Can a villein be too smart or too evil for a party?

[Dragon_Bane]

Well as the title says i am worried about if a villein can be to evil or to smart for my players they already said they would be ok with smart villeins and ok with a hardcore d&d experience but i think they may no be able to handle the kind of thing a true evil hyper intelligent villein would do to a good party. which go's into should villeins be like snidely whiplash or like Dr. Hannibal Lecter how evil is to evil how smart is too smart.

[NorthernPhoenix]

Well as the title says i am worried about if a villein can be to evil or to smart for my players they already said they would be ok with smart villeins and ok with a hardcore d&d experience but i think they may no be able to handle the kind of thing a true evil hyper intelligent villein would do to a good party. which go's into should villeins be like snidely whiplash or like Dr. Hannibal Lecter how evil is to evil how smart is too smart.

Only you can know your players. Some people are unphased by graphic rape and torture (it just motivates them to save the world more) while some people would be turned off TTRPGs forever by the same thing. And there's an entire spectrum in-between.

[JackPhoenix]

The real question isn't if a villain can be too smart for the party, but if the GM can outsmart four or so other people he's playing with. You can't properly portray someone smarter than yourself, and while you can metagame, you can't cheat like writters who set up circumstances in a way that make their character to look smart (if they are good) or make everyone else looks like idiots (if they are not)

[Particle_Man]

I had one GM run a hyperintelligent enemy by giving it a 50% chance of having a perfect countermove for the players' plans, no matter what they were.

That might be too much for your group though.

Basically, the group needs to be challenged but still have a good chance of beating the bad guy.

[Demonslayer666]

Yes on both counts.

Too evil may offend your players, like NorthernPhoenix said.

Too smart would be one that is never caught, and always manages to win. That doesn't sound fun. But I guess you need to elaborate on what you mean by "too smart". What did you have in mind?

[Misterwhisper]

I personally don't think it is possible for a villain to be TOO smart, if that is what they are supposed to be.
If he is supposed to be a genius, then play him as a genius.
This puts a good bit on the shoulders of the DM because they have to be able to play it off correctly without just seeming like the guy who just goes "Oh, that does not work because the bad guy did THIS!"

Ex. In one of my last campaigns the one of the big bad's lieutenants was a total mastermind of political and social manipulation and was a master of disguises.
I am a writer myself and to be honest I scrutinize and plan strategy constantly, so I came up with some great plans, but to be fair I would write the plans, pre-game, in an envelope and keep it on the table and at the end of the game I would open it up and show them if they figured it out.

Through out the entire campaign they never did catch him, nor did they stop his plans. They managed to stop and kill his boss and thus become the overall heroes of myths and legends, but they still knew that somewhere out there was a master manipulator pulling strings against them, to the point they second guessed everything and wondered if he planned for his boss to die so he could take get him out of the way.

[Dragon_Bane]

I had one GM run a hyperintelligent enemy by giving it a 50% chance of having a perfect countermove for the players' plans, no matter what they were.

That might be too much for your group though.

Basically, the group needs to be challenged but still have a good chance of beating the bad guy.

well what i mean by evil and smart would be plans like say have kids hold onto lets say a book that will explode upon them looking at it of opening it make sure they are in a city as well. And have these kids do this or have parents attack them with the same thing and make sure there good people to so the paladin cant kill them without killing the innocent repeat this tell the party is low on health using all of there ability then swoop in with the big guns and kill them at there weakest.

[Dragon_Bane]

Yes on both counts.

Too evil may offend your players, like NorthernPhoenix said.

Too smart would be one that is never caught, and always manages to win. That doesn't sound fun. But I guess you need to elaborate on what you mean by "too smart". What did you have in mind?

the kind of evil and smart am talking about is if they were a high level wizard they failed to kill the first time he would scry on them teleport to the one he think is the most dangerous in the grope probably the cleric and teleport kill and utterly destroy any means of her/he of coming back and rinse repeat to the whole party to a slow tpk. basically focusing a split party

[Sigreid]

Um, yes? Especially on the evil part. You have to play a game your players will enjoy playing so my regular gaming group gets a much darker evil than I will run for my nieces, for example.

[Contrast]

The real question isn't if a villain can be too smart for the party, but if the GM can outsmart four or so other people he's playing with. You can't properly portray someone smarter than yourself, and while you can metagame, you can't cheat like writters who set up circumstances in a way that make their character to look smart (if they are good) or make everyone else looks like idiots (if they are not)

I mean you definitely can do that. The slave ring the PCs just spend several sessions shutting down? Turns out it wasn't run by him after all but one of his competitors and now he's even more powerful and takes up the remnants of that guys operation and even more people are being sold into slavery. DM can always retroactively reframe the setting because they have full control of the setting.

