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© 1998-2001 Dru
Pagliassotti
All rights reserved.
How to Run a Good Bad Guy
Part 3
Return to second part of this article
 The Riddler:
The villain with a trademark can be either the Nemesis or the Hidden Mastermind.
Trademarks can be left intentionally (riddles, origami birds, a "Z")
or unintentionally (the smell of cigarette smoke, a particular weapon
always used when killing, an odd-looking footprint). Intentional trademarks
may indicate that the villain is confident, playing with the characters,
and/or subconsciously wants to get caught. Unintentional trademarks may
indicate that the villain is a little careless, unable to avoid leaving
certain marks, and/or subconsciously wants to get caught. You decide.
Keyser Soze:
The villain who is perfect and never leaves any clues behind works best
as the Hidden Mastermind—after all, the whole point of the Nemesis
is that s/he keeps showing up over and over! A Keyser Soze is a little
tricky for the DM to handle, though, because the perfect Hidden Mastermind
will never be Unmasked. The DM must assume that at some point or another
this "perfect" villain makes a mistake or is betrayed. Put some
thought into this one—the more interesting you can make the villain's
misjudgment, the better.
There are a few other
personality traits to consider, too. Does the villain have a fatal flaw
that the characters can exploit? (Overconfidence, underconfidence, weakness
for the opposite sex, a hot temper, a hobby, a loved one?) Does the villain
have any likable traits in an otherwise unlikable personality? (Never
harms children, paints roses, composes beautiful music?) These and other
traits will give the villain some depth and possibly provide hooks for
the characters to build a plan around.
I believe that the best
villains are the ones the characters end up liking or admiring despite
themselves. If you can create an archvillain who touches the characters
at some level, then whether or not they finally ending up killing the
villain, you can be certain that your players will be talking about the
adventure or campaign for years to come.
The
Final Showdown: The Final Showdown should be the cumulation of
a series of adventures; possibly months or even years of real-time gaming
sessions. You should plan the Final Showdown out in perfect detail—this
is too important an adventure to run by the seat of your pants. Your players
are going to sit down to the Final Showdown session with bloodthirsty,
anticipatory grins, and you'd better be ready to give them what they want—action,
drama, and the ever-present threat of death.
The ideal Final Showdown
is one in which the archvillain knows the characters are coming, and the
characters know the archvillain knows, and both know that one side or
the other isn't going to survive to see the next sunrise. If the characters
have managed to sneak up on the archvillain unseen, then the archvillain
doesn't deserve the title. There's no excuse for allowing the characters
to surprise a Mastermind, and a Nemesis always expects to run into the
characters, just as they've come to always expect to run into their Nemesis.
If the characters are completely brilliant, you may have to scramble a
little, but the DM is always permitted to cheat to enhance the story ...
and this is a good time for it. In this situation you may need to suddenly
decide to make one of the party's henchmen or NPCs a traitor (willing
or unwilling, knowing or unknowing) in order to explain how the villain
is alerted, but the villain should be alerted! Don't tell the characters
this, though—let them find out later that the reason the villain
knew they were coming despite all their care was that their trusted henchman
spilled the beans to protect his infant daughter's life...
.
The Setting:
The classic Final Showdown occurs in the archvillain's personal stronghold.
Players expect this cliche—that's why it's survived so long in books,
movies, and TV. You can buck the trend, but if you do, try to come up
with an equally interesting and dangerous setting. There may be some value
in setting the Final Showdown in a dungeon that poses a threat to both
sides, especially if you're planning to force characters and villain to
fight side-by-side for a while against a mutual threat and then, after
being "softened up" by their mutual foe, face each other to
fight over the ultimate prize. Just don't let either side use the third-party
intervention as an excuse to run away from the dungeon—it's not
a Final Showdown unless characters and archvillain finally face each other
and work out their differences in combat or negotation.
If the Final Showdown
takes place in the villain's stronghold, make certain there are plenty
of alarms, both audible and inaudible, for the characters to trigger.
You want the villain to have time to prepare the troops! Besides, nothing
crushes the characters' morale better—or makes them more likely
to go charging in without thinking—than realizing that the alarm's
gone off and the bad guys are alerted.
The Villains:
Of course the archvillain has to be involved in the Final Showdown, but
don't stop there. It's time to pull out the stops. Virtually each and
every villain or monster who has ever managed to elude the characters
or who can be feasibly sprung from jail by the archvillain should be here,
ready and waiting. If they specialize in a particular weapon or spell,
they should be armed and ready, with spares or scrolls to hand. Make sure
all the villains are protected by the same kinds of defensive spells the
characters have up—fair's fair, after all. I've learned that it's
usually wise to make the villains a little more powerful than the characters.
