What makes for a great villain?

I think people make villains too one dimensional; often they ARE simply more powerful versions of the common foe or

simply some form of generic evil puppet master that are meant to be cut down at the end of the module.  To create a

true villain worthy of a proactive storyline I like to take literary approach.

1.  A good epic villain is legendary.  While he is usually depicted as a cruel person devoted to a life of wicked and malicious actions there has to be more.

A villain is a complex character steeped in amorality and evil doing for his own gain at any cost. A villain may be depicted with bizarre physical traits to make him appear truly villainous while others may appear as mere mortals but  having a dark soul, capable of bringing terror and destruction by their evil actions. 

While some may be archtypical  (think of your evil villains from Disney for example) they each however are unique in their evil. Ask yourself what is your villains form of "evil"  I like to use the 7 deadly sins;

Lust
Gluttony
Greed
Sloth
Wrath
Envy
Pride

Pick one or combine a few and have the villain immerse himself within it.  From looks, to manners, method of speech, surroundings, to intent.  Make your villain iconic.

2.  Is your villain truly legendary or do you want him to grow with the character; do you wish to parallel their rise through him; should his evil balance out their heroic actions?  This is an important question because it affects your  presentation.

In my earlier post I stated, "Evil often can only achieve power in a vacuum of a greater evil."  Having the players  give birth to their own villain under the guise of destroying a greater evil is a great introducion. 

Nature abhors a vaccuum, and if by killing some great evil they open the path for a lesser evil to take over (perhaps one they know personally;) how better to make the characters feel the obligation to remove this villain than being aware that they are responsible for it's birth.

For evil to survive it must be subtle at the onset. Evil will work through agents and for many stories the players really should only experience your villain through a growing sense of familiarity.

Evil's presence should be merely tactile in the first stages where the players see evidence of evils passing.  The change in the economic climate of a small village to gross poverty; ruination of the fields; starvation of the fodder; people may become  shadows or corruptions of their formerselves.  A kindly innkeeper begins treating her help badly beating her serving girls for spilled ale; a fair sherrif begins cutting off hands vice placing people within the stocks for petty crimes.

As the gameplay progresses lesser evils will be born; those opportunists who seek to emulate the master's path, get caught within his wake and follow him to infamy or those that seek to leech his power to someday replace him.

These agents will more often be the face of evil to the party.  Hilter, for example, was the master villain of the 3rd Reich and yet it was his stormtroopers, agents of the SS, various doctors and soldiers that were the face of his evil. 

The average soldier fighting their campaign against him viewed his evil only the the actions of his minions; scraps of his writings; or far away glimpses of his speeches.  Until the party raises to power where the climax of a campaign or series of campaign is finally written rarely should they be in direct presence where they can commit the coup de grace and end the evil.  Escape is overly used and too often robs the players of a fair victory.

However, a knowing sense that you are drawing closer and closer to the source of the evil; builds anticipation to the approaching climax of the story and pending finale.  Imagine waging battle through a corrupted land, ending the plots of various lieutenants; recognizing a concentration of elite gaurdian only finding at their heart; a sheltered fortress that is surprisingly bereft of any gaurds, or perhaps mortal guards... (he cannot trust anyone remember?)

3.  Don't be mistaken however while some villains may be subtle and growing others begin at onset (think Sauron) emininetly powerful; they are deceitful and insidious, overwhelmingly evil and seductive in their use of it.

4.  Some of the best master villains are derived from those that have traits that remind us they too are human.  The villain may have many basic flaws and his intentions and actions may cause untold miseries to the others. All the same, a good villain is one may actually gain the sympathy of the players as he behaves in that manner due to a fatal flaw inherent  in  his character. In fact he has a strong motive for his wrong action which makes him sound convincing.

 
Macbeth was a villain as much as a victim.  he is a man who would have done exactly the same even if he had never met the witches or his wife had not urged him on. His lust for power is enormous and Lady Macbeth and the witches simply strengthen his determination.  However, most people feel bad for him, a sense of pity..   Lord Soth is a great example of a fall into the darkness of a good master villain.  A chivalric Knight of the Rose who falls in love outside of his politically arranged marriage that leads him into jealousy, rage, murder and to turn his back on his god.  Cursed he rules his dark kingdom from his throne in Dargaard.