Now in terms of OP asking if you should do that as a DM. No. No you should not.

[ImproperJustice]

I once ran a villain who was an evil local Baron who was mass murdering whole families. The PCs discovered the evidence of his vile and cruel atrocities.

I was a young GM and trying too hard to make an emotional impact on my PCs. Some of my players were parents, and the evidence of child murder, etc... was too much for them and made them very uncomfortable. One of my biggest regrets as a GM.

I would definitely encourage discussion with your players on how much “evil” they are comfortable with.

My group works in RL in the fields of social services, and the court system.
They all feel they get enough real world evil on a daily basis, so our villains look more like Skeletor on Sunday Morning and are evil because their the bad guys.

So yeah, I would just check with your group on what they want.

[Spiritchaser]

Well as the title says i am worried about if a villein can be to evil or to smart for my players they already said they would be ok with smart villeins and ok with a hardcore d&d experience but i think they may no be able to handle the kind of thing a true evil hyper intelligent villein would do to a good party. which go's into should villeins be like snidely whiplash or like Dr. Hannibal Lecter how evil is to evil how smart is too smart.

I’d say they can absolutely be too smart and too capable. If you want to make such a foe, come up with some significant disadvantages, psychological issues or some such to bring things more level.

Too evil?

That’s a tougher one. In one play group I DM, I’d say certainly. In the other?

I’m not so sure... possibly not. I guess that’s just group specific.

[NRSASD]

Seconding "talk to the players" about how evil is too evil. We all play for different reasons. Some of us want to be heroic figures foiling the latest ridiculous plot. Some of us want to be ordinary people scurrying away from death mere inches behind. Some of us want to explore our darker aspects in a safe setting.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with a warning ahead of time, followed by a check up after the scene to make sure everyone's still on board with the current tone.

Curse of Strahd is a great example of a campaign that necessitates a warning or two if your DM really wants to unleash Strahd. There's a lot of terribleness you can do very easily.

[Spore]

I was a young GM and trying too hard to make an emotional impact on my PCs. Some of my players were parents, and the evidence of child murder, etc... was too much for them and made them very uncomfortable. One of my biggest regrets as a GM.

Surprisingly enough I feel as I grow older, it takes less instead of more vile acts to get an emotional response from me. Aside from the often used film trope where the dog gets killed to get people to be emotionally invested since they don't require a big backstory to be attached to a dog.

Also "more evil" is not a quality you can just assign because evil on a large scale becomes dehumanized and more easily acceptable. Slay a small girl in front of her parents and add the needed context and emotions and the experience is much more traumatizing than a dictator exterminating whole settlements.

And of course "too smart" is a thing. Because it simply denotes the quality of being smart enough to prevent the heroes from catching or stopping him or her. A villain needs a weakness. Perfect beings are seldomly useful or interesting and satisfying in a storytelling environment such as RPGs.

[JackPhoenix]

And of course "too smart" is a thing. Because it simply denotes the quality of being smart enough to prevent the heroes from catching or stopping him or her. A villain needs a weakness. Perfect beings are seldomly useful or interesting and satisfying in a storytelling environment such as RPGs.

Especially when that "too smart" translates into "I'm a GM, so I can pull stuff out of my anus and abuse the rules better than you" instead of "I genuinely thought of everything you guys would do and all the villains preparations are legit" in RPGs.

[Mith]

From the "too smart" idea, I usually use the idea of trench/fortification warfare. You have a really solid defense, but limited manuverability that means that means a more flexible opponent can find a path you cannot defend so easily.

[Thrudd]

Not if they spell it "villein".
Sorry, I had to.

[GlenSmash!]

I once ran a villain who was an evil local Baron who was mass murdering whole families. The PCs discovered the evidence of his vile and cruel atrocities.

I was a young GM and trying too hard to make an emotional impact on my PCs. Some of my players were parents, and the evidence of child murder, etc... was too much for them and made them very uncomfortable. One of my biggest regrets as a GM.

I would definitely encourage discussion with your players on how much “evil” they are comfortable with.

My group works in RL in the fields of social services, and the court system.
They all feel they get enough real world evil on a daily basis, so our villains look more like Skeletor on Sunday Morning and are evil because their the bad guys.

