D&D General Strong, Complex Villains

[Paul Farquhar]

I mean, sure, but I'm missing the connection to my post.

Really? I thought it was fairly obvious, given that there are many other posts making a similar point. You tagged this thread "D&D", not "movies". The scenes that make the Joker an interesting villain - the opening bank heist, the "pencil trick" etc would all have been cut if the Dark Knight had been D&D, because the Player Character isn't present in any of them.

The only way to do The Dark Knight in D&D would be to make the Joker the PC.

The answer to "what makes an interesting movie villain", as exemplified by TDK, is "give them plenty of screen time". And this is a lesson that fundamentally cannot be applied to D&D.

 

[Reynard]

Really? I thought it was fairly obvious, given that there are many other posts making a similar point. You tagged this thread "D&D", not "movies". The scenes that make the Joker an interesting villain - the opening bank heist, the "pencil trick" etc would all have been cut if the Dark Knight had been D&D, because the Player Character isn't present in any of them.

The only way to do The Dark Knight in D&D would be to make the Joker the PC.

The answer to "what makes an interesting movie villain", as exemplified by TDK, is "give them plenty of screen time". And this is a lesson that fundamentally cannot be applied to D&D.

What i said was that a villain doesn't have to be sympathetic to be a great villain and used TDK Joker as an example. The question of how you transmit that to the players is a different one, and independent of where the villain is on the sympathy scale (except it is probably harder to get PCs enough information for a sympathetic villain to be actually sympathetic).

I also disagree with your reasoning why Joker is a great villain in that movie, but that's probably for another thread in Geek Media.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

A really successful villain I once run necessitated the players to investigate him. It was a revenant-based creature. Sure, the players could defeat it but he would reform after 1d6+5 days. and get his powers back to full in short order. To get rid of him, the players had to understand what kept him in the realm of the living and part of this investigation made the villain more sympathetic. He wasn't an actual misinformed good guy but he was.... understood by the players.