5. As an antagonist, you have to rememBer his function. The villain is as an obstacle which the hero has to overcome at various stages of the plot. The villain is "opposing" the heroes.  The players have to feel the sense that the villain is the cause of or threatens them with failure.  There must be indication the villain are the source to build that emnity.  However, the villian as stated above does not, and for story/campaign purposes should not, engage the characters directly.

He should be glimpsed across a battlefield; seen boarding the airship from the burning flying fortress.. he should be looming within the window on the bridge of the capital star destroyer.. so close, but out of reach until the climax of the story.

6.  The villain should evoke as much emotion as image.  He should make the players feel hatred, fear, frustration, anger, sorrow, pity or even jealousy from those so aligned.  Gaming sessions can have themes to drive these feelings.

 

How do you make players "hate" a villain.  Ask yourself, what do they hate?  Do they hate losing property; the villain burns it.  Do they have prized possessions; have the villain steal them.  Do they have have romantic interests; have the villain slay them.  Do they aspire to join some organization; have the villain put it to the sword or disband it (think Cardinal Richelieu and the musketeers)

The Mythic Scribes have a great breakdown of what make for great epic villain;

Powerful

Great villains are staggeringly powerful.  In other words, they have a way of making things bend to their will.  In fantasy stories this often takes the form of magical powers.  Perhaps the villain is a mighty sorcerer or a fallen Jedi Knight.  In some cases, though, the villain’s power lies in his resources.  He may possess vast wealth and influence. Or he may have a highly trained army at his command.

In some cases, though, the villain’s power is less obvious.  A classic literary archetype is the femme fatale: a woman who uses her charm to control those around her.  Some villains posses keen acuity and cunning, which is far more dangerous than raw might.

Intelligent

Effective villains are intelligent.  This does not necessarily mean that they are intellectually gifted.  Rather, it

means that they avoid making stupid decisions. New writers sometimes make the error of crafting villains who are so drunk with ambition that they make dumb moves.  While such a character may make for an entertaining caricature, he or she is not a compelling villain. 

A truly great  villain is always two steps ahead of the hero, and carefully considers every option.

This does not mean that they are above making mistakes.  Otherwise they would be undefeatable.  But they certainly  don’t make the obvious ones.  Great villains pose a real challenge for the hero, and they do so by being on top of their game.

Immoral

True villains are immoral.  This is what makes them villains.  It’s not that they lack a sense of right or wrong.  On the contrary, villains often subscribe to a moral code.  But they are willing to violate accepted moral principles in order to accomplish their goals.

A prime example is Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter series.  He knows that he has violated every principle of human decency.  Yet he justifies his actions by saying that they are “for the greater good.”  Fulfilling his vision of the ideal social order is so important that, in his mind, it necessitates doing terrible things.

This is a common theme with many great villains.  They believe so strongly in the rightness of their own cause that they no longer see the normal standards of moral conduct as applying to them.

Wounded
Memorable villains are usually wounded individuals.  Sometimes this is manifested as physical wounds or disfigurements, such as the scarred face of the Joker or the missing limbs of Darth Vader.  More often, though, the most defining wounds are emotional or psychological.

This reflects the great truth that no human being is born a monster.  Rather, people are made into monsters by the damage and abuse inflicted upon them.  Something must have happened to transform an innocent child into a homicidal adult.  Even if the character’s tragic backstory isn’t fleshed out in the narrative, it is often hinted at.

Having a wounded villain also prevents him or her from becoming a caricature.  Villains who are driven by a lust for power is a fantasy cliché.  Giving the character a reason for this lust makes it credible.

Determined

This is what separates the great villains from the lesser baddies.  A truly formidable villain is possessed by an

unstoppable drive to achieve his or her goal.  Under no circumstance will he ever give up (unless he is somehow redeemed).

Perhaps the most striking example is the Dark Lord himself, Sauron of Mordor.  He is so driven to dominate Middle Earth that even the destruction of his physical body is only a setback.  When a great villain sets his sites on a goal, nothing short of annihilation will stop him from accomplishing it.  This makes the defiance of the hero that much more perilous.

