Why Villainous Rants?

[Bendris Noulg]

My players are always willing to listen and engage in verbal exchanges, dialogue, and/or abuse.

Of course, they've had a few situations where the person they thought was the BBEG was really their biggest, secret ally, and they've also had villains they could not defeat physically (the ol' "Beating Heart in a Jar" trick for those that remember the old Pharoh module). They've learned that it's often better to take in a good essessment of the situation then to jump right in.

 

[Elric]

I am in DM_Matt's game and Fast Gloat is a feat that works out very well. At the start of the last fight, the villain was giving his "I will now take my revenge on you" speech at the start, and I told the cleric to cast Prayer during the speech (only thing we did during the gloat, the prayer probably went something like "please save us"). That prayer spell caused a player to make a save by 1 against an effect that would otherwise have killed him, enabling us to avoid a total party kill (still didn't save my character, though )

6 second rounds are far too fast for conversation so we take creative license and let people do a lot of talking. Think about spells, even. A powerful, full-round incantation takes 6 seconds, or like 15 words chanted. When your cleric sends your enemies to hell with Last Judgment (BoeD), all you have time to say in those six seconds is something like "you can no longer love.”

High level combats take a long time already, though, and this does tend to make them longer. Since the DM has to gather all of the d8s in the room to roll damage anyway, he may as well get in a good bit of gloating over your soon to be dead bodies.

 

[Celtavian]

re

I like having the villains banter with the PC's while they fight. It would be boring if the villains and PCs didn't exchange words. The PCs have been tracking the villain for some time and the villain is pissed becaue the PCs are screwing up his plans. They have to talk. It's expected.

 

[random user]

Without thinking too much (since it's too late to do that... I'll let you decide which way I mean that), most bad guy speeches come at one of two places:

1. the bad guy thinks he has the hero beaten and is gloating before he kills him off

2. there is some impasse which is preventing concentrated fire (such as two people with guns taking cover from each other).

I don't recall offhand any movie where the hero comes charging in, the villain starts ranting and the hero stops his charge and listens.

So I would say if you really want to have a villainous rant, you need to set it up somehow.

For example, instead of having the dragon swooping in on the PC's (which I imagine results in a rant along the line of "Now is the time you die" or something short), have the PC's have to get into the dragon's lair. Of course (assuming it's a red dragon for the purposes of this example) the dragon's lair is in the middle of a huge lake of lava, and he has minions bothering the PC's from far away.

The dragon could start his speech (either in a booming voice or into their minds) while they are still far away dealing with the minions and figuring out how to get across the lava. Yes there are still a number of ways to foil this (ie teleport, windwalk, etc) but it is this type of situation in which it could more realistically occur asuming the PC's can't shortcut this.

I think the key is have something to occupy the PC's time. This can be in the form of a trap that PC's need to struggle out of, minions that are attacking, something that prevents attack (for example in Phatom Menace the force walls that periodically turned on/off right before the Darth Maul battle scene), etc.

But I think given a lack of any other occupying task, both in movies as well as D&D, the hero is going to try and kill the bad guy as quickly as he can.

 

[Gez]

Be sure to have a very confusing plot. If the players feel frustrated by not understanding what's going on, they'll let the villain do the speech in the hope of getting some clues.

Of course, if they don't, they will not bother hearing the next villainous rant.

There's also better opportunities than others. When the party just kicked the door and stormed into the mad wizard's lab is not a good moment (although it can work). When they are held prisoners, bound and chained in jail, is a good moment.

If the PCs are free to act, you need to get a catchy opening to your rant, so as to make the players want to hear the rest. I've used that to great effect once -- the PCs approach the lich's sanctum, just before they reach the door they hear the lich bidding them to come in and chat, since they bothered to journey there; and at the end of said chat, the PCs receive a few toys and an henchman and go on with a quest to do for the lich!

 

[S'mon]

I generally prefer Cool One-Liners (free action!) to long involved rants. You pretty much never get villainous speeches in my pretty hack & slash Borderlands game. OTOH the other GMs in my group run much more roleplay-intensive games. I don't see the cheesy-timestop-villain-rant though, the PC/Villain interaction seems to arise naturally from context, more Blake's 7 than Flash Gordon. In B7 the heroes would get captured by the villainess (Servalan), or occasionally they'd captured her, and there'd be lots of back & forth debate and attempts to Intimidate, Diplomatise & Bluff. Similar stuff happens in the Midnight campaign I play in, my PC especially loves to engage the antagonists in debate, using her maxed out Intimidate score.

In one adventure recently she was captured by the baddies, managed to escape and with another prisoner found the BBEG & his cohorts in his chambers, with another prisoner PC. Staying outside the doorway & shouting in at them, I used Intimidate to keep the baddies afraid and cooped up in that chamber, and try to get them to release my friend:

"You have one chance to get out of this alive! ...Your guards are dead, Vorne!" etc

...when if they had realised our weakness they could easily have attacked and killed us. Eventually the other PCs arrived and attacked the enemy, getting the prisoner killed in a botched rescue attempt. It was cool while it lasted, though.

Likewise in the last Midnight game, I forced the elf ghost who'd been screwing around with us to justify her actions and engaged her in some moral-philosophical debate, exposing the flaws in her postion, which was very satisfying after an extremely frustrating time-loop scenario. Midnight does seem to lend itself to in-depth roleplay much more than regular D&D does, though.

 

[kolvar]

I only did it once and I created a party especially for this occasion, that would have done nothing else than to slow down the adventure otherwise.
The reason behind the rant of the villain was to give him a face. The characters where up against a nameless, faceless enemy, which is boring and the characters lose focus (or constantly ask themselves, why they went on this adventure). Afterwards, they new their enemy and where very much afraid of him (or still are in this case).
Since then, I think I will use the villainious rant more often, not at the end, but inbetween, to tease the characters and give them more reason to save the world (or their own live and the lives of their beloved ones)

 

[Psion]

Am I wrong in thinking that EnWorld Player's Journal contained an article about using social skills as part of the combat process? While this admittedly allowed for only short exchanges of quips, it was a very good idea.

I don't recall that specifically, but in Slayers d20 (just out) there is a psychological combat section. You can actually cause embarassment damage, and they have rules for conditions like "mortified" just like the core rules do for "stunned" and "dazed."

 

[Psion]

That would be the HERO System that allows you to talk as much as you would like in combat without it taking any action.

No. I am a longtime hero fan and that's not what I am talking about.

It was something like a feat or a class in a d20 product you could specifically take.

(Straining brain...)

I'm almost sure it was a spycraft PrC that awarded the villain action dice if they unveiled their plot or somesuch.

 

[Henry]

If you want to encourage villainout speeches, just let the players know that if the villain looks about ready to spout off, and they attack, then they only get half experience for the encounter. If he unveils his villainous plan, then they get full experience. Alternately, just give them a small XP bonus if they let him do his thing.

As for points in defense of Rangerwickett's player, I'd say that dialogue during the butt-kicking session is good, too. Remember the Angel Series Finale? Hamilton and Angel's fight is a prime example of

Standard action
(speech)
move
Standard action
(speech)
move
Standard action
(speech)
move

And an excellent notion: the villain gets about a line or two in per round. Also, if you are going for a little bit of verisimilitude in a game, NO villain would waste time mouthing off against his enemy. He'd beat the crap out of them first or kill them, and THEN, in a video tape, from a thousand miles away, he'd make his speech.