One of the things I appreciate quite a lot about more of the modern RPGs I've read, is that the systems themselves guide the game to go in a certain direction. This is certainly true of The One Ring, where it's implicit that the players are the good guys. The possibility of playing an evil character in the Chaotic Evil D&D sense of it, isn't even properly addressed in the system itself, because after all this is a game about fighting against the shadow, so it would serve no purpose for a character to be 'evil'.

But systematically it also brings Shadow Points into the mix, which when the player's Hope dips below his accumulated Shadow Points means the character suffers consequences, none of which are good, even if a player is trying to be 'that guy'.

Personally I don't care much for playing an evil character in a game, unless it's tongue-in-cheek, but somehow it remains a thing with some people. To me it's so obviously problematic with regards to any kind of team play, that unless there are some fairly serious constraints keeping the party working together towards a common goal it's bound to falling apart, and probably fairly fast.

This kind of 'guided system', even if it's not expressed mechanically, just alleviates so many problems and all it requires is that everyone understands the underlying premise. The same goes for a system like Trail of Cthulhu, in which it's expected that the investigators will investigate, because that's what they do!

Somehow the early sandbox-days of RPGs set a hard-to-kill expectation with some players that it's 'anything goes', when the expectation that everyone should really have is 'let's have fun together'. If my elf character hates dwarves to the point of attacking them on sight and there's a dwarf in the party, maybe I should just throw out that part of my character 'vision' and find something else to hang my hat on, otherwise it'll be pretty damn hard to fight the evil wizard when we're busy tearing each other a new one. That's not to say that there can't be tensions in a group, but they should obviously never hamper the fun or indeed the story (unless that's what the group is into, in which case...)

There are no wrongs ways to play RPGs, but there are quite a few that trip the fun part of the experience up before it gets a chance, and it's great to see that the games themselves have reach a level of maturity where it's understood that each game doesn't have to be everything to everyone, but that it can be built to create a particular kind of experience, and that it's probably better off for it.

There's some sort of joke in here about Alignments doing exactly the opposite of aligning the group, but I can't really figure out how to put it together.