Greatest Villain Every

[Freakohollik]

Dracula.

All the villains I've seen in this thread have nothing on Dracula. I don't think any explanation is needed, but I'll go through it anyway.

1. Owns a castle in east Europe. Commands a tribe of gypsies.

2. Generally always loses in the end. In the canon novel, it is debatable whether he actually dies at the end.

3. Varies by the story, but he's usually killed or infected a lot of humans before he goes down and caused them a lot of trauma.

4. Dracula has more style than any other villain. Between owning a castle, commanding gypsies, taking over and controlling women, having the power to assume animal forms, and walk on walls he's a beast. He's a scary guy, introduces the idea of a secret race that prays on humans with their superior abilities which has been used in everything from Vampire the Masquerade to Twilight. D&D authors liked him enough to give him his own adventure, I6. Later he was determined to be awesome enough to command his own setting, Ravenloft.

 

[nightwyrm]

Kafka

1) Track Record: Using the mind controlled Terra as a human weapon. Using his own soldiers to test her magic ability.

2) Success Rate: Poisoning an entire city. Killing his own boss. Killing a bunch of espers and absorbing their power. Absorbing the power of the gods of magic.

3) How close he got to winning: He won. He blew up the world and acts like a god in the new, ruined world.

4) Style: Killer Clown. Awesome laugh. Dancing Mad theme. "You all sound like chapters from a self-help booklet."

 

[FireLance]

Name: Syndrome, from The Incredibles

1) Track record: successful inventor who created technology capable of defeating many superheroes.

2) Success rate: Minor - killed off quite a few superheroes. Fails pretty badly at actually becoming a superhero himself and getting revenge on the superhero he used to idolize, though. Major - said one line that keeps getting quoted in discussions about how balanced the PCs are in 4E.

3) How close to winning he gets: He's pretty much won already. That line of his is never going to die.

4) Style: The kind of style that makes me want to perform brain surgery with a mordenkrad.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

Name: Luca Blight (Suikoden II), Prince of Highland

1) Track record: Blames his father for the kidnap and rape of his mother, which produced his sister, Jillia, claiming he was weak and pathetic. Thanks to his bloodline, didn't need to earn his position. However, by the events of the game he is a fearsome warrior in his own right, leading his own elite band of soldiers to many victories.

2) Success Rate: Fairly high. Successfully orchestrates a false flag operation on the Unicorn Brigade, Highland's own group of youth soldiers, massacring all but the two protagonists (who escape) and pointing the blame towards the Jowston City-states, the populist anger giving him an excuse to start a war. He immediately meets total success, crushing any resistance, slaughtering every living creature in his path regardless of civilian/military status, and burning towns to the ground. Simultaneously, he employs the 2nd protagonist well, using him (still presumed a "good guy") to sneak in and assassinate the capital city's mayor (greatly helping it's downfall), as well as assisting in a plot to kill his father, the King, whilst hiding his involvement. Thus, for the small gift of his sister's hand in marriage to the other protagonist, he assumes the crown himself.

3) How close to winning he gets: Very close. He captures the capital of the enemy and nearly all of the other major cities, and corners the resistance movement to a single fortification before the tide turns. Even then, the protagonist is only able to defeat his generals. When Luca leads his army personally against the hero's, he easily forces their retreat. It is only after the other protagonist, in his own power grab, betrays Luca by informing the good guys of Luca's plan for a surprise night raid that his ambitions end.

4) Style: So memorable that most would consider him the main villain of S2, even though he dies 2/3 of the way through the game. It takes a special level of psychopath to not only kill innocent people, but to make them crawl round acting like pigs and other forms of humiliation on the promise of letting them live if they do so...only to kill them anyway after getting a good laugh. Luca had no illusions of being misunderstood. He knew he was pure evil and relished it to the fullest. He even went out with style, getting ambushed by a far larger army, assaulted by no less than three strike teams specially formed just to hunt him down, shot up several times with hails of flaming arrows, only to finally fall dead after dueling the hero with barely any life left in him.

"It took hundreds to kill me, but I killed humans by the thousands!"

YouTube - Suikoden II - (Part 81) Luca Blight's End

 

[FireLance]

Name: Wizards of the Coast

1) Track record: Game company that created Magic: the Gathering and bought over TSR and D&D.

