What Makes a Great Villian

[Wolv0rine]

Here are some factors that don't see play as much as I'd like them to:

Fear. You can have wonderful villains, you can have villians with memorable personalities, fully-rounded goals and motivations and all that. But a truely classic, epic villain should be one who you Fear. I love the villain described by Herpes Cineplex a few posts back, great character. But the question is, was the party afraid of him? I don't get the impression that they were.

Case in point, when Warlord Ralts was running the Year of the Zombie game on psionics.net, we were *afraid* of those zombies. The rednecks were tough, but we were confident we could handle them (and when we reached a level too high to even bat an eye at them, I kind of missed them). And the thing we feared more than zombies was kids.

Yes, kids. Little kids. Like 5-9 years old.

Ralts had added this custom template to these feral kids, and they were terrifying. They ran through storms of fully automatic gunfire, making obscene Ref checks, and never getting hit. They wielded butcher knives and cleavers and came dozens at a time in small, confined places. They were scarier than Frell. And when we finally took down their leader, it was tough, and we lost more than a few characters. And no one in that group will ever forget those kids.

Which brings me to another point. The BBEG doesn't always have to be a single entity. Like those kids, or the zombies themselves. They were, onto themselves, BBEGs, but they were groups. There was no Master Zombie, and that was part of the problem. There was no top to go to in an attempt to end the nightmare. You just had to hope you survived the next onslaught. And you knew, eventually, that it was coming.

 

[Herpes Cineplex]

But a truely classic, epic villain should be one who you Fear. I love the villain described by Herpes Cineplex a few posts back, great character. But the question is, was the party afraid of him? I don't get the impression that they were.

Not as a general rule, no. Fear was generated more by specific situations rather than by specific NPCs. For example, towards the end, the BBEG's lieutenants were most often being sent to do nasty things to people and places that the player characters liked, and so there was usually a nervous "what if we're too late?" vibe going. Some of the side plots (mostly unrelated to the villain's main plans) had really scary evil things happening and scary evil NPCs to match, though.

But the main storyline simply wasn't about making the PCs be afraid of the villain, in the horror-movie sense. He was a bad guy, with goals we didn't like, and we were aiming to stop him; so really, he was more like the bad guy of a Western movie, or maybe akin to a comic-book archenemy. You know, the way that Reed Richards isn't exactly afraid of Doctor Doom, but definitely considers him to be a serious threat and will always oppose him.

If our major villain HAD been utterly terrifying, I don't think he would've had nearly as much personality, and so he would have been much less interesting to us. Certainly we never regarded the really scary evil NPCs from the side plots as being "serious villains"; we'd remember them as being frightening, but beyond that we didn't really have much else that we could say about them. As a result, we could never muster up the kind of interest in them that we could for the main bad guy.


Not that I'm disagreeing with you; I like a good horror game as much as the next guy and probably more than most. It's just that not every game with a villain is a horror game, and so not every villain is best served by being scary. But if you're going for horror, then, yes, your villain should be as thoroughly unnerving and terrifying as possible.

--
villains should be memorable and appropriate for the type of game they're in

 

[Wolv0rine]

I didn't mean horror-movie scary, per say, although that can work. If you're afraid of the repercussions of facing a foe, that's a scary villian. If you're afraid the guy's going to draw & quarter you, he's scary. Maybe he's just so frelling self-confident he leaves no room for you to doubt he's Just That Good.

Take Darth Vader. Luke, Leia, Han & company were afraid of Vader. They faced him when they had to, but he was a bad mamma-jamma with a reputation for putting you down. He had the presence, the voice, the power, and the attitude. AND he was a cool villian to boot.

PCs don't seem to have a healthy fear of the BBEG very often, I think it's a shame. I mean really, one doesn't get to BE the BBEG without being formidable. But you rarely see adventurers bat an eye at the prospect of taking him on.

 

[Ashrum the Black]

Wolv0rine: I think the type of fear you're talking about is generated by a well played villain. A well played villain in my opinion doesn't have to make the PC's terrified of what he is, but what is he going to do if they don't stop him.

So while children form hades wielding cleavers may send chills up the spins of the players, so does a villian that is cool and confident and plans to destroy the world if he succeeds. Show the PC's an example of what will happen on a smaller scale, and they'll understand just how bad it will be if he''s not stopped.

Honestly I don't want my players to fear my BBEG, I want them to loathe him. I want them to hate him so much that they'll jump into the active volcano after him, not relent until they see the body and have it buried within a coffin in the basement of the vatican. On round the clock gaurd. Just to ensure he doesn't come back again. To me that is a great villain.

But ultimatly I think we're both after the same thing. To make the villain memorable. To have the PC's think back five years after the campaign and say "Hey, remeber when we took down Ombi?" Each group responds differently so each villain must be tailored to your group.

Great ideas guys, keep them coming.

-Ashrum