Do your roleplay villains have a sensible cause?
Having villains in your roleplay works so much better when they’re realistic. We’ve posted some tips about creating an effective villain before (read it here), but what also makes a big difference is credibility (we’ve posted an article about this before too – see here).
The best villains aren’t just ones that are “evil” or do “evil things”, because if you think about it… what does that mean? That’s not realistic.
There was a great quote from an episode of Fringe I watched recently, I won’t tell you who said it because it’s a bit of a spoiler, but it went like this:
Nature doesn’t recognize good and evil. Nature only recognizes balance and imbalance. I intend to restore balance to our world. Whatever it takes.
This villain (or maybe he isn’t a villain, nothing’s ever that black or white) has a goal, and he’s doing villainous things, but has justified them to himself because in HIS opinion he’s doing the right thing.
A realistic villain is one with a cause you can understand (even if you don’t agree), and this also makes them a much more interesting character.
Someone in your game will be the one playing the villain, most likely the GM, but not always. You might have a villainous character (check with the GM first though, or it might annoy everyone else!), and it’s much more interesting if they have a goal they want to achieve. This gives the rest of your characters something to do – to stop the villain from achiving his/her goal!
What do villains want?
When we talk about villains, we might not be talking about individuals. We could be talking about a type of monster, or a race of creatures. Each of these still have motivations. A pack of trolls might want to capture you and eat you in a stew, and a pack of werewolves might just want to chase you out of their territory. Stormtroopers might want toarrest you for being rebels, and the Borg might want to add you to their collective. Each of these have clear motivations that are actually quite sensible if you’re familliar with them.
But what’s interesting is if you start thinking about ways to make the story more interesting. If you meet the Dalek you know they’ll want to exterminate you, right? That’s what Daleks do, exterminate exterminate? But I’ve got a problem with this.
Why?
Are they just evil? Okay maybe they are. Fair enough. Boring, but fair enough. But what if you’re trapped on a planet with a single Dalek, and only YOU know how to escape. Would the Daleks still want to kill you even though it means condemming itself to never escape?
Similarly, if you met a troll would you assume it immediately wants to kill you like a mindless creature? Or maybe its goal is a bit more complex than that, it actually wants to capture you and use you somehow to find more tasty Humans. That might be a more sensible goal.