So yeah, I would just check with your group on what they want.

Yup. It's important to know the themes you and your players want to explore, and which you don't.

My desire not to murderhobo through everything has put me at odds with a couple of other players at my table over the years. I don't even like to play "Good" characters, I just don't care about fighting town guards and being pettily evil.

Likewise in the Group I DMed for personal loss has made me tweak encounters before.

[Rukelnikov]

Too smart is definitely a possibility, specially for a spellcaster.

NPC's (specially main villains) tend to have a lot of "downtime" to concot plans that would be extremely hard for the PC's to even come close to.

Necromancer is the prime example, a PC Necro can't really play to the best of his ability because it bog's down the game to a crawl to the point it isn't doable.

YOLO tactics are extremely more useful for enemies too, because of the fact that will actually only live for the scene they appear (most of the time at least)

And finally a smart villain that doesn't have a strong code of honor or something can resort to cheap tactics, that are frankly hard to nearly impossible to evade/survive without DM help, and devising said tactics to have to fudge rolls or DEM things later, or have a TPK every two sessions doesn't sound like the most fun unless everyone is on board with that.

tl;dr: Prep tends to help the NPCs more than the PCs, and a "too smart" villain can and will abuse that.

[Man_Over_Game]

Good question to always ask: Is This Fun?

Having a bad guy who always loses, but has 2 oddball escape plans for every evil plan? Fun.
Having a bad guy who always loses, but has a teleport that cannot be counterspelled or prevented? Not fun.
Having a bad guy who presents moral dilemmas that can be circumvented? Fun.
Having a bad guy who presents moral dilemmas that always have some reason they have to go badly? Not fun.

Players play a game to have fun. To play, there needs to be a part of the game where decisions matter. If you don't make your players' decisions matter, they're no longer playing a game. It ceases to be fun.

If the badguy can escape no matter what the circumstances are, that's not a game. At least, that particular part is not. And you can do that!

Strahd (as in, from Curse of Strahd) is not a friendly guy and regularly shows up when the players cannot really deal with him, and yet he's still one of the favorite villains of 5e (if not THE favorite villain). His plans can still be foiled, he still has some major flaws, and his entire nation is filled with people who want him gone (although, there's not many people in his nation). It's because of the fact that the players can still feel a sense of progress, a sense of "winning" that makes him palatable. Every session is one step closer to beating him, even if it's a 10 mile trek, uphill, in sandals.

[Orc_Lord]

Not if they spell it "villein".
Sorry, I had to.

You can't assume that everyone speaks English fluently. That's the beauty of this game, it transcends language barriers.

Onto the question.

For encounters I design them with the archetypical party in mind Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, Wizard. I don't want to try to counter the party, I just want a fun agnostic encounter.

I apply the same idea for all NPCs I make, especially persistent ones.

All NPCs should have a motivation, it's even better if their motivation is fueled by an idea, a perception of the world.

For example one of my last campaigns my party had to deal with a necromancer.

His motivation was that he wanted to raise his long dead father from the dead. So he run experiments, and he needed a lot of living and dead bodies till he perfected his resurrection abilities.

Something like this gives you fuel of his thought process. What is he willing to do or not do.

Now the reason why I brought up the idea of combat design that is party agnostic.

Your NPCs are not god. You have to make your plans from the NPC perspective. Do they even know of the party's existence?

If they do, how did they find out about them? Are they aware the PCs are coming?

Respond to the PCs based on the NPC's personality, motivation, and what the NPC knows about the party.

It ensures fairness, realism and the feeling that the PCs earn the victory. It also gives a breath of life to your world.

Maybe the NPC sends a spy to keep tabs on them. Maybe he sends assassins after the party. Maybe he threatens a friend of the party.

See the world through the eyes of the NPC, he is your character after all.

[HappyDaze]

Too smart is when the villain pulls off Xanatos Gambits (or the many varieties of) with regularity. If every defeat only works towards furthering the villian's evil plans, then the only way to avoid causing evil is to not play his game. That can quickly translate into not wanting to play the game if you're not very careful.

[fbelanger]

You can’t appy movie plot trick to a DnD game.
A simple mystery can be fell like totally obscure from player side.
In movie we just enjoy impossible challenge or obscure link,
But players can fell completely overwhelm and have no fun.
A typical DnD party would not have found the lost arch.

[BreaktheStatue]

It's important to talk to your players, as others have said, because certain actions might make them unnecessarily uncomfortable.