So while I understand the desire to have the villain as the source of evil who keeps escaping, but if you consider the traits above you may be able to add much more depth to your antagonist.



On Playing Evil - "So you want to be chaotic evil do you?"

One of the challenges which every GM will face is permitting his players to align themselves to darker forces.  Sometimes players have a romanticized version of what it would be like to be cut free from moral responsibility and go on a romp down darker paths.

I tend to look at playing evil a little differently in my campaigns.  It takes just as much; if not more work to truly roleplay an evil character and it should.  Consider the following;

1. Evil often can only achieve power in a vacuum of a greater evil. If you are a "lesser" evil your presence unless you are subservient will not be tolerated so your first opposition may be others of your ilk who simply do not play by the rules.

2. If there IS an absence of evil; then there usually is a well-entrenched force for good keeping it at bay.  Someone is taking a vested interest in keeping evil out and have systems in place to warn of their approach.  If evil is a weed then "good" is a gardner which leads to;

3. For evil to survive it must be subtle at the onset; anyone can wear their evil on a sleeve. That usually ends with you dying to the angry mob with pitchforks or tied to a post in the center of town surrounded by kindling. There is usually a reason evil moves by shadow or in the dark of night; it's to prevent the overzealous good majoirty from pummeling you.

It will take time for evil to sow corruption within this garden.  There are no lesser evil minions for you to exploit (good has plucked them before they could take seed as larger evil) so you often are on your own at first until you can foster small bits of corruption beneath the watchful eye of the tenders.

4. Corruption and power are two sides of the same coin. While simple power grab may be fun; corrupting good and turning it evil over time may be more satisfying and long lasting. Beat down that paladin and take his lands; you may simply make a martyr. Turn that paladin evil and creating a Lord Soth to take his place; now you have truly corrupted the landscape and made your mark and gained a powerful servant vice a resolute enemy (in the case where the paladin is simply driven away vice slain.)

5. Everyone is valuable in some way. Look at the mob; or warlords in Africa...Evil has a very extended family; You don't have to walk through town shooting old ladies and burning orphanages to be evil. True evil funds the orphanage, makes it the most recommend and well cared for in all the land, so you have an endless supply of children to experiment upon. True evil dines with the ladies auxiliary, paying for their meals, so they may use their bodies for cover when the righteous come with guns blazing to try and put you in the ground.

My advice;

Ask your players what are their vice; what is the "cardinal sin" that their character worships at the altar of; gluttony, lust, avarice, pride, despair, wrath, envy or sloth.

Challenge them to take each to new levels but make them fear the enemy as much as any first level fears an ogre.

Make "good" a palpable threat. Do not simply create a playground where evil goes unopposed and they will have a great time overcoming the challenges and creating their fiefdoms or lives of infamy.

When they cross the country side murdering, pillaging and conducting all sorts of villainy without fear; that loses one of the principle elements of evil.  Fear.

There is always someone stronger.  There is always someone who replace you.  You cannot trust your lover, your ally, your henchmen, your servant, your guard, your bloodbeast chained to the eternal stone of damnation in the well of suffering awaiting your virgin sacrfice to complete the ritual of transformation to abyssal godhood... oh and you definitly cannot trust the virgin either.

Like any game you want the players to have fun, too easy however, is not fun; make the players aware that alignment or morality does not make the world easier; it simply changes the opposition and the source of challenge.

For me this is when the fun begins.

Online Gaming and Parenthood or "That which you learn hardest, you learn best."

This may relate more to MMOs than online Roleplaying but with technology assisting online roleplaying more and more I can see the creep, and falls into the realm of fatherly advice vice gaming revelation.

An active gamer with 2 children I learned quite a lot over the years. I have been the young dad with babies and like most young men I was selfish and did not truly understand my role in marriage or as a father.

You eventually grow into the role but you only have the image of your own father in your minds eye to serve as a template. Those images can be good, bad or indifferent. You hear about a lot of negativity associated with gaming.

