Serious Villain Arcs (Without Being a Hired Thug)
By
BadJuJu,
Posted on: 2009-04-02 15:06 in Mission Architect
What motivates a villain? Why one of the seven deadly sins, of course.
1 Lust (Latin, luxuria)
2 Gluttony (Latin, gula)
3 Greed (Latin, avaritia)
4 Sloth (Latin, acedia)
5 Wrath (Latin, ira)
6 Envy (Latin, invidia)
7 Pride (Latin, superbia)
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Overlord of Dream Team and Nightmare Squad
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"Build a Giant Robot and Crush Paris"
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I would so play that. 
The old "It is what it says on the tin" trope can apply well for these direct arcs of mad villany; it's a great way to hook the player and draw them into your arc, if it says right up front what it is, no bones about it.
One thing I wish the system had was a tagging system with a dev-chosen taxonomy -- things like "Revenge", "Mayhem", "Redemption", "Temptation" or other motivational tags would help filter stories and show which ones work which angles. Making it dev-only decided upon means you'd have some actual standard labels rather than a swath of similar but not quite same player labels. ...although then we'd get forumites screaming bloody murder if THEIR specific tag wasn't in because the devs are idiots, or something.
I started a story last night which is a Character Focused (hah! tag!) one, where you show a young girl the ropes in terms of becoming a powerful villain and getting revenge on someone who wronged her. It's tricky because I can't assume your character would even want to play along with her request to be your sidekick -- so what I did was I had, in her pitch to you, she pitch all sorts of motivations:
"If you won't do it out of sympathy for me, do it to mess with the heroes who keep stepping on people like you and me, or do it for the powerful relics I'm looking for, or heck, just do it for the money. I don't care, just please, let me be your sidekick!"
By throwing a heap of motivations at them, we can then assume the character picked the one that matched their attitude, and then move forward. If NONE of them matched, I guess they can just quit the arc, but we gotta make some assumptions to get anywhere.
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What motivates a villain? Why one of the seven deadly sins, of course.
1 Lust (Latin, luxuria)
2 Gluttony (Latin, gula)
3 Greed (Latin, avaritia)
4 Sloth (Latin, acedia)
5 Wrath (Latin, ira)
6 Envy (Latin, invidia)
7 Pride (Latin, superbia)
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I think this sums it up.
On a side note I didn't know my vid card meant "Envy" o_o
-C.A.
I've got an idea for a villainous arc that is somewhat similar to the Radio/Television arcs in that you're not specifically hired to go and perform tasks, but something points you in the right direction for your evildoing. I've not got all the elements down yet, but I'd like it to have a kind of trippy, mindscrew sort of feeling when you go through it.
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While we were talking on Test about this, the idea came up of writing for different villainous mindsets. Personally, I don't want to assume that all villains want to rob banks any more than they all want to rule the world, or all want to go on crazed killing sprees, or all want to promote evil for its own sake, or all want to get riches by any means they can.
Talking to Twoflower about taxonomy (see above!) I thought up a set of 'villain mindsets' based on what kind of villain the arc was written for.
Overlord: Doctor Doom, Lord Recluse, and so on. The villain already controls some property, whether it's a base or an entire nation, and intends to keep it under his/her iron fist. Opportunities include annexing other countries, recruiting strong henchmen, stealing technology, and stamping down rebellion. Threats include invasions from other countries, assassination attempts, insurrection, heroes trying to 'liberate' your political prisoners, and spies trying to sabotage your equipment.
Crazy: The villain is seriously and colourfully deranged (Joker, Harley Quinn). They are a villain because their twisted worldview allows them to be. Opportunities include bamboozling the police, kidnapping people, driving heroes insane with gadgets or chemicals, pulling off ridiculous stunts and generally sowing chaos. Threats include armoured hunters from the local asylum, vigilantes, grieving relatives, and other villains who think you're ruining things for them.
Acquisitor: The villain is motivated by cold hard cash. They put what scruples they have to one side if there is money involved. This is the classic CoV villain, robbing banks and being a hired thug if necessary.
Beast: (werewolf and vampire characters, aliens, predators and so on) Unlike the Crazy, the villain is sane, but it's an inhuman kind of sanity. The Beast sees humans as prey, or as a lower form of life. He/she sees human morals as irrelevant, any which way. Opportunities for a Beast would include taking on powerful rivals, finding a suitable mate (Species anyone?), protecting the lair, or a basic drive to find food. Threats would be from hunters, government agencies, scientists trying to use the Beast's genes, rival Beasts, and so on.
Malfaisant: The villain practices evil as a philosophy, evil for evil's sake. They do evil deeds not for any material reward but because they enjoy seeing evil done and good humiliated. A Malfaisant would likely be most interested in the opportunity to corrupt a force for good rather than destroy it.
For Wholesale Soul Sale (which has a totally serious skeleton despite despite abundant comedy flesh) I started with the assumption that the player has already heard the basic sales pitch (the brief arc description) and has taken the first step of asking for more information.
The initial contact dialog is the timeshare presentation: you provide the labor and snare a few souls for me, and I will secure four basic tools of villainy for you: a maguffin, a patsy in a position of authority, an assortment of goons, and an ace up your sleeve. What the player wants to do with those four things, and why, is left wholly open, since the focus is on the acquisition.
Of course if the sales pitch isn't convincing enough, you can always say "No thanks," but those are such basic Bad Guy Tools they can potentially work for just about any concept.
Yeah, for villains more than heroes, having an arc with essentially an inanimate object giving "you" ideas goes a long way. if somebody doesn't agree with the ideas they're "getting", well, that's their prerogative. Lots more missions to choose from.
