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InQbait
2013-08-29, 05:29 PM
Fellow GMs/DMs, in your experiences, how do you efficiently add a villain/antagonist into your campaigns? How do you make them interesting, and how do you make the Player characters give a crap about their existence? This is something I have been struggling with lately. I'd be gracious for your help

Lorsa
2013-08-29, 05:35 PM
The easiest way to make a villain the players give a crap about is to see what they do care about and then make a person that is antagonistic to those goals or views.

Most often I don't introduce the villain as such, things happen to the players that are problematic/harmful/against their agenda and eventually they find out who is responsible for those events. In the end I don't really care if they dislike the "villian" or want to fight him or not, they will end up in situations that they need to solve and that's really all that matters.

Mr Beer
2013-08-29, 05:50 PM
I generally have an end boss flee rather than fight to the death. Then they are angry and want revenge and will do bad things to the party. Voila, instant villain.

To make the players care, they need to hit them where it hurts, which is very person dependant. Some examples:

- Villain doing evil stuff and characters observe it

- Villain thwarts or embarrasses characters, this could be as simple as not letting them buy nice new platemail because villain has badmouthed them in this town

- Villain steals character's shiny things

Raum
2013-08-29, 08:28 PM
Fellow GMs/DMs, in your experiences, how do you efficiently add a villain/antagonist into your campaigns?Two ways come to mind - reactive villains and foreshadowed villains. The former are easiest, just take something from the players and run with it. Could be an enemy from their background or someone they've harmed in the course of play. Could simply be someone they irritated with arrogance. Whatever the instigation given, take it and run with it!

Foreshadowing a villain takes a bit more planning. At it's core you give a protagonist some goals and allow the players to run across clues, minions, or perhaps even the villain while doing other things. Do it in a way which seems relatively innocuous at first meeting but will be suitably reprehensible later with hind sight.


How do you make them interesting, Make them human. Give them goals, flaws, and even a good quality or two. The necromancer who feeds homeless children through charitable foundations is more interesting, more human, and potentially creepier than one whose only fascination is death.


and how do you make the Player characters give a crap about their existence? Make it personal. Take something from them - stolen items, assassinated friends, or even a ruined reputation will get almost any group more irritated than killing a PC. Betrayal can be even better (or worse depending on point of view). But however you do it, players will care more about a personal goal or perceived wrong than about saving the world for the umpteenth time.

kyoryu
2013-08-29, 08:53 PM
The easiest way to make a villain the players give a crap about is to see what they do care about and then make a person that is antagonistic to those goals or views.

Yup.

It's a pretty fundamental thing - working with what your players care about, rather than trying to get them to care about certain things.

Zavoniki
2013-08-30, 03:53 AM
Fellow GMs/DMs, in your experiences, how do you efficiently add a villain/antagonist into your campaigns? How do you make them interesting, and how do you make the Player characters give a crap about their existence? This is something I have been struggling with lately. I'd be gracious for your help

Antagonists need to be threatening to the party in some way and if you want the party to care about the antagonist that person needs to threaten what the party cares about. If all they care about is gold, threaten their loot baskets. If they care about their reputation, they attack with a smear campaign. If they care about the well-being of the commonfolk, have the villain start oppressing them(or be the one oppressing them). I also tend to introduce them as characters before they are villains or at least before the party realizes they are villains. Finally when the villain goes after what the party cares about for real, try to have him do it in a way the party will not expect(at least at first).

For example:

I ran a campaign(which unfortunately died) where the players ended up in the position of looking for the heir to the throne of a kingdom before its king died and the Noble Houses tore the kingdom apart in a civil war. The villain in this case was the love interest of one of the player characters(well... love interest is stretching it), a bratty Noble Heir. The players goal in this case was to find the heir(which they did) and put them on the throne. The players spent a large amount of time(and the meager social/political resources they could muster) protecting the princess that they found. So the Noble Heir opens a portal to the Elemental Planes in the sewers beneath the Capitol City. The players did not like this person and were somewhat happy when he died and somewhat unhappy that the kingdom they were trying to protect had collapsed. This is also provided the next villain, the portals to the Elemental Planes, and then the campaign fell apart.

But you can see here a general idea of how you can make villains. Find something the players care about(the well being of the Kingdom). Find how they plan to protect or promote what they care about(Find the lost Heir). Find a character that they know or make one up that would be opposed to this(The Noble Heir but could have easily been the Adviser with a Goatee). Attack them in a way they do not expect(Destroy the capital instead of killing the heir). The players will want that villain dead and be interested in what they can learn about them, to make the killing easier.

Unrelated advice, don't go opening portals to the Elemental Planes when the party is 3rd level. At least not ones that let all sizes of Elementals through.

supermonkeyjoe
2013-08-30, 04:14 AM
I find there are two ways you can go about it;

1) The PCs find out about the villain first, they thwart a few schemes or whatever, connect the dots and figure out the evil Mr.X is behind them, hopefully you have set it up in a way that they now naturally want to stop him

2) The villain finds out about the PCs first, too many schemes have been foiled, too many damsels rescued, he looks into the matter, discovers the PCs and then introduces himself. The nature of the villain depends on how this is done, maybe he sends a few mooks to sort out those meddlesome kids, maybe he swoops down to take on the PCs if he's a level appropriate challenge, maybe he introduces himself pleasantly and kindly asks they stop meddling in his affairs.

