Hardly anybody wants to do anything besides play a goodie-goodie adventurer type who's the center of the galaxy and makes his way to the middle of the stage to save the day.
I don't think the population of good and evil characters is fixed. Rather I've seen it shift over time and I'm sure it will continue to do so. Sometimes I have found the evil characters to strongly outnumber the good ones, so much so that my good characters still tend to be loners to this day out of learned paranoia.
It's one of the reasons MPCs are hardly ever played, as well as the reason they hardly ever come out to interact with players. A vampire or werebeast character can't go out at night and prey on whoever was stupid enough to wander the outskirts, because the moment they kill that person, a mob of moderate-to-high level characters show up and gang up on that one MPC.
Heh. You are not part of my world apparently. One of my good characters has been repeatedly drained by vampires, both DM's NPCs and PCs. Another of my characters was only recently killed by a vampire PC while traveling to Vallaki at night (during a corpse retrieval for a stranger). In all of these cases, there were no repercussions that I'm aware of. In character and out of character, it did not even occur to me to try to get revenge, and I doubt I would have been able to stir up a posse of avengers even if I had wished.
It's kind of sad how a setting that's supposed to center around people feeling alienated and vulnerable, racism and a fear of the dark is now entirely misbalanced with people huddling together in packs of high-powered individuals, absolute tolerance of caliban...
I do have one timid half-orc who has worked long and hard in raising his influence skill to soothe others fears, and sometimes will linger in the Temple (he was banned from the Drain by evil PCs less than a year ago). But he still is fearful of Radu and the Garda, especially after one incident where NPC garda in Vallaki chased him down, beat him unconscious and left him unable to move at all for a game day and night (partially due to an NPC glitch I think).
And he is the only "caliban" I have who is even as daring as he is. My other "calibans" only pass through the outskirts by necessity, avoid most everyone and skulk about primarily in isolation, which has gotten even harder to endure OOC because the Sewers, once a busy place of roleplay, has become desolate of players (thank goodness for Degannwy). In fact, I've almost given up on playing any of my half-orc/caliban characters at the moment. It is just very hard and isolated, which I'll admit is what it is supposed to be for such outcasts.
And what makes it worse than anything is the fact that it's next to impossible TO play an evil character. Either you're forced to work alone, which results in you being too weak to actually do any evil, or if you try to involve yourself with other players, you run the risk of having several high-level goodie two-shoes characters smiting you with impunity.
Interesting. I've sometimes felt it was extremely hard to endure as a good character for similar reasons. From unpleasant experience, I've learned not to ever fully trust my fellow players and not to underestimate the darkness that some players/characters can conceive. Right at this moment I'd agree with you that life has, for now, gotten easier for good-aligned characters, which has been a relief for me personally, but even in this period I've had several run-ins with monster PCs and I've had plenty of heart-pounding moments of fear, as well as some unpleasant ones.
Regardless, I don't think everything will continue as it is now indefinitely. In every community there are phases and seasons.
So no. It's not the areas. If anything, a vaster amount of areas means there's more places for the evil types to lurk around and gather strength - y'know.. if PLAYERS bothered to put the effort into doing so. Let all the happy, dapper goodly types congregate in Vallaki, then. Instead, there should be more and more evil types using the other areas and domains as their base of operation.
I'd recommend the sewers. Even though none of my characters are evil, it is sad to see the sewers so underused when they used to be so alive with the bad, the good and the ugly.
