Regarding evils grouping with goods:

Warning – long post, but the important bit comes at the end.

As an evil, I group with other evils, not because I care for them, but because it suits me to do so. I benefit by increasing my own power. For all I know, those I am with will one day turn against me. This is not a problem provided that I believe they won’t, either because they fear me, or because they convince me they are loyal.

Whether or not I feel scorn or other negative things towards the evil in question (e.g. I might view them as a weakling who can’t stand on their own two legs without others to hold their hand) doesn’t matter that much as long as they are serving my purpose in the here and now. For example, if I’m an ap and I want someone to tank for me, I don’t care if they are the stupidest person staff spec ever, as long as they do the tanking for me. They can even continually annoy me and I won’t kill them until later for it in some cases (though not all). Why? Because I still have a use for them now, and if I kill them immediately after finishing with them, word will get around and others may not be there when I need them as a result. So I leave it until the next occasion that I see them. This isn’t just lip service. I’ve done it on several occasions.

In this respect, I don’t see a difference between them and a good. I might feel scorn and distaste for the good guy, but if he is a spear spec and I need a tank, I’ll still use him. When my ap did actually group with a good guy, I took them to kill svirfs in Blingdenstone. That suited my purpose, though it probably didn’t really suit the good guy’s and it certainly didn’t suit the ranger who was acting as the bridge to be in the svirf city all that time. But my character didn’t care about that. He was level 35 and he wanted to get the unholy blessing, and this was the quickest path to doing so. (However, said ap did promptly show bad rp immediately afterwards by rescuing one of the other two from a maze. However, at this stage, a promise of power if he killed the guy he was rescuing would be a good way of seeing whether he did it to keep a potential alliance or whether he was actually being good.)

I take Phaelim’s (or whoever’s) point about the good aligns (those you despise, say) increasing in power too. However, being realistic you can quite easily get an idea of who is going to be a threat to you later in life and who is not, whatever their alignment, purely on the way in which they use their skills. To be quite honest, my characters do not feel threatened by someone displaying the skills that you get to see when a newbie is playing a character. I know if they ever tried anything they’d die pretty easily because they’d choose the wrong skills (e.g. if they bash spammed themselves to death against a svirf when they got disarmed, I’m fairly confident a simple disarming will allow me to kill them if they try anything). Also, there are evils I despise and that doesn’t stop me travelling with them when I benefit out of it. Sossaphrin grouped with Malkhar (or was it Mahar – anyway, one of them) after Malkhar ganged him four on one and the gang took an unholy weapon with 9 charges. Why did he do it? Because by letting it pass he got some souls. By not letting it pass he’d just end up wasting his time looking for a ranger in the wilds. Ok, so if he killed Malkhar/Mahar he might end up feeling better, but the time it would take to do so would leave him with less power as a result. Sossaphrin twisted the truth to prevent the guy who took his unholy from getting into scion, so it wasn’t like he was willing to let people walk over him in cases where it didn’t suit him to.

Put it this way. Say my evil acts friendly with goods. You are thinking about turning him neutral, because you think I’m not evil enough. Rather than do this, why not give a dream (say) promising him more power if he betrays one of these people he appears to be overly friendly with, and see if he does it? If he does it, you know he’s evil, no matter how friendly he appears to be with them. If you pick a person where he doesn’t stand to lose more than he stands to gain (e.g. don’t pick his cabal leader since getting thrown out of his cabal would do him more harm than good, or have the patron god of his cabal appear to him and promise him the leader position if he kills the current leader), he’d do it. But it sounds to me as if, because you haven’t put him in this situation, you don’t appreciate his evilness.

I really do think that the above is the only way you will really get to see if that friendly looking evil is genuinely evil or whether they are just someone playing an evil class for its skillset/cabal options. Do you disagree with this assessment? I mean, if they claim to be after great power but turn down the chance when presented with it, you know it is lip service. If, however, they betray that good aligned guy they spend time with, then you know it isn't.