The Great Villain Motivation Thread

[Yora]

The most difficult part about creating adventures or any kind of fiction is to come up with plausible reasons why the villain is doing things that the protagonists want him to stop.
In most cases it seems to be either conquering the whole world, or destroying all life in the universe. But these are really bad motivations, as they don't provide any gain by themselves at all.
Stealing money or collecting ransoms is a bit better, because money is always nice, but it hardly makes for interesting villains.

So please, share all your villain motivations that provide a good reason why the main antagonists go through all those troubles that force the heroes to take action.

[Crow]

Just pick an emotion and turn it up to 11.

[NowhereMan583]

I find that "the greater good" is one of the more fun villain motivations. It completely throws the PCs to find out that the man/woman/thing/eldritch horror that they thought was pure kitten-swallowing evil has a goal with which they can sympathize. This also leads to the possibility of the PCs switching sides, which can make for an interesting story.

One of my recent villains was someone who was working towards the same goal the PCs were -- the overthrow of an Evil Empire -- but whose methods were highly questionable.

[Shadowknight12]

My current villain is a pixie wizard who was exiled from his forest realm under some flimsy pretences by the Queen of the Forest (epic-level dryad with more druid levels than toes and fingers). He was taken into a fortress populated mainly by celestials, clerics, paladins and the like. His current plan is to sacrifice all the celestials in the fortress to harvest their divine essence and channel it into the CG goddess of the fey, who lies dormant in another realm after a near-mortal wound. And he's doing so under the Queen of the Forest's indications, who has sent a diplomatic contingent of fey and elves to establish relations between the forest and the fortress. The villain in question is sealed away in the deepest level of the fortress, under the excuse of examining the Calling Chamber beneath, making the celestials think he has the power to Call forth more celestials (he doesn't).

The villain is also the player's character's ex-lover (yes, the player is playing a pixie, and yes, the pixie is in the diplomatic contingent).

The Reveal should be pretty interesting.

[KineticDiplomat]

Sometimes the greatest, most horrible motivation, you can give to a villian is utter indifference. He/she simply see's his acts as no different than stomping an anthill. Ok, maybe it wasn't nice, but really, he's quite a pleasnt and socially acceptable person amongst his peers. You, yours, and all your burning motivations are really quite as trivial as a squirrel ganwing on the electric line : somewhat annoying to be out of power, and maybe a little sad, a little funny that the bugger fried himself (or this mortal plane was destroyed), but really, dammit, now the A/C doesn't work. (I reccommend something equally comfort causing as the equal final answer)

[hydroplatypus]

I am currently running a low level campaign (start at lvl1 end at 7ish hopefully). In the setting the area the PCs are in is largely ruled by city states, who aren't great at maintaining control of border regions. The PCs are in one of these border regions, and the villain is planning to conquer the town they are in. No gigantic world conquering plans, he just (at least for the moment) will be content with ruling a couple thousand people in the border regions. Basically the villain doesn't need to have world destroying ambitions. A smaller scale villain can be interesting too.

Additionally, after replaying Dragon Age 2 the quanari made really good opponents. A similar group could exist within any D&D setting. Maybe even a group of Paladins, who could easily fight a group of good PCs due to rigid adherence to their principles.

[Tyndmyr]

Just pick an emotion and turn it up to 11.

This.

Curiosity? Fantastic. The man has a quest for knowledge no matter what the cost.

Friendly? All he really wants is for everyone to love and accept him. He devoted his life to it. But always...always there is someone who is unhappy with him no matter what he does. It's almost enough to drive a man...mad...

[Saintheart]

Love. Doomed, obsessive love. There is no more tragic motivation than this.

[dsmiles]

This.

Curiosity? Fantastic. The man has a quest for knowledge no matter what the cost.

Friendly? All he really wants is for everyone to love and accept him. He devoted his life to it. But always...always there is someone who is unhappy with him no matter what he does. It's almost enough to drive a man...mad...

Have to agree here. Ultra-strong emotions lead to interesting antagonists, at the very least.

I also have to admit that the "greater good" bad guys are pretty fun to DM as well.

[Lapak]

Giving the villain a specific motivation is definitely the key to making him interesting. He or she should have some specific thing that they want or need, with money/power/conquest being the tool to that goal. To take a couple of examples from popular fantasy:

Darth Vader wants control of the events around him. He doesn't care about good or evil; he doesn't care whether he controls matters to people's benefit or their detriment. He just wants order, his order, and he'll smash whatever he has to to get it.

