So, what is your Favorite "Villain" race these days?

[Tonguez]

Spanish Inquisition? After all, no one expects it.
.

in my ‘faux-europe‘ setting Torquemada* (combining the historic and the 2000AD versions) was a major antagonist and after he forced the Church to declare him Pope expanded the Papal States to dominate much of Southern Europe (including waging war against France). Torquemada upheld Human Orthodoxy, through persecution, torture and burning at the stack, declaring all fey, humanoids and magic to be devilish witchcraft.

 

[Voadam]

I am running the Iron Gods AP so for a while it has been Mad Max style orc gangs and Paranoia style insane robots with a gang of necro-cannibal hobgoblins thrown in. Mutant hill giants and alien aberrations are on deck though.

 

[payn]

I am running the Iron Gods AP so for a while it has been Mad Max style orc gangs and Paranoia style insane robots with a gang of necro-cannibal hobgoblins thrown in. Mutant hill giants and alien aberrations are on deck though.

When I ran IG, I added in Orc bards with electric amplifier back packs.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

As a youthful GM back in the 80s I ran Keep on the Borderlands. And in this adventure (and others I'm sure but names are escaping me) the writing specifically said there were children in the caves. So, naïve little fella I was, I just ran it as written. I mean, it made sense to me that there were children.

No-one liked that there were children. They were like "Dude, we don't want to kill children but we don't want the hassle of running an orphanage either. Can we just say there's no kids?" I'll be honest, I was a bit "but, it's village of people, of course there's kids." The players said "We don't care about the realism." I didn't want any child murder either, so no kids it was.

The downside of that was that we could continue playing the simplistic "they're bad guys, kill 'em all" style of game.

It was only once we started playing games other than DnD that we moved away from that. Palladium had orcs (goblins, ogres, trolls) playable as PCs. Shadowrun/Cyberpunk was a real change-up as we could see that the NPCs (e.g. the security guards) were just people with jobs, they were specifically presented as such in the rule books and adventures. Marvel FASERIP made killing anyone, even Red Skull, a bad thing. (Murder's a bad thing? Who knew?) Being a murder hobo was suddenly a lot harder.

I guess what I'm slowly waffling toward is that the way a game presents in-game situations has a big influence on how it's played. DnD has only moved away from murder hoboing in recent years. But did anyone playing Shadowrun, even in the 80s/90s, ever think it would be okay to walk into a big squat in the Barrens and start murdering all the people, be they orcs, dwarfs, humans, who lived there? I'm gonna guess no-one did that. I know in my Shadowrun game we very rapidly moved to gel rounds and narcojets for all but the most dire situations.

 

[payn]

As a youthful GM back in the 80s I ran Keep on the Borderlands. And in this adventure (and others I'm sure but names are escaping me) the writing specifically said there were children in the caves. So, naïve little fella I was, I just ran it as written. I mean, it made sense to me that there were children.

No-one liked that there were children. They were like "Dude, we don't want to kill children but we don't want the hassle of running an orphanage either. Can we just say there's no kids?" I'll be honest, I was a bit "but, it's village of people, of course there's kids." The players said "We don't care about the realism." I didn't want any child murder either, so no kids it was.

The downside of that was that we could continue playing the simplistic "they're bad guys, kill 'em all" style of game.

It was only once we started playing games other than DnD that we moved away from that. Palladium had orcs (goblins, ogres, trolls) playable as PCs. Shadowrun/Cyberpunk was a real change-up as we could see that the NPCs (e.g. the security guards) were just people with jobs, they were specifically presented as such in the rule books and adventures. Marvel FASERIP made killing anyone, even Red Skull, a bad thing. (Murder's a bad thing? Who knew?) Being a murder hobo was suddenly a lot harder.

I guess what I'm slowly waffling toward is that the way a game presents in-game situations has a big influence on how it's played. DnD has only moved away from murder hoboing in recent years. But did anyone playing Shadowrun, even in the 80s/90s, ever think it would be okay to walk into a big squat in the Barrens and start murdering all the people, be they orcs, dwarfs, humans, who lived there? I'm gonna guess no-one did that. I know in my Shadowrun game we very rapidly moved to gel rounds and narcojets for all but the most dire situations.

Its a hard template to get out of for some folks. When I moved to other games folks still wanted to arm themselves to the teeth and expected all problems were solved with murder. Thats a base level experience too, you dont even get into trad and narrative games quite yet..

 

[aramis erak]

Wait. I have questions...

He has answers. We've been friends for decades.

Beware what you ask for.

Oh, and someone did write an abusive AI chatbot... by accident. https://spectrum.ieee.org/in-2016-m...t-revealed-the-dangers-of-online-conversation
... or was it an accident? Probably an accident. But some people are perverse enough to aim for abusive.

So, even now, one cannot be certain the racist «bleep»-head online may or may not be a human.

I love using rogue AI as a villain in certain settings. Especially ALIEN... MU/TH/UR, Synthetics, APOLLO... loads of AI to go rogue. One can have a wonderfully dark ALIEN campaign and never even bother with the Xenomorphs.

 

[aramis erak]

What if your PC eats them?

ALIGNMENT CHANGE TO EVIL!!!
MUHAHAHAHA!!!!

Unless they're from a particular world in the OTU... Calling Purser Grande...

 

[DrunkonDuty]

Its a hard template to get out of for some folks. When I moved to other games folks still wanted to arm themselves to the teeth and expected all problems were solved with murder. Thats a base level experience too, you dont even get into trad and narrative games quite yet..

Oh! Speaking of particular mindsets from particular games, I'm reminded of a time a few years back when I got my group (not the same group from the 80s) to try Champions for the first time.

Now we did agree on a darker campaign. So when they killed a villain in one of the early sessions I wasn't bothered. But then they looted the guy's apartment. We're not talking super science gadgets and mystic artefacts. Just stuff. Some nice art on the walls. The cutlery. The blu-ray player and the TV. That sort of thing. All wrapped up in the curtains.

Had to have a whole conversation about genre and genre conventions.

 

[Peter BOSCO'S]

Wait. I have questions...

The rest were all animals or machines, at least as far as I know.

 

[Peter BOSCO'S]

ALIGNMENT CHANGE TO EVIL!!!
MUHAHAHAHA!!!!

Unless they're from a particular world in the OTU... Calling Purser Grande...

Hey! He never murdered anyone so he could eat them. They were already dead. When you're from a TL 7 airless world it just makes sense not to waste resources.