What is YOUR idea of true villainy?

True villainy has to be believable.

I just don't believe that there's anyone out there who's evil "just for the sake of evil." There's always personal motives behind it. She never cared for me like I cared for her. I deserve that money. I don't deserve that money, but I want it anyway. Nobody really thinks "gee, I bet it would be amusing to kick that puppy." Those kind of villains just aren't believable to me.

I've always been enamored with the villain who believes he's doing good in the world. One of those "ends justify the means" sort of villains. Deluded or just downright convinced that it's worth thousands of lives to "save the world" from itself.

Alright, I can see why you don't think that being a sociopath, kicking puppies for kicking sake, is necessarily evil. I do want to point out that Westin Phipps has a motive for keeping the poor slobs in Grandville downtrodden. He wants them to be dependent on him. He's a classic control freak kind of lackey to Lord Recluse. He is against changing the current order of things: Freakshow being educated to become self-reliant and independent of outsiders. He is a petty miniature version of Stalin in post-revolution Russia. As they said in Animal Farm, he is more human than humans.

Since the "look at my AE" barrier's been broken, I've gotten numerous compliments about the plot in my mission "Standing Within the Mists".

I got tired of the constant contradictory gripes on mechanics ("It's too easy!" "It was too hard!" "I only saw bosses!" "I had to fight an Elite boss!") and gave up on tweaking it but the villainous story itself and your relationship with your contact generally resulted in praise.

Wow, I go to bed and wake up to find a ton of responses to my question.

So, a villain HAS to have PURPOSE? What would you see as motive for your villains? Money? Power? Revenge? Or something else?

And this really stuck out to me, as well.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Doc_Reverend And then there's that hero. You know the one. To be fair they make your life a lot more interesting and the work more exciting (police are boring and to be brushed aside)... but yeah, you want to get one over on that guy too. Just to say you did. And you'll be awesome doing it. The best villains, even when they lose, do so with style. They're almost admirable, or at least have traits you could admire. They're the dark mirrors to heroes. Without that... they're just bland and mundane, petty thugs and not villains.

To ask all of you, then:

If you were to "pull one over" on the hero of your choice, who would it be? A member of the Phalanx? Statesman's snotty brat of a granddaughter or one of her Vindicators? Or one of the generic heroes recently given characterization and life in the tip missions?

When I look in mainstream movies, the worst villains (in my opinion) are the ones who put the heroes in a morally challenging position.

Examples:

1. Ozymandius from Watchmen: He never sees himself as the villain. In fact, he is essentially trying to save humanity from itself. But his actions, which he considers morally sound, are not what most would consider to be morally sound. And in the end, he puts the heroes of the story in an impossible position: Either reveal what he has done to the world, thus putting it back on the brink of nuclear war, or keep it a secret and live with the knowledge the the entire world has been tricked.

2. Joker from The Dark Knight: Unlike Ozymandius, Joker is an absolute. As stated in the movie, "Some men just want to watch the world burn." So he did a lot more of the classic "evil for evil's sake." And he has some fantastic, villain defining lines, such as the interrogation room,

I'm currently running a pencil and paper superhero game, and the recently finished scenario had a villain that I wasn't sure how the heroes would react to him. The villain tried (and succeeded) to take over the world with mind control - in game effects, everyone who fell under the villain's mind control became an Extreme Fanatic for the villain. An Extreme Fanatic will do *anything* the object of fanaticism asks...*anything*. The PCs were not mind-controlled, thanks to a healthy dose of Plotdevicium. However, the mind-control came on pretty quickly, the heroes weren't prepared and had to retreat to plan their next move. While they were planning, they were watching the villain on TV, making proclamations to the world. Among the things the villain was ordering his billions of minions to do were: feed the hungry, redistribute wealth to eliminate poverty, immediately cease all armed hostilities, don't steal from each other, don't harm each other, protect/restore the environment where possible, etc.