Thulsa Doom (1982 Conan movie version) wanted to understand the nature of power. He was a philosopher willing to conduct whatever experiment was necessary to increase his understanding - he learned about magic. He learned about war and conquest. He learned about religion and devotion. None of it was interesting to him for the power it actually gave him; all of it was interesting for what it taught him about power. He was a horrible cult leader, mass murderer, and black magician, but it wasn't out of an active desire to do evil. It was just an academic interest with no concern for people whatsoever.

Agent Smith (the Matrix) just wanted to quit his job and get out of the world he'd been stuck in. He didn't hate people except as the thing standing between him and what he wanted, but that hate festered and grew the longer he was denied freedom until it was white-hot rage.

[Mixt]

Curiosity as a motive leads us to people like Xehanort, the Big Bad of the Kingdom Hearts series.

Hatred as a motive leads you to people like Sephiroth of Final Fantasy 7, overwhelming hatred for the human race, kill kill kill them all!
It can also result in things like Alma Wade from the F.E.A.R series.

So yes, emotions cranked up to 11 can do a lot.


How about this one.

The villain has seen visions of the future, visions of a dead world where nothing can live, where pollution has turned the atmosphere so toxic that it instantly kills anything that breathes it, where radioactive waste litters the landscape, where there are no forests or any kind of plant life at all.
And all because of the human race.

For you see, humanity believed that the economy was more important than preserving nature, so they chopped down the forests, drove every species in the world extinct through overhunting and habitat destruction, they dumped radioactive waste in the oceans and polluted the atmosphere so much that it became impossible to breathe it without dying.
And all to earn more money, money money, human greed destroyed the entire world, killed everyone and everything.

The villain is of the mind that the only way to prevent this from happening is to wipe out humanity, so he starts trying to destroy the human race in an all out pre-emptive assault on behalf of nature.

How's that for motivation?

And in the event that the PC's succeed in stopping the villain the DM will then describe how the world suffered a slow and painful death at the hands of humanity, congratulations, you are responsible for the end of the world.
Thus proving that the villain was right all along.

[Choco]

I had a villain once who had become immortal, and finally snapping after a couple thousand years he decided to go the evil villain route in the hopes that someone would figure out a way to kill him and do so.

[supermonkeyjoe]

I definitely think preservation is one of the best villainous motivations for an organisation or race, take the Quori of Eberron, they know that if they don't act they are going to cease existing within a manner of decades as part of the cycle of the planes, they mean to stop this even if it involves enslaving every sentient mind on the planet.

Fighting for survival also allows more desperate measures, someone who is after power can be dissuaded or turned off his path in exceptional circumstances whereas someone fighting for their very life has literally nothing to lose.

[Lysander]

One major hangup people have is assuming that villains have to be evil. Maybe nobody is evil, or even "misguided good", they might just be your rival.

For example, perhaps you're from warring noble families both intent on seizing the nation's throne. Good or evil doesn't have to come into it, it's just a squabble for wealth or power or honor or revenge. Maybe you're both good, just on different sides of a fight.

[The-Mage-King]

I tend to default to a desire for "WORLD DOMINATION! AHAHAHAHA!", or to "because I can"/"For teh lulz". And then there's the one guy who's after the first to make the world a better place. By ruthlessly crushing all resistance to his rule and turning various monsters wandering the giant wasteland that was once a country into his minions. Not a nice guy.

*Whistles innocently*

[Yora]

For you see, humanity believed that the economy was more important than preserving nature, so they chopped down the forests, drove every species in the world extinct through overhunting and habitat destruction, they dumped radioactive waste in the oceans and polluted the atmosphere so much that it became impossible to breathe it without dying.
And all to earn more money, money money, human greed destroyed the entire world, killed everyone and everything.

The villain is of the mind that the only way to prevent this from happening is to wipe out humanity, so he starts trying to destroy the human race in an all out pre-emptive assault on behalf of nature.

I think that's the plot of the manga X.

Spoiler

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And yes, the antagonists are quite likely to be right in their assesment.

And I really like the quori as villains, because they have a really good reason for their actions.

[gkathellar]

conquering the whole world ... [doesn't] ... provide any gain

Calling you out on this.

[Marxism]

The tragic motivation is sometimes the best but sometimes you need to make the players truly hate your fictional character. Make a Complete monster. someone who is evil because he loves the suffering of others.
Also misguided people are nice. People who have gone too far in their quest for good.

