NPCs you love to hate
Posted by Yax on August 29, 2007
Most D&D players love to hate NPCs. A typical characteristic of villains is that they are very intelligent but lack the humility to hide it. They will shove their knowledge and wits in everyone’s face.
Cockyness made easy
An easy way to make this come across is by using a fancy vocabulary. For cool words you can peruse the phrontistery, a website dedicated to obscure words and vocabulary resources. I would say more but I want to avoid logorrhea when possible! (see how annoying it is?)
Have fun being irritating when you impersonate the villain during your next game!
I don’t know if it’s just the people we play with, but there have been several occasions in our adventures where the PCs do things and the bad guys whip out legal pads and start taking notes. Even so, I find the evils that my companions before raw and amateurish.
I will forward this link on to these members of our group. If there is to be villainy, at least it will be proper villainy.
Ahhhh, there’s nothing like verbal diarrhea to give a NPC some flair (Pun intended).
Giving airs, using big words, being exceedingly polite and unassuming can be a blast to DM.
Terry Pratchet novels are a treasure trove of personality traits and quirks ready to be stolen for RPGs. The Patrician of Ahnk-Morpork is a paragon of the bright evil overlord (he’s not actually evil but that’s how it should be done!)
Vanir: Pulling off credible Evil in a RPG game is not easy, you have to walk a fine line between laughable schoolyard bully and cliché psychopathy. Hmmm nice topic to explore though.
Yeah, I know. I was just trying to be funny. :) You’re absolutely right, real evil takes a lot of work and it very seldom works in extremes.
Actually, that’s one of the topics we’re going to cover on stupidranger.com in the next couple weeks. And now I think I have a good title: “Proper Villainy”!
“Proper Villainy” is definitely something I can read more about.
PCs are the backbone of the campaign, but the villains flesh the adventures out!
Don’t tell my players though. I spend a lot of effort making them feel their characters are the superstars
Superstars need actual steps to get to the top. These steps might as well be interesting recurring villains.
Very inspiring discussion there guys.
Yax you completly destroyed my whole universe. My life was based on the fact that I am a superstar!!!
Peo said:
“Yax you completly destroyed my whole universe”
I say:
Behold the power of the DM!
As a player (of Phil’s game) and occasional DM I can say that recurring villain are something I really enjoy. (Maybe to much for the taste of my fellow players, but that is another story.)
A campaign without a good villain will often lack drives and focus.
Adventuring to save whatever, is so much more gratifying when somebody was there trying to stop you, from achieving your goal.
His defeat becomes an automatic highlight of the campaign that the player will remember.
Without a *good* evil villain does lack a little something. It’s so much more fun to try to save the world when you can do so by destroying some creapy, smart-aleck’s dream of taking over.
I do like the vocab idea, Yax… give your villain that extra little something… like Professor Moriarty.
DM caleb had a good anecdote about a recurring villain:
The wizard that wouldn’t die
The tricky bit about villains, I find, is giving them evil things to do. Murder? Nah, most often the PCs couldn’t care one way or another for the life of an NPC. And besides, how many intelligent creatures do they kill in the course of a campaign?
In order to really get at the good (evil) stuff and demonstrate their intelligence, I find it’s best to get them right under the players’ skin. Set them up as allies, then have them betray the PCs. By this I don’t mean just have them turn nasty. Have them turn nasty when the players have put valuable treasure or magic at their disposal.
It’s the arch-villain’s ability to forward plan and predict the PCs’ reactions that are the real demonstration of their brains.
Giving them a bit of jargon does help, though. No villain is complete unless he knows and uses the word ’stratagem’ and has at least five similes for ‘fool’. :)
[...] Make one villain easier to hate. [...]
[...] NPCs you love to hate by yours truly [...]
[...] Use fancy vocabulary. [...]
One very simple thing you can do to truly make the PC’s despise a villain - something that is very easily overlooked - is resurrect the villain after the PC’s have already killed him. In D&D there are so many ways to do this, and it forces the PC’s to ask themselves, “Who has brought my enemy back, and why?” leading to interesting character development, and even a more sinister villain.