Found here. Short version: understand your villains, for they are the GM’s opportunity to roleplay. But always be ready to kill that which you love.
2 thoughts on “My PJ Lifestyle piece on RPG villains is up.”
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Found here. Short version: understand your villains, for they are the GM’s opportunity to roleplay. But always be ready to kill that which you love.
Comments are closed.
I didn’t think there was anything terribly controversial about most villains dying.
And those you can’t kill should be at least somewhat avoidable.
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But I think it’s much more interesting when the antagonists are actually pretty good people, who just happen to be on the other side of a difficult moral conundrum.
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Not that I’m somehow “above” using evil to despicable characters as foils and prods. The last campaign I ran had four of them (plus 5 location-locked demigods based off the GURPS:Voodoo Corruptors, but mostly dialed back to in-betweener power level.)
But ideally, the only one the characters would have encountered was one from a PC’s backstory. (They managed to encounter every one *except* him. Also most of the demigods–most memorably when one of the PCs challenged one of them to a duel. It was a very brutal two seconds, and only lasted that long because the villain feinted. I would have felt a bit bad about it if the other players hasn’t tried so hard to talk him out of it. They warned him it was suicide, even when they mistakenly thought the villain was human.)
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Of course, what I really wanted to do was telescope time and play with different lifespans to bring expys of Stephen I and Bonnie Prince Charlie into conflict over the throne. With racial loyalty and conflict between religions as additional themes, because why not? Set against the backdrop of an ancient threat largely lost to mists of time.
Of course the players took one look at that collection of plot hooks, and ran like hell.