One I want to play around with is someone who is trying to corrupt the PCs. He makes them strong by throwing challenges at them then when they face him he forces them to do something that will corrupt them. I.E. killing him instead of capturing or Making them kill a child because otherwise the child will grow up to be worse then the villain.

[Ravens_cry]

Revenge.
Deep in our gut, we know this motivation.
We have all felt when we have been wronged, and we have all been wronged, that burning, aching, need to seek redress through any means possible.
Like the best tragic motivations, as audience and even characters we can understand and even sympathize with the motive if not the means.
It has destroyed families and nations, brought down empires and kings. When the first hand struck down another in murder, another rose to follow soon after.
Blood calls to blood.

[RandomNPC]

My group never cared to find out about the BBEGs past, they willingly skipped it and went on to fight him.

Had they paid more attention to the murals in the halls of the past they would've noticed everything they guessed about him was right, and then some.

He was a spoiled rich kid, who got tutoring in wizardry at a young age. His parents even hired him body guards, who he turned into undead minions at the first opportunity. He wanted a sizable kingdom with his name on it so his family name would last forever, but his family wasn't quite royalty level noble.

So he became a lich, gathering power, intimidating clans of bugbears, giants, and the like, into becoming his tax collectors. They gladly helped intimidate cities into paying tax, and after building six strongholds across a large area of land, the party showed up. They leveled his strongholds, fought to him, and were offered a job working for him, seeing as they were obviously better than his previous minions. That was the first time they destroyed his body. Three weeks later they get word of a talking skeleton trying to collect tax...

It took four years real time, and they still talk about that game.

[KingofMadCows]

I find the villain's plan for achieving their goal to be more important than their motivation.

I played a campaign where the villain was a troll swiftblade who used to work for a blue dragon. He fled when his master's keep was invaded by an army. After he escaped, he became a bandit and pretended to be a regular stupid troll that was born with supernatural quickness. He was able to accumulate quite a bit of wealth by stealing from his bandit associates and escaping each bandit company right before things got too rough and some adventurers or army were sent to destroy them.

In the campaign, the troll had secretly became the leader of several groups of bandits and inciting hostilities between two rival cities. The rivals then hire bandits to attack each other, not knowing that the troll is secretly controlling most of the bandits in the region and getting rich off their conflict. The players even got to meet the troll several times but didn't realize he was the mastermind because he acted like a regular dumb troll. However, the troll's motivation is quite simple. He wants to get rich and live comfortably and have enough wealth to either protect himself from his former master or be able to appease his master.

[Silus]

In my opinion, the best motivations are those that the players least expect.

First campaign I ran originally had a pretty well fleshed out BBEG that the party was going to hunt across the planes (The campaign later was turned into a horror game due to time restraints). The guy's backstory was as follows:

Originally a member of a well know adventuring party (Factotum/Mindbender/Ur Priest), the BBEG eventually settled down and had a family. At some point, his wife and child became very, very sick. He went to all the churches and temples that he could, but none had a cure. Soon after, his wife and child died.

So, seeing as the Gods wouldn't or couldn't bring his family back, he decided to take things into his own hands. The objective was to cause a stupid amount of chaos in the planes (unbalancing the Blood War, throwing the Elemental Planes into chaos, undo some laws on Mechanus, ect. ect) and, while the powers that be are distracted, slip into the Temporal Energy Plane and use the power of the Citadel of Eternity to reverse time and bring his family back.

So yeah, simple but unexpected reasons =3

[Ravens_cry]

That wouldn't really work in D&D in all but the most low magic settings because there is a variety of spells for removing diseases, curses, and similar effects. So a 'couldn't doesn't work. 'Wouldn't', unless your pulling a Burning Hate, is rather out of character for ostensibly Good deities.

[Tech Boy]

The want to just mess with the group of "Heroes".

The want of a "game to play".

One word: Moriarty.

[Zonugal]

In my highly magitek campaign there are a couple galactic-wide villains.

One is a the leader of a world of purely plant-based creatures whose motivation is to wipe out not plant-based creatures as it sees them only bringing a true, inescapable entropy to the galaxy in the form of their industrialization & pollution. It allow sees vegetation, agriculture and such as a form of genocide against it's people and thus sends off bombs & missiles full of Yellow Musk Creepers as to infect the rest of the galaxy.