Here's the part that made me proud of my GM skills: after hearing the villain's proclamations, the PCs had an hour-long discussion/argument about whether they should actually try to stop the villain's plans. The heroes thought that a lot of what the villain was demanding was reasonable, and even good. But on the other hand, there's that whole free-will thing. But what good is free will if you're starving, or the world is destroyed in a nuclear war?

It wasn't until the heroes discovered that the villain planned to enslave and/or kill 1 billion to 2 billion people to further his designs that the heroes were fully on-board with stopping the villain. When the heroes finally reached the confrontation with the villain, he berated them for misusing their great powers in petty street brawls and the enforcement of "law" and "order". In the villains eyes, the heroes were the true villains because they *didn't* try to take over the world and "protect the human race from itself". The 1 billion to 2 billion casualties were regrettable but necessary. Some of the heroes actually wanted to try to talk the villain out of killing all those people, but the rest (mind-controlling the entire world's population, ruling as supreme king/emperor, etc.) was acceptable.

The players seriously thought about joining with the villain, and almost did. IMHO, that's one of the best villains I've ever done as a GM.

This bears repeating - there are two questions here that get instinctively mangled into one very fat, unwieldy one. These two questions are:

1. What makes for a good antagonist in a story?

and

2. What kind of villain do I want to play?

These two questions are not interchangeable, and they're really not talking about the same thing at all. Designing a good antagonist, for the most part, revolves around designing someone you HATE, even if you infuse that someone with positive, or at least "evil is cool" qualities. Designing a good player villain is almost the complete opposite. It involves designing someone you kind of sort of secretly really like, even if you pretend you love to hate him.

This is City of Villain's primary source of fail, in my opinion - it does a decent job as far as creating stories for villains goes, but it fails to account for the PLAYER at the controls of these villains, and in so doing creates a terrible environment FOR THE PLAYER. The whole of the experience is dark, dreary and depressing, exactly what life for a true villain should be like, and exactly the WRONG kind of experience for people looking to have a spot of fun and maybe feel good about themselves. The key to designing a good villainous experience is just that - giving the players the chance to end the day feeling good about themselves DESPITE having done evil, not BECAUSE of it. You want people having genuine fun, not make-pretend fun because the act of doing bad things was well-represented. And, honestly - unless you enjoy seeing people suffer, a game that's all about suffering isn't going to give you sunshine and roses.

This is why I talk about "villains with style and class." In order for players to have fun, in my opinion, the game has to be on their side. To ensure this happens, you need to take the glamorous parts about being a villain - the powers, the technology, the grandeur and so forth, while simultaneously playing down the unglamorous ones - murder, betrayal, torture, psychopathy and so forth. Give people the kind of fantasy where it's OK to be the bad guy for a day and do indeed get away with it and win in the end. Every time you stop by to beat people over the head with how horrible they are being, you essentially have the game tell them "You should not be having fun! Stop it!" Not a good approach.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Dog! I forgot to add:

Evil is not the opposite of good.

Anyone who plans to ever write a story for a villain, please write this down and read it between every sentence. "Evil" has many definitions, but "the opposite of good" is probably the WORST of the lot, and the most useless when it comes to writing a convincing evil character. Simply creating a heroic story and then having the villainous character to everything opposite to what the hero would do makes for a CRAPPY villain.

A believable villain has both a reason to be evil (even if it's not a valid one) and a specific kind of evil that he or she adheres to. Not every situation that has an unambiguously good and evil binary choice will have an evil character pick the evil option, because a character needs more motivation and justification to take an action than what it's labelled as.

Simple example: You have an option to save a person from a monster or let him die. "Let him die" would be considered the "evil" option by virtue of being less good than the "good" option, but that doesn't mean every villain would take it. Some might save the person to get paid, some might do it because they hate monsters, some might do it because they believe they're good guys, and some might do it because, hey, free XP! However, none would do it "for the evulz," because if they did, then they're not very interesting as player characters OR as antagonists.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Seeing the diversity of opinions, you would have been better off asking what kind of villain people would not want to play as.