On a different (but maybe related note?), I personally think being gratuitously, graphically evil - unless used *very* sparingly - is just corny and kind of boring. It breaks immersion for me, and my first thought is usually, "Whelp, our DM is Coldsteel the Hedgeheg."

That's me though. It's all about personal taste.

[Spore]

Especially when that "too smart" translates into "I'm a GM, so I can pull stuff out of my anus and abuse the rules better than you" instead of "I genuinely thought of everything you guys would do and all the villains preparations are legit" in RPGs.

While I agree there are an odd estimate of 70% of groups out there who cannot stop a lad with an invisibility potion casually wandering off after an encounter. A big problem is, if the adventurers are pretty well known to still overdo the prep.

Take the Order of the Stick for example. People might know they have a powerful wizard. People even might know she has barred the evocation school or some of his preferred spells. But they won't most certainly know the wizard's spell loadout for the day, or where they are exactly at every point in time.

Yes, they are in your lair. Yes you might even have it heavily surveilled. No, that does not give you permission to switch up EVERY element of the final battle when the adventurers prepared for your summons with a dismissal spells, to swap your heightened fireballs for cone of colds because they cast Resist Energy (Fire) on everyone.

Granted, sometimes you should exactly do that, but only if the battle would otherwise be pointless or a cakewalk.

[Finback]

Well as the title says i am worried about if a villein can be to evil or to smart for my players they already said they would be ok with smart villeins and ok with a hardcore d&d experience but i think they may no be able to handle the kind of thing a true evil hyper intelligent villein would do to a good party. which go's into should villeins be like snidely whiplash or like Dr. Hannibal Lecter how evil is to evil how smart is too smart.

Really, it's a question of the *goals*. Do you want to set up a big narrative twist later on, or just be able to continually foil the PCs' plots?

Case in point: is the big reveal that the BBEG wanted the party to find the Axe of Truth, the Hammer of Light, and the Book of Secrets, to save them the trouble of doing it? (doubly good if the BBEG is something that is really obvious, like a dragon who can't just waltz into the King's Armoury and take it without people realising they are up to something). Because that sets up a great dramatic moment - what if the heroes were unwittingly working for the BBEG all along?

A super-duper intelligent villain will have multiple plans going at once, keeping their minions working against each other so none a) realise theyre also working for the same BBEG b) gets to stable that they might think to try to contest against the villain, they will have dead-ends and red herring plots to keep their rivals/foes from getting anything seriously achieved, and do this *all at once*.

A good example of this is Nicol Bolas, from Magic: the Gathering. He has
a) brokered four contracts with demons for Liliana Vess to have power, which in turn motivated her to kill the demons off to free herself. Except the final clause was that in the event all four contracts are ended, she ends up under contract to Bolas himself. He's also rid himself of four powerful demons, who could make trouble later on.
b) destabilised ten guilds holding power over a city-wide world, so there's no challenges to his attempt to take over because everyone's too busy with a civil war
c) enslaved a world by killing off all the adults, and subverting an entire pantheon of gods, solely to generate highly trained warriors he then as killed, so they can serve as superior undead troops
d) sent highly trained agents to a world built as a trap for him, to steal the artifact that could both jail him but also give him back his nigh-godlike powers he once lost, which will also allow him to send said superior undead troops wherever he wants in the multiverse
e) took on a small quasi-Justice League of other powerful planeswalkers, knocked them about like ragdolls, giving one amnesia, making one seem like a traitor, one leave the group altogether, and otherwise making them all question their own abilities as both individuals AND as a team.

If you want to have a super-intelligent BBEG, make sure you have solid backgrounds for your PCs, and *use it*. Weaponise it against them. If the BBEG wants the Sword of Power, killing the parents of a bunch of random villagers will eventually create a pool of heroes wanting revenge, and surely one of them will get the mcguffin and bring it to the BBEG, saving them the hassle. If they can also convince the team warlock/wizard to sunder the mcguffin, because this ancient tome promises whoever breaks it to gain unlimited knowledge, but said tome was planted by the BBEG in the first place, all the better.

[Finback]

Not if they spell it "villein".
Sorry, I had to.

Maybe they WANTED this definition:

villein
/ˈvɪlən,ˈvɪleɪn/
noun
noun: villein; plural noun: villeins

(in medieval England) a feudal tenant entirely subject to a lord or manor to whom he paid dues and services in return for land.

(OOH the plot twist is the villain was a super smart villein who felt there was a great injustice in a feudal system!)

