D&D General Strong, Complex Villains

[Scribe]

I think those can be interesting villains, but I don't think they are "the best" by any stretch. A Great villain can absolutely own that they are a villain. itis the fact that they are a fully realized character that makes them a great villain.

Exhibit A: The Dark Knight (film) Joker.

Sometimes I wonder if this is what makes Joker a good villain. He's nothing but a Villain. No positive spin possible, he's just this elemental force.

You can have characters on the other side as well, ones who have motivations, desires, goals, that are not objectively counter to the morality of the day, its just the methods, or some such.

Not Joker though.

 

[Charlaquin]

I have a rule to make any NPC main villain to have either a redeemable quality, or a tragic backstory that caused them to become warped. Often many villains are certain they are doing the right thing. They aren't all out for conquest and subjugation.

I used to have a similar preference, but anymore I don’t feel it’s necessary for villains to be so sympathetic, as long as their motivations are understandable. Take Strahd as a familiar example. He started out as a mustache-twirling cartoon villain. He was an evil Dracula and as far as the adventure was concerned, that was all he needed to be. Later, I, Strahd gave him a tragic backstory, which was the in thing for villains at the time. He wasn’t just evil because he was evil anymore, he was evil because he was spurned by the woman he loved. Now, that may be less of a sympathetic angle these days, in light of the whole incel phenomenon (and maybe it never was all that sympathetic to folks who grew up having to deal with dudes acting like entitled creeps), but regardless, the goal was certainly to make him sympathetic, and to at least a portion of the audience at the time, it did. But the Strahd of Curse of Strahd isn’t even that. He’s not in love, he’s obsessed. He was always a brutal conqueror, and he had already been courting the dark powers by the time Sergei and Tatyana got married, killing Sergei was just the act that sealed a deal long in the making. His tragic backstory has been recontextualized to make him understandable without being sympathetic. You can see what led him to be the way he is, but there’s no longer any shadow of a pretense of that excusing him. And I think it’s the best version of the character yet. It combines the complexity of the tragic villain with the moral and narrative clarity of the irredeemable moustashe-twirler.

 

[Charlaquin]

I always think of Magneto from the X-Men comics as a great example of a complex villain. As a young man, Max Eisenhardt fled Germany to seek safety in Poland only to end up captured when war broke out and sent to the Warsaw Ghetto. Max lost his whole family to the Holocaust, and as he grew older came to fear the the growing hatred people had for mutants. So Magneto fights against Homo sapiens sapiens because he's afraid they're going to start rounding mutants up and sending them to death camps. We understand what motivates him and empathize with him even though we (most of us) don't agree with his actions. He's a great villain.

I don’t know, these days I feel less comfortable with oppressed minorities engaging in direct action against their oppressors being cast as villains…

 

[Charlaquin]

Sometimes I wonder if this is what makes Joker a good villain. He's nothing but a Villain. No positive spin possible, he's just this elemental force.

You can have characters on the other side as well, ones who have motivations, desires, goals, that are not objectively counter to the morality of the day, its just the methods, or some such.

Not Joker though.

Not that that stopped them from trying to make him sympathetic anyway with Jouaquin Phoenix’s Joker. I know a lot of folks liked that film, but I just don’t see the appeal.

 

[Scribe]

Not that that stopped them from trying to make him sympathetic anyway with Jouaquin Phoenix’s Joker. I know a lot of folks liked that film, but I just don’t see the appeal.

There can still be a sympathetic back story, but if its not really impacting the end result of being well...really just a random force of chaos, I personally dont think it fundamentally changes the perception of the character?

 

[Charlaquin]

There can still be a sympathetic back story, but if its not really impacting the end result of being well...really just a random force of chaos, I personally dont think it fundamentally changes the perception of the character?

I agree that it doesn’t fundamentally change the character. So, what is it doing? The Killing Joke gave Joker a tragic backstory, but did it with the express purpose of revealing something about the character: that he doesn’t really remember, or even care what his actual backstory is, because to him the only thing that matters about it is that he was a regular person who became like he is now because of one bad day, and he truly believes the same could happen to anyone. The Dark Knight gave a nod to The Killing Joke with his various stories of how he got his scars, and for much the same reason, because that version of the character had very similar motivations to the version seen in The Killing Joke. But the Joaquin Phoenix version? What is that backstory doing for the character? Conflating his iconic manic laughter with Pseudobulbar affect? Blaming his violent behavior on mental illness? Teasing the possibility of him being Batman’s illegitimate half-sibling? Making him sympathetic to incels? I just don’t see it doing anything useful, or even particularly interesting.