Another is the head of the XerVs, a coalition of Mechantrixs, Maugs and Mordrons looking to bring the galaxy back to a state of unity, order and systemic perfection. They see humanity and the like as an uncontrolled outbreak which must be realigned with the needs of the galaxy. With extreme militarization and heavy industry they send off thousands of soldiers to restore the galaxy to it's former clock-like glory.

The last is the Baron of Blood, a Vampire Lord who commands the vast legion of undead throughout the galaxy. In my campaign setting undead aren't intrinsically evil but rather act on behalf of the galaxy itself who commands them towards wickedness and vile individuals/scenarios. In this way the Baron of Blood works a lot like Ra's al Ghul from Batman in that he instructs shadows, mummies and lesser vampires to go assassinate kings or topple over societies.

[Shadowknight12]

In my highly magitek campaign there are a couple galactic-wide villains.

So... Warhammer 40K meets D&D?

[Zonugal]

In my highly magitek campaign there are a couple galactic-wide villains.

So... Warhammer 40K meets D&D?

Basically but with some Chronicles of Riddick thrown in for good measure.

[Notreallyhere77]

Have the villain tell them outright that he wants the same things they want. Money. Power. Sex. Land. Luxury. Fame. Why, as kindred spirits, do they insist on standing in his way? This forces the players to consider their own actions and motivations.
Even on their own, these desires can make a decent villain.

Greed has been done, but it remains a classic. But in this case, it's not the money, it's about what he wants to buy with it. Better gear, of course. Can't you identify with that? Who cares who he had to kill to get the money? How many goblin children will grow up fatherless because you wanted a shinier sword? Not so different, after all, are we?

The lure of power is a strong one. The villain wants better spells, a stronger combat technique, more finely honed skills. And he's picked an efficient method of advancement by causing all of this conflict. Sure, it can be shallow if he's just leveling for the sake of levelling, but maybe he's trying to see how far he can go before he dies.

Lust is a great one, if your players are mature enough to handle it. The PCs visit brothels all the time, don't they? Perhaps the villain has different tastes, or is jaded, or just can't find a big enough brothel to give him as much as he wants.

Conquest of land is a classic motivation that combines greed and power-hunger. Of course, it can imply a philosophical cause as well...

The villain, like the rest of the people in the world, wants to retire to a huge castle surrounded by servants and full of the best food and the softest beds and the finest music. Unlike most of the rest of the world, he's going to make his fantasy a reality by actually working for it.

Fame can be a good motivator. The villain wants to make a name for himself. If the PCs already have some celebrity, he can become famous for defeating them.

Best used on a group that has similar motivations.

One motivation that the PCs aren't likely to have is fear. An evil cleric fears the wrath of his god, and will do everything that god asks of him, no matter how vile. An evil barbarian fears weakness and old age, and must make a show of strength, if only to convice himself he is still strong. An evil aristocrat might fear loss of social standing, and will kill anyone who threatens his good name. A paladin antagonist should fear falling, and will follow orders to the letter, lest his honor be stained with sympathy for his opponents. An evil sorcerer fears death, and the hell that surely awaits him, so he becomes a lich.
The possibilities are endless, but keep in mind that a simple motivation with a complex method of execution is better than a complex motivation with a simple execution.

[Brauron]

Love/Lust (both carnal and for power) are the driving force behind the villain of the game I'm currently running. She's a Marilith who lusts after Erythnul, and wishes to be made his blood-thirsty bride. To draw the God of Slaughter's attention, she's orchestrating the bloodiest war in the history of the world, which she sees as leaving at least 60% of the planet's population dead. At which point, she expects Erythnul to appear, smack her around a bit and then carry her off.

[Axinian]

Love/Lust (both carnal and for power) are the driving force behind the villain of the game I'm currently running. She's a Marilith who lusts after Erythnul, and wishes to be made his blood-thirsty bride. To draw the God of Slaughter's attention, she's orchestrating the bloodiest war in the history of the world, which she sees as leaving at least 60% of the planet's population dead. At which point, she expects Erythnul to appear, smack her around a bit and then carry her off.

Kinky!

...

Moving on...

I've never really understood why people say destroying the world provides no gain for the villain. Maybe it doesn't in our traditional sense of the word "gain," but being able to do so provides at least some sort of mental or spiritual gain for the villain. It makes sense to them, and that's all that really matters, since only they need to understand their plan to carry it out.

Besides, the whole point of a megalomaniac's madness is often that it can't be fully understood

(unless the point is that it's relatible)