[Particle_Man]

well what i mean by evil and smart would be plans like say have kids hold onto lets say a book that will explode upon them looking at it of opening it make sure they are in a city as well. And have these kids do this or have parents attack them with the same thing and make sure there good people to so the paladin cant kill them without killing the innocent repeat this tell the party is low on health using all of there ability then swoop in with the big guns and kill them at there weakest.

Well the paladin (or others) could do non-lethal damage on the last melee weapon blow to said good antagonists, so that wouldn't slow the PCs down much.

As for the initial strategy, that would be too evil for my tastes (I have a toddler so "kids blowing up" ain't fun for me), but I don't know your group. Maybe use goblins in disguise instead?


the kind of evil and smart am talking about is if they were a high level wizard they failed to kill the first time he would scry on them teleport to the one he think is the most dangerous in the grope probably the cleric and teleport kill and utterly destroy any means of her/he of coming back and rinse repeat to the whole party to a slow tpk. basically focusing a split party

I would advise against this, unless perhaps the wizard licks their wounds first for long enough that the party levels up quickly enough that any one of them could solo the wizard when the wizard thries this. Otherwise you are just giving a TPK no save to the party, in slow-motion (with elements of "I am writing a novel" and "Let me show you why my DMNPC is so much better than your PCs!"), and that will very likely seriously annoy your players, and may make some or all of them walk away from your table. Then again, you know your group better than I could so maybe they would be up for this.

[J-H]

When it comes to evil in D&D, or in most games, here's what I've found to be a good rule:

Would you see this on Batman: The Animated Series (1990s)? If so, it's probably fine.

[HoodedHero007]

As long as a villain has a clear motivation that causes their evil to make sense, and the players are fine with it, the villain can be as evil as you want.
As long as you don't retcon things, the villain can be as intelligent and as crafty as you want.

For example, once I ran an encounter in which the Warlock's Patron (The Raven Queen) basically said "Hey, this town has people that should be dying, but their souls aren't passing on. It has been hidden from my sight, somehow. Can you look into it?" The apparent situation was that there was some sort of monster going out and killing a single parent with an only child every new moon, leaving the only child alive and unharmed. The Baron of the town was the first victim and was working in order to discover, find, and defeat the monster, causing the Adventurers to create their plans with his aid, thereby giving them access to the town's resources, among other things. Additionally, he adopted the now orphaned kids.

The reality was that the Baron was a Vampire and was using a Boneclaw he had acquired to kill the parents, thereby enabling him to give the children immortality via vampirism, and the adventurers succeeded in their apparent objective the first night, but in such a way that they didn't interfere with the villain's plans.

I cleared my party's willingness to be in a horror campaign beforehand, and while they did some... emotionally mutilating things to their characters, I didn't plan for them to do that and it was entirely their own choice. (The party's tank, when fighting the Vampire Spawn, picked them up and walked outside, and later broke down a wall, letting sunlight stream in.:smallfrown:)

[Tvtyrant]

Not really, but they can certainly be too gory or successful. Not all intelligent people are chess masters playing xanatos roulette, some are just nerds who are fanboys of the party. Syndrone from the Incredibles is a genius and also wildly impractical.

[Azgeroth]

i don't think this is really a question of morality or conduct. its a question of challenge and player agency.

it doesn't matter what or who the villain or challenge is, if your players have no opportunity, or ability, to stope/defeat this villain challenge, that can be game breaking for the players.. or it can be an amazing story tool.

the trick, is to ensure your players don't FEEL like there agency is being stripped away, if they encounter a bady that simply outclasses them, they will come away wanting revenge, and make it that much sweeter a victory later.

but if you wrap that villain in plot armour, and even when the players succeed, you hand waive it away to preserve the story, your robbing them of their agency..

best solution? be ready for your villain to die way too early, for your players to thwart their evil plans way before they can even get off the ground, and have a contingency.. a secondary villain, the TRUE BBEG!!

its rarely rewarding, when the players meet BBEG on day one, and have to wait for day 104 to actually confront that same villain. thats why all pre-made adventures have a host of villains, and as you advance through the campaign to climb throug their ranks, knock each successive Big Bad out, untill you get the tipity top, for the big fianl confrontation. right?

your BBEG should be just that, but there underlings might not be so intelligent or evil, thats how your low level party can win. but just like the dice, they won't meet every encounter with the same success, and as things go on, your BBEG will start to learn what the party is capable of, and the strategies and foes they face will show that. its not meta-gaming, its simply how wars are waged.