make a miss into a hit)

He played/plays chaos in both 40k and fantasy

I don't find this to always be the case. Different things appeal to different people for different reasons. I've seen someone play Orks because they were most like themselves, and I've seen someone play Orks because they're not at all like themselves. If there's any consistency at all, I'd say that people have the most fun when they connect in some way with their forces.

Ive alwats stuck stuck to the "good" guys but occasionally dabbled in agrey area chaos.

I know a Pastor who plays a daemon army though if that counts.

Just remember this little ditty, it should make all of this make sense.

"Some times you feel like a dick, some times you don't.
Slaneesh army's have dicks, Sisters of battle don't,
Because sometimes you want to play the dick,
Sometimes you don't "

I can barely make it through an evil playthrough in KOTOR because I feel bad doing any of the mean things.

I'm the exact same in real life.

I play Guard because I love the idea of a normal human standing up against impossible odds to help even a tiny fraction of a fraction of a fraction for the betterment of humanity.

And I like tanks.

There's something to Eldar that resonates with me and is difficult for me to explain. I've tried to play evil characters on occasion but it's tiring to stay in character with novelty wearing of rather soon.

I have this but why political views. I'm very leftist, but in Sci-fi and Fantays I always, always prefer the Legal-Evil typical empire.

I always find the "Omg we are rebels but good" factions very, very naiveté and just incoherent. When the conflict is presented in a such obvious white-black version, normally I always side with the bad guys.

Plus, bad guys have the best style. Just compare rebel troops vs Stormtroopers, or Uruk Hai @.@. The Bad Guys always known how to make a good militar parade.

 Blacksails wrote:
I can barely make it through an evil playthrough in KOTOR because I feel bad doing any of the mean things.

This happens to me as well, I'm incapable of doing "Evil walkthrougts" in games. It goes as far as not killing my pigs for food in Age of Mythology because the idea of killing those little piggies did made me sad. So I ended the game with 30-40 pigs that I collected from the map around my Town Center.

Not exactly the same thing, but my BFF picked up 40k over the summer because he liked the Nurgle models so much. The catch?

He works in an operating room.

Personally I like to play "I am evil, but I am the only one allowed to be evil, so you have got to go."

Yeah, makes me a hypocrit but I am evil so I don't care as much.

 Galas wrote:

 Blacksails wrote:
I can barely make it through an evil playthrough in KOTOR because I feel bad doing any of the mean things.

This happens to me as well, I'm incapable of doing "Evil walkthrougts" in games. It goes as far as not killing my pigs for food in Age of Mythology because the idea of killing those little piggies did made me sad. So I ended the game with 30-40 pigs that I collected from the map around my Town Center.

I got scammed out of a not insignificant amount of money in EVE Online because I played with a guy for 2 months who then asked me for some money to help him buy a ship for the corporation. He accepted the transfer, then told me it was a scam, thanked me for the money and wished me well.

He was pretty cool though. We talked on TS a lot. #noragrets

Tabletop or as described earlier, online games are a form of escapism.

If you are across the table from someone or are identified, people tend to play a bit more conservatively.

As some handle or anonymous, I find I am a bit more reckless and pushy than I am in real life, you kinda play out how you wish you would act.

Using the good old D&D terms, I will usually play Lawful Good in word and deed (Black Templar / Grey Knights) or Chaotic Good: ends justify the means (Inquisition, Mechanicus).

Just how some people I know will play Lawful Evil (Necron) or Chaotic Evil (Dark Eldar) with a similar situation of being known or anonymous.

This is not always the case, always subject to whim or what people think is cool to them.

<edit> I have liked "Lawful Evil" characters, ones that appear darn well pleasant but if you break one of their "rules" it gets ugly quickly.
Dexter as a character seems to be the poster boy for that kind of thing.

I am probably an evil person at heart.

In C&C: Red Alert, whenever I play as the Soviets, I would cripple the enemy team to the point that they cannot retaliate against me anymore, then build what I like to call the "kill pen", which is a square land circled off by flame towers that constantly force-fire into the center. Then I would build and sell buildings until I have a bunch of technicians (who are basically unarmed) and send them in just to watch them die.

In Tiberian Sun, I would often build Visceroid farms (if you know what these are, you'll know that their mere existence is cruel in of itself) near crippled enemy bases just to watch the chaos that ensues.

I wish I could grow a mustache to twirl sometimes.

Unsurprisingly my primary armies usually range from the darker side of grey to the pure evil side, like Chaos, Dark Eldar, VC, etc... Even my "Good" armies tend to have evil elements to them, like my space marines, due to a genetic defect, harvesting progenoid glands from all of the fallen, not just their own, and murdering anyone who might be a "witness".

Wow this has really opened my eyes. Before I thought everything as black and white, but there are nuances.

I'm a Death guard player and just saw them as evil and polar opposite to real me. Sure in demeanor they are, but in appearance not so much, we are actually quite alike, corpulent, bloated, ugly and smells bad. I wonder if this was an unconscious decision made by me? I thought I was chasing what I don't dare to experience in real life, while i all along was just hanging around what I'm familiar with.

I have found that Ork armies tend to be played by people who want to have fun, and are a little bit Orky themselves (partiers, goofballs, etc). On the other hand, I find that guard players tend to be people who have an interest in history, who tend to be serious in some part of their lives (at work, painting, etc) and who tend to be the kind of person who dosen't mind blending into the background, much like a Company Commander. Like me!

