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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mark" data-source="post: 276598" data-attributes="member: 5">I prefer to create villains for lower levels that are easier to identify and less sympathetic, moving toward the opposite as the campaign builds.IMO, your typical bully or ruthless killer makes for a good nemesis while the players are sorting out the definitions of their character's personality traits.  Once they've begun to define the parameters by which they make their moral and ethical choices, I prefer for villains' morality and ethical standards to become more ambiguous in the villain's eyes, and therefore present harder choices when bringing such a foe to justice.To use a pop culture example (that most on these boards will know), how truly evil is the king in Dragonslayer (or the story on which it is based) who has held the lottery to choose a sacrifice, omitting the name of his own daughter from the choosing?  For years he assumed that sooner or later the dragon would perish and thus save his own daughter and curtail the mass killing of the people of his kingdom.  Surely, his shortcut leaves something to be desired, but his choices (and he does have two) seem largely unselfish.Another common example is the Jean Valjean of Les Miserables.  One cannot deny that he is, under the law, a thief (twice over, eventually).  If a PC in a similar scenario is in the position of Valjerre (sp?) do they have an easy time reaching a satisfying conclusion to the adventure of bringing Valjean to justice?  Perhaps not, but it becomes a better game for the gray lines that divide the field, IMO.Quite frankly, black and white scenarios have been done to death (literally) and CRPGs are full of two dimensional bad guys and bosses.  At my table, I want to present situations where there are no easy answers and the characters grow because of the degrees by which they measure their own decisions, not because they pushed one of two buttons and some candy dropped out of a shoot.To answer the question, neither (in the long term).  "Love to hate"  and "hate to hate" are far too clear cut to be challenging.   Even the villain that you love to hate is still a villain and needs to be brought down in full.  IMO, villains that you neither love nor hate, but have aspects with which you can identify become the ultimate foe that needs defeating.  It is in vanquishing them that we conquer the demons within ourselves.Just my thoughts, as it were... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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