 Howdy how's it going? My name's DavyChappy, and if there's one thing being a dungeon master has taught me, it's that good villains are super important. The whole reason why the heroes are out there trying to save the world is because some schmuck put the world in jeopardy in the first place, and by golly, that schmuck had better have a good backstory or else all of this had been for nothing. So today, I'm gonna give a couple of pointers on what makes a good villain as I've come to discover from playing D&D over the years. As always, keep in mind that a lot of this is just my opinion, so if you feel like a bad guy is overplayed, feel free to run your games however you want. But without a way, let's begin. So, making your villain really boils down to three things. You have to know who the villain is, you have to understand the villain's motivation, and that motivation has to conflict with the motivations of the players. Now, all this is fine and dandy, and it may seem obvious, but it's more metaphorical than you would think. First up, and arguably the most important thing, is that your characters have to actually know who the bad guy is, and that goes beyond just saying, oh, he's the Dark Lord Kiliman, and he's really evil, ooh. Whether or not the player characters and the villain ever meet properly, they have to feel like they know the villain's personality enough to have a meaningful hate relationship with them. Or else things are just never gonna work, and you're better off just finally meeting that guy that your Nan's been talking about. My point is that the players should, over time, eventually understand the bad guy's attitude and personality, not through the game telling you how important he is, but because the players felt it for themselves. Darth Vader isn't a cool villain because of his legend, he was a cool villain from the moment he appeared, because he showed up and just started doing powerful things that left the impression that maybe the players are right to fear him. Likewise, the Emperor was a memorable villain because while he didn't do things himself, the story used Vader as a literary agent of the Emperor, meaning that a lot of the intimidation factor that Vader pulled off would partially transfer over to the Emperor, and it would only increase further once Vader acknowledged that he was stuck under the guy's old, wrinkly thumb, because who in the world could control the master of Chrome? To put it in D&D terms, the reason why Strahd von Zarovich is so popular is due in large part to the fact that the characters see him all the time, and they get a good gauge of his personality, helping define him as a real person, even if he still is a destructive force of nature. And by the third or fourth time that the heroes meet Mr. Blablabla himself, it feels personal. You get to know him through the things that he does to you personally, the things that he's done to the people around you, and the actions of the agents that he employs to get things done when he's not around. Meanwhile, if you've played the Tyranny of Dragon storyline, you'd be hard-pressed to even remember the main bad guy's name. It's Severin, by the way. Because even though it's said enough times and everyone is technically working as agents of his will, the players don't give a shit because from a story perspective, he's accomplished nothing and nobody could tell you anything about his personality besides he's evil, and that's not a personality, that's a hobby. The players could have been given detailed stories about the bad guy's exploits, they could have run into him at a convention, they could read his diary, they could do anything, but they have to understand the emotions and feelings of the person or persons that they're up against because that is what will directly tie into the next important thing about your villain, which is understanding their motivation. When the players find out why the guy they've been chasing after for 10 sessions is doing all these bad things, it had better be something that they can get behind. Understanding the motivation is more than just coming up with a reason, it's coming up with a good reason. The motivation has to be something that, while still evil on the opposite side of it, would be something that the player could see themselves doing if they had been in the villain's shoes. Something that the Marvel movies took the longest time to figure out is that a villain is only as powerful as the reason why they're a villain in the first place. Loki's motivation is that he's the spurned son of Asgard who cheats and lies because he constantly feels cheated and lied to. Malekith is a guy who wants a Mio. Thanos saw the ruination of his homeworld due to overpopulation and went mad trying to stop that. His henchmen did too? I don't really know what their deal is. Iron Man isn't a bad guy at all, but he's the villain of Civil War because his perception of what a hero should be conflicts so drastically with that of Captain America and it just so happened to be a Captain America movie. Meanwhile, the Red Skull is a Nazi and then a Ghost Nazi. The point is your villain has to have purpose for what they're trying to do that the players can empathize with or at least they have to understand the logic behind it and don't try to be cheeky and act like they have a good motive but you just want to hide it from the players forever because then the villain will seem bland and unfulfilling. To go back to D&D, I would like to talk about Asbara Joss. Who is Asbara Joss? Well, he's a minor villain from Horde of the Dragon Queen with a throwaway backstory that I used as the book's main antagonist because Tyranny of the Dragon sucks and didn't have one. As per the book, Asbara Joss is a low-ranking member of secessionists from Thay that are working with the cult so that Tiamat can get rid of the lich guy that runs their country. He barely appears, says nothing, and then dies like a punk in a battle where his boss, the guy who he's playing the literary agent for, also gets beaten. The reason why I chose him is because unlike all those other bad guys that just want to summon Tiamat because Tiamat, he actually had a reason to be there. He was a freedom fighter trying to liberate his home in a world where the rest of the world wouldn't lift a finger because Thay has always been evil, so who cares? As the players went through the game, they realized, hey, this guy isn't actually a bad guy, he's just down on his luck. And he became the breakout star of my sessions because he always seemed to feel bad about the things he did because he knew that he was hurting people, but still be 100% convinced that what he was doing was the right thing to do. One of the groups even tried to win him over to their sides, that he could be a good guy, and even though they failed and he responded by kidnapping and doing horrible experiments on one of the magical party members, it was still great to see that with the right motivations the players will resonate with even a bland bald guy in a boring module and try to see if they can't somehow see eye to eye. Which brings me to the last big part of making an important villain. The motivation has to run conflict with that of the party. This is literally what makes a villain a villain. If the villain's goals could run counter to the party at some point but don't necessarily even have to, then that's not a villain, that's an anti-hero. When deciding what it is that the villain wants to accomplish, you don't have to make it as blunt as them wanting to specifically defeat the party. The villain could be completely unaware of the party's existence, it's just that their plans happen to negatively impact the players. When you look at the big dictator archetype, they almost never know who the heroes are until the heroes start mucking things up. Going back to Marvel, Ultron's goal was to delete humanity and restart after he saw tentacle porn on the internet, but that obviously couldn't be accomplished without destroying the Avengers, whose goals were all very much incompatible with being destroyed. To switch back to D&D, Jarlaxle Bainry, or really any of the villains from Waterdeep Dragon Heist, shows up as a clear antagonist with inscrutable motives that just so happens to target the characters once they accidentally stumble upon the basic MacGuffin of the story. He never intended to incur the wrath of half a dozen weirdos, but circumstances just happen to dictate that they be enemies. And I like to play up that relationship a lot with Jarlaxle. He's not antagonizing the party out of malice or a desire to see harm done to anybody, but he's a killer businessman with a job to get done, and unfortunately, somebody's gotta pay. It's a shift in the dynamic of the villain because where Jarlaxle comes across as an entirely impossible threat to defeat on his own, he's actually only there for his motivation, and he's likely to leave if his motivation takes him elsewhere. So the conflict stops being, how do we defeat the villain so that we can foil his plans, and it instead switches becoming, how do we defeat his plans so that we can foil the villain? Finally, one last tiny little thing I like to do when I'm getting in the mood to play a villain and understand their personality is I like to play a little bit of music that I associate with the bad guy right before the game begins. For Asbara, it's poor man's poison. For Strahd, it's the darker canon Wakashima songs. For Jarlaxle, it's Shaefer James, especially Counterfeit Arcade. Seriously, go listen to villainous thing, it's perfect. There's just nothing that clicks better than finding a song that fits your villain's personality. But that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Be sure to do the dance of clicking all of my social media. Go out and be the villain you see in the mirror and maybe support me on Patreon because capitalism is bad and being bad is good. But yeah, Davy out.