What makes a good villian evil?

[Babylon Knight]

I draw upon an example from "Pirates of the Carribean", wherein Johnny Depp is constantly under stress to avoid Keira Knightley's father, who, we know is a pretty good man, doing his job, but he is also a minor-antagonist at that, surely trying to foil Cpt. Sparrow's plans.

So, my question to you - are there certain qualities that would make a good aligned NPC a formidable opponent, ongoing, that would appear to be evil, but they really aren't?

It could even have a bit of humor thrown in, as noted by my previous example

 

[MavrickWeirdo]

I have read stories of 2 great villians in recent years.

The first was a truly evil man. A pirate without mercy. He discovered that the quickest way to gather a loyal following (to become "Pirate King"), was to capture slave ships and free the slaves. (Liveship Traders Trilogy by Robin Hobb) That is probably the opposit of what you were asking for.

The second example is of a "bishop" who is sent to a foriegn land to convert the natives. His homeland is a theocracy. Before he left the High Priest/King informed him he has 3 months to have the "true faith" made the state religon of the foriegn land, or an army would invade slautering thousands. So he decides to convert the foriegners by any means necessary. (Elantris by Brandon Sanderson)

 

[Lazarous]

Well, the simple answer to this one is that you should have an evil party. Powerful good aligned enemies seem quite formidable from that perspective.

Some other qualities that a 'good' character might have which would put them into conflict with your PC's are - stubborness (closely related to obstinancy - the pc's do something the npc would consider punishable yet does not care about the motivations), very strict code of honor/conduct which the pc's have violated, misunderstanding of the situation, being used by more ruthless/evil beings as pawns.

Expanding a bit on misunderstanding of the situation - take this situation: the pc's are trying to stop a horribly evil man from going around and ritually killing specific people who are important in some doomsday scenario. However, the evil man is being very careful about his actions, and is making it seem like the PC's are the ones doing the killings. You basically have to disallow spells like know alignment and zone of truth for this sort of scenario to work, but if the truth of a situation can be obscured somehow, the pc's will continue running from a lawman trying to catch them and stop 'their' killing spree.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Everything is in the defination, details and description; there are a number of villian archtypes: The monster, the creep, the henchman, the thug, the mastermind, the hero, etc, once you have that archtype you have to streotype them and define them: What makes them and what will they do (not what you would do but what they would do), this is bullette item responses to events and using them; a thug resonse to anything would be violence, a creep could be anything but begging and scheming should be first.

You just have to build you villian.

 

[Hand of Evil]

Oh, define what is evil in your games, let your players know.

 

[Aeric]

Evil can very often be in the eye of the beholder. Situational enemies make for the best "good villains"...these are guys whom the PCs might sit down and have a drink with if they weren't violently opposed to each other. Everyone involved may be Good, but each side has its own opinion of what would be good in the current situation.

Commodore Norrington (from POTC) was a situational enemy to Will Turner; both were good-aligned, only Will was willing to break the rules to save Elizabeth while Norrington was not. In fact, Norrington cared so much about the rules that he was willing to jeopardize his fiancee's life in order to bring two criminals (Jack and Will) to justice. A classic example of CG or even NG versus dyed-in-the-wool LG.

Even two characters of identical alignments can have wildly different takes on a situation, thereby making them enemies. There's a lot of room to play around in the borders of alignments.

And let's not forget the evil villain who actually thinks he is the good guy....