SPOILER WARNING: The nature of this trope means that spoilers abound. Tread carefully.
Then Let Me Be Evil moments in Tabletop Games.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- The fiend-blooded Tieflings are prone to this. While they are no more predisposed to good or evil than their human kin, enough people treat them as if their heritage makes them intrinsically evil that they often give up trying to be decent to their abusers. Compare their Aasimar counterparts, who sometimes get so worn down by the assumption that their celestial blood means they must be paragons of good and justice that they end up bobsledding off the slippery slope.
- Warlocks are born with magical gifts from unspecified dark powers, ranging from powerful fey to actual demon lords, and are commonly treated as evil by default on the basis of their gifts being a bit spooky. Consequently, there are a lot of evil warlocks.
- Chromatic Dragonborn will usually end up in situations like this, given that Chromatic dragons tend to fall between being instinctual feral beasts or Always Chaotic Evil pillagers amassing hordes and terrorizing towns, it shouldn't surprise anyone when being called a monster all their life makes them decide to follow in their dragon parent's footsteps. In some sources adopting this outlook will even cause their Dragon parent to finally acknowledge them as their offspring... unfortunately for their tormenters who while prepared to fight a dragonborn, probably can't fight a dragon.
- Godforsaken: Many cambions turn to evil due to it being the only course left to them in a world that has always expected them to become destructive monsters.
- Legend of the Five Rings: It takes a lot for the samurai of Rokugan to betray their Emperor. The Code of Bushido is very clear— if you betray your lord, you must kill yourself to restore your honor. So imagine how bad Hantei XVI was to have his personal guard turn on him and slay him— in their minds, bringing dishonor on themselves and their family and having to commit seppuku was a preferable fate to letting Hantei XVI stay in charge.
- Nemesis is a Traitor/Hidden Role game in which players must choose between a benign and traitorous role. Unlike other games of its ilk, players aren't assigned the traitor role. They have to decide to do it.
- Warhammer 40,000: The Imperium loves causing this.
- It is said that to betray the Imperium is the heretical work of Chaos. After all, the Emperor Protects, and His Imperium provides for all. So who cares if you grew up on a world with a 95% conscription rate, if your local sub-System governor cut off all incoming supplies to your desert planet because the local figurehead didn't want to marry off his only daughter to the guy, or if you only accepted the help of that one benevolent alien race in fighting off the far-less-benevolent alien race because the Imperial Guard/Space Marines wouldn't arrive for, oh, fifty years. The response will still be BURN, HERETIC, so if you'll be condemned for being a pawn of Chaos anyway, you may as well get the fun powers (and horrid mutations) that go with it.
- Mutants usually arise from non-Chaotic sources, such as exposure to rubber-science radiation, but are at best barely tolerated and the victims of severe discrimination because it's feared that they will turn to Chaos. For some reason, having it made clear for your entire life that you're one slip-up away from the stake means that when a cult teaches your differences are in fact holy, you're statistically very, very likely to be on board with that - meaning that you do, indeed, turn to Chaos. Then again, many mutants do turn to Chaos or are tainted by Chaos at birth, meaning the Imperium's attitude is usually the correct one.
- More than once, Space Marine Chapters have been accused of treachery on scanty evidence, leading to them ending up genuinely in the hands of the Dark Gods, most notably the Soul Drinkers (although they later gained a form of redemption).
- More than one Primarch was a victim of this during the Horus Heresy.
- Most notable was Konrad Curze, who was cursed with visions of the galaxy falling into eternal bloodshed and himself being executed as a traitor by an agent of the Imperium. After his one sincere attempt to seek help from his brothers was violently rebuffed, he decided to embrace his fate.
- Part of the reason Mortarion slipped into heresy was his steadfast opposition to use of psychic powers, which he viewed as sorcery in all cases. When a daemon makes it clear that his "clean" wards and counteragents are useless, Mortarion unleashes his own sorcerous might to destroy it and vows to master the practice himself.
- Magnus the Red seems to be slipping this way. He intended to let himself be executed for his defiance of the Decree of Nikaea, but when it came to the end, watching his world and sons be destroyed angered him too much to do this. Since he's now banished, friendless, and trapped in the power of the Chaos Gods, he might as well embrace it.
- Alpharius may end up a victim of this. The Alpha Legion embraced treason for the greater good of the galaxy, but by the 41st millennium, they all seem to be card-carrying villains. With the Alpha Legion, who really knows.
- Warhammer Fantasy:
- Village witches, alchemists, and various others are all too open to accusations of being in league with Chaos, at which point they generally have nothing left but to either die or actually go over to Chaos.
- Those who start mutating later in life are usually hidden away by their families, until they get chased out by the rest of the townsfolk, join a band of mutants/beastmen, and lead them right back to the village that kicked them out. In the case of beastmen, mutants quickly find that they might have had better luck staying with the village, as beastmen view human-born ungors as expendable slaves and emergency food.
- Archaon the Everchosen combined this with You Can't Fight Fate. Archaeon was originally a devout Sigmarite who found out about a prophecy about the birth of the Everchosen, the greatest champion of Chaos ever to live. He travelled around the world trying to find and kill the child, only to realize to his horror that the prophecy was about him. He then tried to kill himself, but when he tried to stab himself and his dagger bent, he took this as a sign that he would never be free of Chaos, and might as well serve them as best he could.
- The World of Darkness:
- Hunter: The Reckoning: Storytellers sometimes use this tactic. Since almost all of the mook monsters you meet actually have a measure of humanity and are enslaved to their natures or other, worse monsters, there is already a bit of a gray area to killing them in the first place. Since hunters constantly hound the monsters, cutting off their resources and food supplies, they can eventually get fed up or be driven to desperate acts of violence since their beastly side starts taking over. This could cause a normally nice vampire who only drinks just enough blood to survive, and only from animals, to become a raging beast draining the nearest humans dry. If the monster survives, you can bet he won't care much about keeping his humanity anymore. Expect angry party members who have more forgiving views of the monsters.
- Promethean: The Created:
- The Refinement of Stannum is centered around wrath and getting revenge on the world that scorns you at every turn. Prometheans eventually draw the wrath of humanity and the suffering of nature everywhere they go, and Stannum is about focusing that wrath where it belongs. Each Refinement is a philosophy that the Promethean follows during their Pilgrimage, and the various paths usually require some careful study before you can switch over. Stannum, however, can be entered instantly, and is usually entered when some Promethean goes, "Oh, fuck this shit."
- A step below that is the path of Centimani, the Refinement of Flux. Flux is a force of dissolution and mutation, and the Centimani themselves are focused on monstrosity rather than rebirth. Prometheans on this path have not only given up on trying to be good, they've given up on trying to be anything resembling a human. In a subversion, however, some Prometheans (in 1e; 2e changed the rules to disallow this) see Centimani as a way to humanity just like the others.note