 

[MGibster]

I don’t know, these days I feel less comfortable with oppressed minorities engaging in direct action against their oppressors being cast as villains…

The X-Men sometimes take direct action against their oppressors as well but that doesn't make them bad guys. What makes Magneto a baddie is that he's working to create a world where mutants rule over humans. Given his origin it's ironic he adheres to a philosophy of a master race ruling over their lessers.

 

[Charlaquin]

The X-Men sometimes take direct action against their oppressors as well but that doesn't make them bad guys. What makes Magneto a baddie is that he's working to create a world where mutants rule over humans. Given his origin it's ironic he adheres to a philosophy of a master race ruling over their lessers.

Yeah, for sure. To be clear, I wasn’t suggesting Magneto isn’t or shouldn’t be seen as a villain. Just that he’s less comfortably villainous than I think he was meant to be. Which is always a risk when making villains sympathetic.

 

[Reynard]

The X-Men sometimes take direct action against their oppressors as well but that doesn't make them bad guys. What makes Magneto a baddie is that he's working to create a world where mutants rule over humans. Given his origin it's ironic he adheres to a philosophy of a master race ruling over their lessers.

What makes Magneto a villain is he is willing to kill innocents. He is a terrorist.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Many interesting ideas in this thread, some directly contradicting my experience, so it's obviously group-dependant.

1. Attacking the thing the PCs (and players, in fact) are invested in

Burning their stronghold, taking their stuff, killing the NPCs they are attached to... I can see that working, but I also found that it tend to have players invest themselves less in the world. "What's the point in building a stronghold if it will be razed by the next dragon?" "What's the point of getting attached to NPC X if he'll be kidnapped... several times? Let's not let the GM have leverage on us, henceforth we will be loners, going from tavern to tavern and we'll never have more than a business relationship with anyone not having the PC glow around him". Being to "heavy-handed" can make this approach backfire in the long run. I have found that having the villain just... ignore them or consider them beneath him. Not being respected as heroes is something that infuriates PCs even when they're with allies, let alone foes. PC Sherlock Holmes would immediately hate Moriarty if Moriarty was saying "Him? Let him go. Sherlock is no threat, the real threat is Lestrade, not his incompetent henchman!" Lack of respect is a strong motivator.

2. Taking their stuff...

Sure, PCs tend to have an extended notion of property rights. You took my stuff, I'll cross the world over to kill you, even if I actually got my stuff back 18 sessions ago... But it borders on another problem... the KoS problem. You absolutely need to telegraph that the big boss is above their ability to defeat when they meet him. If not, you risk them to fight to the death instead of letting themselves become prisonners & being captured. There is some sense that the GM is expected to provide CR-appropriate foes for the players. The idea (present in real life and MMORPG) that some monsters are very dangerous and can kill you easily is less present in D&D. As the system also allows large power discrepancy, half of the PCs can be dead before they realize... and even then, they might not accept defeat as a solution. Risking a TPK and campaign failure because one wanted to make the players invested with the villain is not a success. Players are prone to do reckless things.

3. Have the villain be an organization, not a single foe

This is my favorite trick. It makes confrontation possible. If X the villain is killed during session 2, before establishing his backstory, then the real leader was Y, not X. Once they have started hating the faction and his leader by extension, then it's time to let them get clues about the villain (and avoid any direct confrontation, except in a context where it's not possible to use violence (meeting in public place like the king's court). Not all villain need to be KoS by everyone, if your villain is a noble family wanting to overthrow the king, they are the king cousins before proof can be delivered and so they can basically go wherever they want and the PCs would be unwise to harass them. Il also prevent scry-and-die techniques until they discover the identity of the true leader of the organization they are fighting.

4. Make sure you give the PCs the time to get information about the villain but don't force it down their throats. There is no saddest story that the GREAT backsory of your villain the PCs didn't get the opportunity to discover because the campaign went in another direction. But there is a risk that the GM becomes too invested into his villain's story to allow the PCs to bypass/ignore it completely. It's first and foremost the PCs story, and explaining the villain backstory must be organic to the story of the PCS.

5. Make the villain plan realistic and not evil overlord-like (or have him read the list)

Single foes are easily defeated. If you want your villain to have some staying power, he must confront the heroes and escape (thanks to his henchman dying for him to buy him time). Nobody will die for a raving lunatic, even if he pays well. The servant must be convinced they are working for the greater good (ideally) or at least for something neutral. Even the mafia tries to pass as good, and blatantly terrorist organizations can have armies because the rank and file believes that they're right/doing the right thing. Nationalistic conflicts are better for this than "destroy the world" scenarios, religious, too: the villain's army must be sustained by something. Bonus point if the players can see the villain having a good point to act like that and could see themselves in the same situation as him.