2) Success rate: Destroyed D&D and ruined my life! (See below for details)

3) How close to winning they get: Award yourself points as indicated for any of the following which apply:

1. Did unspeakable things to my childhood (10 points)
2. Forced me to participate in edition wars (10 points)
3. Got me banned from a thread (20 points)
4. Made me use the phrase "If everyone is special, no-one is" (20 points)
5. Caused me to make frequent posts complaining about 4E (40 points)
5a. Award yourself extra points if you regularly post complaints about the following subjects:

dragonborn anatomy (10 points)
martial healing (10 points)
martial encounter and daily powers (10 points)
wizards (10 points)
PCs are not special (20 points)
PCs are superheroes or mutants (20 points)
the Great Wheel cosmology (20 points)
yugoloths (20 points)
dragons (40 points)​

6. Got me temporarily banned from ENWorld (40 points)
7. Got me permanently banned from ENWorld (100 points, but what are you doing reading this?)

4) Style: Took a sharp nosedive after The Rouse left.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Emperor Palpatine
1) Track record:
Killed his master. Turned some Jedi to the Dark Side and help him set up a Clone Army to be used in an up-coming Civil War. Takes control of a resistance that will allow to instigate the up-coming civil war.
Installs himself as an important Senate Member, concealing his dark powers from even the most powerful Jedi.

2) Success rate: what do they manage to do in the film/media?
Well, depends on which episodes we look at. In the first three, he is very succesful.
- Starts a blockade on the very planet he is supposed to represent.
- Starts a Galactic Civil War in the process.
- Takes control over both sides in this war by ensuring that the current Chancellor is voted out of office, replaced by him.
- Wins the war (how couldn't he - he's on both sides?)
- Turns the possibly most powerful Jedi to his side.
- Destroys the Jedi Order.
- Turns a Republic into an Empire he leads.


3) How close to winning they get
He destroys a planet hostile to his empire (though by a proxy). He dismantles the senate.
Well, the Rebel fleet is suffering heavy losses, and he is killing the penultimate hope of the Jedi. But he still loses when the turned Jedi turns against him and throws him down a shaft.

4) Style:
Impressive. He is a master of a deception. He plays his role brilliantly, nobody would believe he is the person that is leading both sides.

 

[Relique du Madde]

The Joker is probably one of the greatest comics villains ever invented.

1) Track record: what have they accomplished prior to their antagonism? Before they meet, the Joker is already an accomplished murderer with an agenda.

That really depends on which telling of the Joker's origin you take as being cannon. The one from the Killing Joke had the Joker being relatively normal everyday no-life until he met Batman, which lead to the chemical bath and the insanity.

 

[SolitonMan]

Davros (Doctor Who)

Track Record: Creator of the Daleks who spread destruction and terror through time and space, betrayer of his people.

Success Rate: Very successful.

How close to Winning: Very close, if not for some timely "Doctor Ex Machina" all of reality would have been destroyed.

Style: He built a "machine" to destroy all of reality, and nearly managed to set it off. I give him credit for original thinking - it's much easier to simply destroy all of your enemies and anyone or anything that might oppose you in one fell swoop than to hunt them down individually.


Davros' speech in the final episode of season four of the new Doctor Who (with David Tennant, Billie Piper, Catherine Tate, et al) where he explains his plan is a good one, forgive any misquoting:

ROSE: "What happened to them?"

THE DOCTOR: "..."

DAVROS: "Electrical energy, Miss Tyler. Every atom in existence is bound by an electrical field. The Reality Bomb cancels it out. Structure falls apart. That test was focused on the prisoners alone. Full transmission will dissolve every form of matter."

ROSE: "The stars are going out."

THE DOCTOR: "The twenty-seven planets. You've transformed them into one vast transmitter, blasting that frequency -"

DAVROS: "Across the entire universe. Never stopping, never faltering, never fading. People and planets and stars will become dust, and the dust will become atoms, and the atoms with become - nothing. And the wavelength will continue, breaking through the rift at the heart of the Medusa Cascade into every dimension, every parallel, every single corner of creation! THIS is my ultimate victory - the destruction of reality itself!!"

 

[fireinthedust]

As the OP I want to focus this discussion:

* could we get more source material? Some of these guys I've never heard of, so I need some pointers on where to reference them from. also, let's pick specific instances of villains like the Joker (though that "the time I won" is pretty bad).

* Competence is a big thing here. I've noted that while some of the villains are pretty scary, the question is whether or not that is a situational thing. Take Biff from Back to the Future. He's no where in the same league as Ursula or Emperor Palpatine. Awesome movie, and he's antagonistic to the extreme, but I wouldn't say it's due to his being bad as much as just... in the right place, y'know?
Then again, when we get enough here we should debate!

 

[avin]

Ozymandias

1) Track record: for a while, he stopped a world war.

2) Success rate: almost there... damn Rorschach diary!

3) How close to winning they get: as far as it gets.

4) Style: on comic book, fantastic, on the movie, what a crappie actor...