Chaos I notice tends to be populated by Alpha type personalities who want to seen. So naturally they pick the dark edgy guys who have centerpiece figures and are borderline inappropriate.

Nids players tend to be people who want to be different and not mainstream, so they pick the army that is totally different then the rest.

Eldar players tend to be the kind of people who are into regal, showy type stuff, interestingly enough also the same kind of people who love modern vampire fiction in my experience.

Tau tend to be people who love technology, anime, and are drawn toward unified aesthetics, i.e. the kind of people who always have have matching somethings on.

Thats my take on it. Also I always play good characters, whenever I try to be evil or a jerk in a game it never lasts and I always venture back toward the "good guy" so naturally I play Ultra Marines and Imperial guard, the honest decent guys and those devoted to a lost cause.

I'm a treadhead so first love will always be the Guard, but I lived the Lawful Good Stupid alignment as a cop for several years and got sick of both truly bad guys and white horse types that will screw over anyone to uphold a principle, which really pisses me off as I have a grad degree in ethics.

I really, really want to like the Dark Angels and Inquisition so I could make explorations in shades of grey, but they are too far down Good Intentions Road (damn near at the exit ramp to Hell) for me to truly enjoy them.

If the Rowboat would bust Cpt. Titus out of jail, I'd be sorely temtped to play the Smurfs as Titus seems just about the perfect pragmatic hero to me.

When it comes to choosing an Army Faction to play it depends on my mood for the day. If I feel evil I go with the Black Legion.
If I am more of the good guys, I go with Astra Militarum.

Although I'm occaision, I am always up for a good challenge. Once I played Drukhari, of a friend's army, and beat his Salamaders with them. Just because he said they were garbage. It was fun destroying him with his own models, just to prove him wrong!

My armies are Marines (Good Guys) and Tyranids (Neutral). Don't have anything straight up evil. Not a bad person, and not a WAAC gamer.

i joke around with and mess with people i like. Other than that i am quiet and reserved.

Warmachine/hordes - retribution / grimkin
Malifaux - gremlins
infinity - tohaa
40k - harlequin
ol warhammer - night goblins

Make of that what you will. But if i had to classify my self as something it would be neutral with a dash of chaos.

I set goals for myself higher than I can possibly achieve at the time, and get frustrated when I don't reach those goals at that exact time.

I play Thousand Sons.

I am not normally one to play the good guys, I love the Empire (Star wars), Marvel & DC Villians (Kraven, Venom, Solomon Grundy, The Joker, etc), Nightmare & Cervantes (soul Caliber), etc...

But I play Salamanders (the most honorable and "caring" thing in 40k)
I would say other than 40k (have no interest in Chaos, other than purging them)my penchant is for bad guys.

I enjoy playing as a big standard human in any setting, be it fantasy, sci-fi, online, etc.

So, playing the Guard felt like the right choice!

Most people don't think of themselves as bad people.

No armies, at least in 40k, are really "good".

I'd consider myself a pragmatic donkey-cave...so I suppose Eldar are pragmatic donkey-caves. Seems to fit.

 daedalus wrote:


No armies, at least in 40k, are really "good".

I think in Grimdark, "good" means a well-reasoned general benevolence moderated by a sense of realpolitik. ie. Try to do the right thing, and don't be a dick when your forced to pick a lesser evil.

I'm a pretty laid back, chilled guy.

Always preffered playing Chaos in 40k/30k.

Hmm I don't think I've ever played an army based on my moral affinities. I like High Elves and Vampire Counts back from WFB and they're not exactly morally identical. I play Mechanicus and Dark Eldar, the first being far from "good" and the second being the embodiment of evil in my eyes. Not even Chaos is that evil in my opinion because Daemons are raw emotions, they can't really think what they're doing, while Dark Eldars chose to be evil to stay alive. I have no problem with that as my army choice as I mainly chose my factions by aesthetics, lore and playstyle, and I think they're all really attractive in those criterias. I could not play a "lawful good" faction like Sigmarites though, because I think they're too bland because of the "absolute good guy" vibe. High Elves are interesting because while they're definitely focused on protecting their world from evil, they're not perfect themselves and are subject to arrogance and such. The very fact that Dark Elves exist prove they're not perfect.

Vampire Counts I'm playing because I really love undeads

However, I was a DM in my own D&D campaign and we played an evil playthrough, so all my players played bastards, each to their sauce. Well, the things they did, I certainly could not have roleplayed that as a player. I tend to play good/neutral characters with their own flaws and views on others, but fundamentally never truly evil, and they never did despicable deeds. But for some reason when I'm playing an evil NPC it goes quite easily. As soon as I play the character I feel he will undoubtedly share some of my own personality, while an NPC (or the army I play) is more detached and so, I see and act with it somewhat like a spectator, from an exterior mindset. It's quite odd in some ways.

 Aaranis wrote:
I could not play a "lawful good" faction like Sigmarites though, because I think they're too bland because of the "absolute good guy" vibe.

I can't play them either because to me they look like total and utter crap.
I've yet to start building my fantasy army but I love the Egyptian style of the Tomb Kings.

I play imperium and just like them, I'm a good guy.

Seriously, though, it wasn't really the morality of my faction that drew to play it. It was the playstyle. Imperium provides versatile combined arms tactical solutions that don't rely too much on just one aspect of war. I really like that.

Also, I really dig the fact that you are always ethically and morally absolutely right when you play Imperium. It's a cool perk.

I just happen to like mecha, so I play Space Marines and Tau.