Yora
2013-08-30, 04:18 AM
I think the most effective method to get the players to care is to make them feel personally offended by the villains action. He has to do something that hurts the characters pride and makes them plain feel insulted.
Hating a good villain is not about wanting revenge for the attrocities he did, but showing him his place.

Steal the PCs treasure, burn down their hideout, make it look like the PCs are responsible for his crimes.
Pride is a very powerful motivator, especially for players who think their characters are the kings and can get away with anything.

Hopeless
2013-08-30, 07:52 AM
In the Legend game i ran the first recurring nemesis was a woodsman who betrayed the village where a couple of the PCs hailed from.

One of the other PCs took the woodsman's leg off with a critical hit with a crossbow, he then returned in the following adventure where he tried to assassinate one of the PCs and escaped retribution(He has a peg leg and I pictured him as being played by John Thaw in that Sherlock Holmes episode about the Indian Colonel who betrayed a group of criminals and stole their loot even though promised to an equal share in the proceeds I think they've done that story a couple of time).

On that occasion he first tried to shift the blame for the murder he committed when he wasn't able to strike directly at the PCs onto a rival band of adventurers' intended as a nemesis for the next adventure and then a travelling merchant who was allied to the same employer the woodsman was working for.

Merchant ran as soon as he was confronted and was killed by the rival band whom had been tricked by the woodsman to cover up his part in the murder and the PCs once they realised they'd been tricked returned to discover their nemesis was long gone... at least for now!:smallamused:

He was intended as a lead in for an encounter with his employer the Sorceror of Black Mountain whose been referred to several times as an employer of a mercenary guild as well as a powerful sorceror, maybe one day I'll get to run the next part maybe even use the Caravan Quest supplement for RQ6 which sounds like an interesting series.

BWR
2013-08-30, 08:26 AM
How to introduce a villain:
"Oh noes! the evil baron Scummypants has kidnapped our children. Pleas help us, brave adventurers."

How to make the PCs and, more importantly, the players care about the villain:

1. Make the villain colorful.
Make descriptions of them. How they look, how they talk, how they move, how they walk. Mannerisms, idiosyncrasies, habits. Make this a fully fleshed out character in your head and on paper and it will be a lot easier for you to portray this to your players. Even when not personally present, events caused by the villain should often have some sort of hallmark that identifies the origin (unless you want to play him like Moriarity - behind the scenes and unknown to anyone except those who really, really dig) deep.

2. Make it personal.
Hit the PCs where it hurts. Sometimes, just saying he slaughters innocents for fun will be enough, and your average party will try to take him down, but that's not really personal. Building up lots of NPCs the players bond with, ones they really like, then having the evil Baron torture, mutilate and kill the NPCs to warn off the PCs: that makes it personal. In less overtly physically evil cases, e.g. for intrigue games, have the villain constantly ruin the PCs plans, take credit for stuff they've done, publically humiliate them, get them to lose status and face. Do this a few times and your players will be frothing at the mouths to get even.
Often times, stealing or ruining equipment and possessions will do it, especially in D&D-esque games.

AKA_Bait
2013-08-30, 10:37 AM
There are already quite a few good suggestions on this thread. Here are some that I don't think have been mentioned:

1. Mr. Evil (that's what I'm calling our hypothetical villain) is not obviously a bad guy and hires the PCs for several jobs which either have really awful collateral consequences or which are evil on their face (but not necessarily illegal). Either is a good way to get your players mad ("He set us up!"; "How dare he think we'd do that?"). You can actually string this one out for a long time by having him promise to fix things if the PC's confront him (and then not doing it).

2. Mr. Evil is a whiny, entitled, jerk-face with resources. Just introduce the bad guy in a neutral, non-aggressive setting (the inn, the great hall of the king, etc.), but have him treat the PC's like dirt. Then, introduce some hook that creates the possibility of the PC's affirmatively making him look really bad or causing him to lose something of value. If the PC's succeed, or even if they visibly fail, Mr. Evil can now have target painted on them.

3. Mr. Evil kills, casually, an NPC that the PC's have come to like.

kyoryu
2013-08-30, 12:17 PM
Another thing you can do is introduce him as a sympathetic character to start.

If this happens to be a minor NPC that the PCs latched onto for some reason, so much the better :)

In a BW game I ran once, the players latched onto this minor NPC, a guard with a conscience. The game never progressed to that point sadly, but my plans for him involved him becoming something of an extremist and a villain in his own right - even though his goals were still at least somewhat aligned with the players.

InQbait
2013-08-30, 12:23 PM
You all have been very helpful. I appreciate it. Thank you