My 'The Bravuran Jobs' puts a diplomat in the role of inanimate object. Occasionally he reads the beautiful paper of his home country out loud, to practice his English, and if someone should overhear him and be moved to visit the homeland, well, that's hardly HIS fault now, is it?
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Talking to Twoflower about taxonomy (see above!) I thought up a set of 'villain mindsets' based on what kind of villain the arc was written for.
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This is a thought-provoking post and a good start on some classification.
One of the biggest ones you missed:
Fighting for a Cause: The villain's primary motivation is to work / fight for a cause that is larger than themselves. Due to either the cause itself or the methods by which the villain advances it, they are considered villainous. Depending on what the cause is and how important the villain is to its work, there may be superficial similarities to other motivations, but the underlying focus on external, rather than personal, accomplishment sets the villain apart.
As a somewhat odd example, one of my friends has a villain who is a freedom fighter in exile, doing whatever she can to build up the strength to help her people someday throw off the oppressive boot of the invaders of her beloved homeland and restore her people's ground down civil rights. This sounds arguably reasonable and perhaps even marginally heroic, until you realize that she's talking about the deposition of the House of Stuart, and the "oppressive invaders" are everyone connected with the government of the United Kingdom since 1688... you just don't meet that many Jacobite terrorists these days
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A couple of other potential villain styles for you to contemplate
The Freak: Outwardly, this individual is an average individual forced, by society, into doing horrible things to survive. This inevitably twists said character into doing horribly depraved things. I don't lump them under Revenge or Beast because they aren't really either. They're survivors more than anything else, but even that isn't much solace when they're killing you to take your stuff/lifeforce/lunch money. Threats include overly zealous do-gooders seeking to imprison them "for their own good" and Overlords seeking to harness them as elite henchers (i.e. Solomon Grundy or Killer Croc.)
Prideful: This individual isn't in it for the cash or the power or any of that jazz. They aren't out of their gourd nor are they particularly keen on evil for evil's sake. They're in it simply for self-validation. This is arguably where villains like Kraven The Hunter and Bane come in. Yeah, sure, money's great, whatever. I just want to prove myself against a tougher opponent. When you have a guy who's climbing Mount Everest barehanded just because he's bored you might have a problem when he decides to start playing the "let's be destructive" game in your town. These guys tend to peeve off anyone in town if they work for them long enough because it becomes clear that they have their own agenda.
Enlightened: Above even the Overlord and Crazy combination, you have guys who are over and above anything the normal folk can imagine. They aren't Malfeisants because, well, this good v. evil is silly and doesn't concern them. What concern is morality to the guys who normally reshape reality with a thought. Normally, this would be the realm of Bat'Zul, Cthulu, etc. However, some players are trying to play variations on these guys. Puck, Pan, Loki, Nygslpix or however you pronounce it from DC Comics, Galactus. None of these guys are concerned with evil. Nor are they really that crazy. They just exist and are 100% bored with what the ants are doing, even if they've been, for story purposes, bound and limited in power.
There's always a "caught up in events" theme to play with. A progression that neither the player nor the contact anticipates; no matter how bad you are, some days you're just glad to come out intact, with no one's Master Plan furthered.
Then there's seeking knowledge. Information, secrets, arcane tomes, scientific theories, someone else's plans for next Tuesday... doesn't always have to be concrete or tangible.
Role reversal is always fun... force a choice against type. I remember discussing on test the only way to make a branch right now is to use the last mish in an arc with a failable goal, and Success is written as Outcome A and Failure is written as Outcome B, instead of "you failed in the task i set you!"
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There's always a "caught up in events" theme to play with. A progression that neither the player nor the contact anticipates; no matter how bad you are, some days you're just glad to come out intact, with no one's Master Plan furthered.
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That can be fun to play with if you want a not-so-serious arc as well. "MacGuffin Delivery Service" is an arc where I took that concept and played it for humor.
Pretty good thread so far, so I thought I'd toss in my two cents.
My arc starts out under the premise that the contact did you a favor in the Zig and now he is calling in that favor to rescue his daughter from another villain group. I took a few shots at writing the script and either kept coming up the contact never coming out directly with what this favor was, but implying that rescuing his daughter wouldn't be enough to pay it off... but he'd call it square anyways because he is desperate.
If I was going to go with the view of a typical villain, I think I'd fall flat because of the whole "no honor among thieves" approach. Would most villains keep their word? Would I have the contact make threats if they turned down the mission?
In the end, I stopped worrying about the villain's motivation and pressed on with my script. I felt that my arc would be unique enough due to its content and it would give a villain a chance to make up a story about what this favor was, which I think is the true reward of the arc.
Then again, I may be better off writing hero arcs.
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@Kageshi_Dashi - I still think distributing zipped mish/costume/group files passed around would make the ability to branch missions easier. After the mention of villain motivation types I've started working on lowbie villain mishies in order to avoid the boring Burke or Kalinda show. I figure once I have a decently tested arc for each, I'll upload them as a zipped pack with specific lists of what the player had to have unlocked first. Then, they can publish, play, and un-publish any motivation arc they feel like for a given character.
@_Wyll_ - I think that's sort of the way of things. We're trained to be heroes and to understand how heroes, even anti-heroes work and why they (usually) succeed. Villains not so much. It's not something everyone rushes out to teach their kids and so it makes a game where you're the bad guy but still want to allow to "win" a pain in the neck.
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What are some other setups that you can think of which allow a villain to truly be their own person, within the framework of MA?
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Well, there's one classic villainous arc that is present only once in all of the CoV stories: the corruption of the pure and good character. (Peter Themari gives it.)
A villain could have any number of reasons for seducing someone to the Dark Side. They could be doing it for revenge, to neutralise a threat, to gain power for themselves, or just for the sheer joy of tainting.