To me gaming is a great hobby; it kept me from running around with the guys who were still single chasing skirts. spending all weekend on the golf course or banging heads on the pitch and drinking after wards. The wife could always look over and know where I was at in the evenings! LOL

There is a period of your life where everything of a personal nature must become secondary for a couple and that is during the infancy of a child, and probably up until they can communicate.

Newborns and babies are fatiguing to say the least and require both parents’ efforts. If nothing else to gain the rest you require to function like a normal human being. When they sleep; you really should because they require 100% attention not just for their survival, but your sanity.

I did a terrible job of this with my firstborn; I ignorantly felt that I spent 12-14 hours at work and deserved a little time off when I came in the door. I failed to acknowledge my wife had spend just as much (and even more tiring effort at home.)

Man do I regret the arguments. “I spent all day working, what did you do?” Some things should never be said, especially out of ignorance. MMOs and gaming online do not help this discussion; many of the devices that make them fun to play you also cannot just just typically "walk away from." There is rarely a pause button nor can you save the game like some RTS.

Your character will always either have just entered a dungeon; started a fight with a mob or is transiting through dangerous territory. The biggest comments that make a wife sick to her stomach are probably;

     "Honey, let me just finish this fight real quick."

     "Honey, let me get back to the inn/town/city real fast"

     "Honey, I cannot walk away I just joined this group they are relying on me."

(They all start with honey... we get very loving when we stall)

I learned after the first and did much better with the second child that the wife and baby are much more important than any game. If she is asking for your help; she's asking for it NOW.

     Not in 10 minutes.

Not when she is FINALLY a priority over;

     some pixels on a screen

     some random acquaintances you have never met in real life

     something/someone who cease to exist the moment you log out .

If she could afford to wait those 10 minutes she wouldn’t ask for your help.

Game time is a lot like time during a football game you are watching on TV. The clock may say 7 minutes but the universal rule is multiply it by 3. So when you tell her, “honey Ill be off in 5 minutes I swear!” that is why she roles her eyes and gets upset.

Babies are about crisis management. They do not come with guidebooks or instruction manuals. You will be figuring out a ton of stuff together. Games can often serve as a place to shelter ourselves from our ignorance. However, babies are so much easier when figured out side by side with your spouse. It is easier on her; it is easier on you. In the end it is healthier for your marriage.

     Make her a priority always.

     Make the baby a priority always.

     Learn to type "BRB Baby" and immediately walk away.

If you can find a group of adults to game with; do so. College kids and teens do not often have the frame of reference. Youth is selfish by nature. They can ridicule you and attempt to guilt you based on how you are distracting from THEIR playtime, as though they should be on an equal level with your family. Trust me; a young man's ego feels and responds to this pressure.

There are two paths in gaming much like in your career. For an occupation, such as the military, you can choose the “Family” path or the “Career Advancement” path. For one you must sacrifice the other. There is no compromise. You simply cannot spend 3-8 hours raiding for those almighty “Purplz” or 4-5 hours tromping across Varisia because you may not get your PFS xp, without detracting from other elements of your life.

If you have a family you must be prepared to walk away; and that forces a much more casual play time.

Relatively speaking I will say it is a short period of your life. Once our children learned to communicate; and became somewhat self- sufficient. The wife did not mind indulging my hobby. Heck, she even brings me a beer or stuff to munch on nowadays while I am Frapsing the latest BETA, or spending hours on Roll20.net with the gaming crew. 

She wants me to be… well… me.

However, she wants her family to be a family and have a healthy foundation. That is what is important; and upon reflection, so did I. Learn to game only after the baby is asleep, AND when you have spent quality time with the wife.

The game will always be there; your children are only young once.

Everyone Loves Pie

So, last night, after 20 years of marriage my darling wife agrees to play
Pathfinder with her 19, 17 and 44 year old children.  The kids and I have been egging her on for the past week to get her to play with the familiar barrage of, "don't you want to spend time with the family?" type soliloqies she normally uses on us.

Submitting to the familial pressure she ends up rolling up "Jasmine" the druid to complement the family's coterie of Davian Lightbringer, human cleric of Iomedae; Micha half elf rogue; and Tirnaug Llachhammer dwarven fighter.

