How to take the edge off of a Warlock?

[Rhifox]

Let me come with a counter opinion. How to take the edge of a warlock?
Don't

This. A warlock should always have an edge. Even a fey pact is the warlock committing to (or being forced into) working for a whimsical, destructive master. Chaotic Good feylocks might be in service to relatively good-hearted hosts, but those hosts are still creatures of chaos and would encourage the warlock into being unreliable, flighty, and capricious. It might not be a gothic-type of edge, but even good faeries are still incredibly dangerous. They lure people into playing games with them, without a care for that person's life or even bodily needs. The warlock themselves are probably the victim of such a game, after having followed the song of a satyr too far or ventured into a faerie circle and become entranced to dance as a puppet on a faerie's strings forever more. The faerie might mean no harm, but it still does harm.

Unfortunately, I'm trying to play a chaotic-aligned warlock and struggling to find a good story line as such with a devil pact.

As a person that RPs a demon-pacted warlock, the key thing with a chaos pact is to throw out everything you already know about pacts. A chaos pact is about characters rather than deals. It isn't formulaic. If you read lore on lawful, devil pacts, those are very determined: the warlock signs away their soul according to an exploitative contract, the devil (generally a harvester devil, because there's a whole devilish profession for pact-making) manufactures ways to kill the warlock in order to get their soul ahead of schedule, and then the warlock gets sent to the soul-consumption-and-devil-creation assembly line that is the Nine Hells. The contract's exact terms might differ, and the devil may have some additional uses for you first, but your journey is pretty set.

In a demon/faerie pact, however, if the demon/faerie wants your soul they'll just get on with it and eat you. Any arrangement you have, you have because it wants you. Something about you pleases it. You're its play thing, its toy, and the length and quality of your life, and your afterlife, is determined solely by how well you are able to please and entertain your master. Maybe you wind up soul chow and become a mane, or dancing forever before your faerie master, or maybe you become a valued retainer in your master's court. It's all up to the master's whims.

Therefore, the biggest tip for a chaos pact, in my opinion, is that you need to flesh out an actual character for the master. This is important for all warlocks, as metaquad4 said, but it's essential for chaos pacts IMO. What is the master's personality, what are their goals, how do they intend to achieve those goals? The warlock will have to play off of the master's individual desires, so you need to know how that master thinks and what it wants.

My quip above was actually a query in disguise. Daemonpacts, yay or nay?

I see no reason why a daemon wouldn't be allowed.

Though along the same vein as above, being Neutral Evil I'd expect them to function a certain kind of way. Lawful Evil wants to harvest souls to increase their personal power and influence in the hierarchy of the hells. Chaotic wants whatever it wants at the time. Neutral Evil tends to be a bit more directed. They have some goal they want to achieve, and it's determined that using a mortal pawn, a warlock, is the best way to go about doing it, so they create one. Once that goal is complete, they probably eat the warlock's soul or just take the powers back and abandon them. But if there's no clear profit to be gained from making a warlock, then they won't make one. Ergo, daemonpacts are probably better for pnp rather than an open-ended setting like BGTSCC, as daemon warlocks are likely going to be goal-oriented. I'm sure it'd still be possible to come up with a way to make it work, but it'd be harder and they'd be rarer.

[TeoDeathDealer]

If we went Rhifox's way, no one would ever play a pacted warlock.

[Rhifox]

Huh?

[Tantive]

I don't think that is the case. The fact that warlock is so filled with the darker aspects of lore doesn't mean it isn't attractive to play. But the class has certainly been made light of. If you think its a simple thing to blast magic out of the hand because you made some sort of deal, you are just as mistaken about the nature of what it is to be a warlock, as the pactor is to the deal they make.

I would say that there's been a minimal amount of representation with players playing a warlock as it is understood in the lore. With notable exceptions of whom have well identified their pacts, or given an understanding in their background story in say the form of a biography, which allows the DM's to play the otherside of the warlock, namely the character to whom you are pacted to.