You might think that this would mean the characters would always lose,
but players are a crafty lot. They never shine so brightly as in that
moment where it looks like their characters are all about to be destroyed
for good. After all, it's one brain (yours) against many (the players'),
and no matter how crafty you are, your players are going to out-think
you when their characters' lives are on the line. So give your villains
a little edge by boosting their power level. You wouldn't want to make
it easy on the heroes, would you?
The archvillain should
be around, of course, but s/he shouldn't appear until the characters have
been softened up by all the lesser villains, agents, and lackeys. Again,
the players expect this—they know that they're not going to see
any trace of the person they've come for until they're down to the dregs
of their hit points, spells, and magic-item charges. Why disappoint them?
The End:
When the archvillain appears on the scene, the long, winding plotline
that has led up to this encounter is finally coming to an end. The DM
should have a pretty good idea of what the characters are going to do,
from listening in to their planning sessions and simply being familiar
with their strategies and personalities. If the characters going to try
to negotiate (and still plan to negotiate even after fighting their way
through the stronghold), the DM should already have an idea of how the
archvillain will respond. This is a tricky situation because it can be
anticlimactic—the characters nearly die in a huge fight, then offer
the villain a deal and walk off? Something seems to be missing.... There
are two ways to avoid this.
The first way is to
milk the scene for every ounce of melodrama possible. Ham it up. Roleplay
it to the hilt and encourage your players to roleplay it, too (if they
see you going into full emotive swing, chances are they'll get into the
spirit pretty quickly). Act. If you provide the players with a strong
enough performance and milk the same out of them, they'll end up feeling
just as exhausted as if they'd actually been in combat. This is a big
demand to make of yourself and your players, and I've only seen it done
on a few occasions by particularly fine gamers, but it's always memorable.
The second way is to
carry out the negotiation but then throw both the characters and the archvillain
into danger. If you're going to do this, try to plan it ahead of time
so you can foreshadow the possibility. For example, if they've been fighting
in a cavern, have bits of rock fall off during combat ... maybe a small
earth tremor as they begin to negotiate ... and then have the roof start
to cave in as they near some kind of agreement. If they've interrupted
the villain in the middle of a grand ritual, have the spell still crackling
in the background, and then a henchman break the circle, or blood run
over an important line, or the spell energies surge out of control, conjuring
up that ethereal juggernaut that the villain had been trying to summon
before the negotiation started. If there's a third party of villains you
can bring in, have them teleport in and attack right as the negotiation
starts to go well. In other words—give the characters a fight of
some sort, even if it's not with the person they'd been expecting to fight.
If the characters are
going to try to fight the archvillain, the DM should already know what
the archvillain's tactics are—and what the archvillain intends to
do if the characters lose. This is important, because although the ideal
is for the characters to emerge bloody but triumphant, sometimes not even
the most skillful fudging of dice rolls on the DM's part will be able
to give the characters the edge they need. AD&D is, in part, a luck-based
game—the dice inject an element of randomness that can sometimes
tip the balance so far against the characters that there's no way to save
them. The DM should have planned for this contingency: Does
the villain kill the characters? Imprison them? Enslave them? Bind them
in some way so that they are no longer a threat (say, by a geas) and then
set them free? Or are the characters saved by some unlikely deus ex machina?
I don't like last-minute divine intervention—I feel it robs the
glory from the characters—but if it makes sense in your game, and
especially if it can be done in a way that still gives the characters
some glory, then plan for the possibility. And be sure to plan it in such
a way that the characters are indebted to their rescuer, so you can exploit
the debt later.
Once the archvillain
has either been captured, killed, or has undergone a change of heart,
the characters will probably collect their booty and drag their dead,
dying, and walking wounded out of the dungeon. This is the decompression
stage, and it's best not to throw anything more at the characters. Assume
the rest of the minor villains or monsters have fled (hey, you can always
use them later for the next major plotline) and gloss quickly over the
treasure-gathering and return to normality. There's little point in staging
any important scenes after The Final Showdown—they'll detract from
the moment. Your next step should be to let the players do their bookkeeping
(healing up, counting gold, divvying treasure, figuring out how to raise
the dead, and so forth) while you either figure experience points or decide
what the repercussions are going to be. Are there authorities who must
be reported to? If the villain is still alive, what next? Let the game
wind down with record-keeping and wrapping-up-the-loose-ends roleplaying.
Give yourself and your players a rest—you'll both need it. Because
after this game, you're going to have to figure out what to run next ...
and The Final Showdown with the campaign's archvillain is a tough act
to follow!
originally written June 13, 1998
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