Apparently "Jasmine" sounds sufficiently "nature"ly.

What followed was a combination of perhaps some of most fun and frustrating roleplaying I could have asked for.

I chose a relatively simple module, D0 - Hollow's Last Hope to serve as an introduction. 

For those unfamiliar with the story; the logging town of Falcon's Hollow has been beset by a fearsome plague called the "blackscour" which becomes lethal in days.  A local alchemist has a page out of her grandmother's tome that hints at a cure and asks the players to go into the nearby wood, Darkmoon Vale to find the 3 ingredients; Elderwood moss, pickled rat's tail (a root) and ironbloom mushrooms.

After hearing of the various locations our druid was the only person who appears to have both knowledge geography and knowledge nature but due to some horrible rolls was unable to discern any locations.  We later learned upon close observation that she chose to roll a d10 vice a d20 to check her skills; all dice look alike when they have 10 or more sides.  No worries I simply layed out her set of dice in numerical order tossing the offending 20 sided D10 over my shoulder and continued on.

With our druid unfamiliar with the small forest of darkmoon vale, the party, under the militaristic leadership of my eldest, decided to head out to one of the principle logging camps and see if they could get direction.
Seeing an armed and armored band approach; the surly lumberjacks with axes in hand rallied to drive off the brigands or worse case infected townspeople.

Then the humor set in.

Demanding, not asking for, assistance my daughter's scrappy rogue begins pulling out her blades (chaotic neutral) in preparation for a fight that her insults are bringing; My son is tossing around his best "I am the holy son of Iomedae; you dare risk the wrath of the God's humble servant" speech.  My wife's contribution to the poor treatment by the lumberjacks?

"My cat doesn't like you", Jasmine utters. (Her animal companion is a cheetah)
Everyone pauses and the first chuckle starts.

Hearing the uproar at the edge of camp, the foreman arrives (a GM fiat to prevent the unplanned melee since they were given specific recommendation to ask for him back in town; and thusly failed to do so)  Describing him as a Vitto Mortensen with a braided beard; my wife utters, "oh he's cute" and completely breaks the tension as she sais, "Do I know you?  Have we met before" winking.

My daughter completely baffled and blushing and tells her, "Mooooom, you cannot...flirt with him..." 

"Why not?  I'm 22 by my character sheet, young and he's obviously ruggedly handsome"

"I won't get any loot if we don't fight!"

"We don't want to fight, we just want answers, we're on a quest not a date!" my son intervenes the two of them.

So the foreman attempts to drive them and their "unchained beast" off into the woods;
     "You're probably infected...."
     "We don't need armed brigands in our camp..."
     "A camp is no place for wild beasts, etc, etc..."

to which my wife very sweetly utters, "If I bake you a blueberry pie, will you tell us what we need to know?"

Yes, everyone pauses mid sentence and looks at "Jasmine."

"A pie mom?" My son asks incredulously.

"You're a druid, at the edge of a dark forest, where the heck are you gonna get a pie??" queries my daughter.

"Well everyone likes pie, and if I bake him one he'll be nice and help us."

I couldn't help but let her role a diplomacy check, with a grin on my face amidst everyones laughter, in light of that sound logic and of course she lands like an 18.
The scene concluded with the foreman sketching them directions to key locations within the vale and the family bedding down at the edge of the forest for the night.
Afterwards, when the session had ended, I had to have a talk with her regarding the druids relationship to nature and the forest; and how the huge blight upon the land which was caused by the lumberjacks cutting and how the scarring of the earth would appear to her. 

"A demand of planting some trees for every so many cut down would be more in her character." I mentioned.

She ignored that part of the description read to her initially, about druids... and the whole.. "nature thing" apparently liking the picture of the cute gnome next to the leopard in the Core rule book served as the basis for her character choice.
She knitted her brows pensively and said," oh I wouldn't have baked him a pie then knowing that."  

I definitly learned one thing about roleplaying;

While there may not be a druid in the mother; you cannot take the mom out of the druid.

Oh... and everyone loves pie, apparently.