Where do you draw the line when creating a villain?

Where do you draw the line when creating a villain?

How much of the atrocities are you willing to describe when talking up just how evil your big bad is?

If he's doing worse than the PCs, you might have gone too far.

Depends on the group I'm GMing for and what kind of campaign we've agreed on running

He can't have eaten all the cookies...

No limits.
I made it so the players while restrained forced, mind you, had to watch him hold hands in a somewhat public setting.
I described in massive detail how he did this.He also indoctrinated the poor girl to make her do that act.

Depends on setting. It doesn't take a lot to make a character evil.

Depends on the players, but usually I go until it is well established that the dude is a bad dude. Having a villain murder one innocent NPC is the same as him murdering a dozen NPCs and that is the same as him murdering a hundred NPCs. The players register he is evil and he must die. Even my players who are new barely respond to body counts. I also avoid acts that are too distracting like rape. Such crimes end up taking too much focus, or too little to the point of being redundant, and distract from the game. Same with torture. A bit here and there works fine. If you try too hard then it starts to lose effect. If you want a villain to come off as being especially evil, then focus on his character rather than his deeds. In a game where mass murder is standard affair only motivations and personality really stand out imho.

Up to anything and everything, children's genitalia excluded.

Depends on the villain. After all, they're just people with motivations and ideals that conflict with those of your PCs.

I leave children out things, except as collateral damage. Otherwise it largely depends on the tone of the game.

This.

I guess it depends on the villain. A tantric diabolist under a lust demon that gains power from loli gore is on a fairly different level than a rival adventuring party working for a different guild

It depends on the villain and the tone of the game. A good rule of thumb is "does doing this advance the villain's goals?". If not then there should be a good reason for it.

When creating a villain who is defined by his evil, I try to make it so, that his evil is so absurd it crosses the line thrice.

But he needs to be sincere in his personality and goals.

>like this

My villains are usually just logical in their goals. One villain regularly abuses a PC but she sold him her soul so it just keeps happening.

Being a dick is always fun.

I don't draw a line.
When I design a villain I usually have a goal or theme in mind. Ambition, greed, lust are all OK but some of my best villains thought they were serving a greater good. And what ever it took to get to that good is what it took. Hell, I've made villains just to fuck with a specific player. My point is don't worry about going too far. As long as it makes sense to the villain it should work out.

I don't draw lines when creating the villain, but I do leave lines the villain will avoid crossing if possible. Having the villain being some megalomaniac trying to blow the world up is lovely for getting people to kill him but my goal is never to have killing my villain to be the end goal. My players tend to have an end goal for their characters and my villains are the guiding hand toward the realization that the PCs /can/ reach said goals.

Even if I make a megalomaniac they are designed to have faults, wants and needs. Sometimes it's validation from an admiring mob of people, for some it is to see how people will remember them for the the rest of their lives. There's always a reason for their actions, and it's possible to push them to be worse so I have the ability to up the ante and keep my players invested.

Whatever fits the tone. Edgy baby rape wouldn't fit the tone of my game, besides being cheap shock value. Villains only really have to be bad enough to stop and threatening enough to make stopping them satisfying.

Presentation makes the villain.

...

This stuff is more disturbing than any baby-murderer

It's not hard. For 99% of all groups you just need to say "he's the bad guy" and they'll pick up on it and kill him.
The supposed "BBEG" thing is largely a fairytale propped up by the internet; most major villains in most actual long-running campaigns do not last particularly long in my personal experience and in the experience of most players and GM's I talk to because PC's have no real reason to keep letting him get away and the only way to really "introduce" him to most groups so that they remember or care about him one way or another (as opposed to him being this Sauron guy who is talked about but never seen) is to have him personally show up and directly oppose the players, at which point they will promptly kill him.

That's probably why most of the most memorable classic D&D villains are powerful demon lords; you can kill them and they don't come back.

So you're saying we should stop trying to come up with memorable villains then? That's great advice.

No, I'm saying you should stop trying to write a novel when you're GMing and focus instead on actually GMing.
Every single thread like this reads like a bunch of people who saw a memorable villain in their last anime or comic or movie or TV show or videogame or whatever and wants to do the same without taking into account that these are all VERY different media styles then traditional gaming and have wildly different methods of information presentation then a game of D&D or whatnot does.

Not saying you can't make memorable villains, just saying you should stop trying to do it in a way that mimics a novel or other storytelling method.

As much as it takes, but I always avoid random atrocities for apparent no reason because it makes the villain looks like he is just "a random generic bad guy".

Random generic example time:
> playing dungeon & dragons
> players got hired to find out what happened to a caravan that was escorting dancers to the city across a desert (probably hookers)
> total of, idk, 10 dancers
> players come across 3 of them brutally murdered, likely raped previously
> head on stakes and shit like that, very graphic scene described
> "why only 3?" they wonder

They eventually found out who did this was a nomad desert tribe, and they took the others to sell as slaves or for ransom, something like that. But those 3 were at least half desertfolk (from the same folk that did this), so they killed those 3 in disgust for them to bring dishonor for their people.

Its not just random murder/rape/torture, there's a cultural thing there. The desert nomads hated civilization, but hated even more when their own kind left their old ways.

I beg you, never make your villain do "evil shit" just too look cool/badass/evil. Have a real reason for it.

Not that guy, but I disagree with what you're saying.

You cite books, comics, film, video games, and TV as being different media than gaming but fail to understand that each of those media have their differences that you could throw the "Stop trying to make a memorable villain because there will be a new one in the next book/comic/film/episode/game" argument at.

One thing to note is that early TV, comics, and video games were very episodic in nature. Every new episode, issue, or game would have a new villain and are generally viewed as kid-friendly fodder. I'll concede that there are exceptions, but most relied on Villain Of The Week as a plot narrative with characterisation only really occurring among the POV characters.

Now look at modern media. As each form of media matured it transitioned from the Villain Of The Week episodic nature in to more complex arc driven narratives.

Essentially what your argument boils down to is "I think RPGs should focus on Villain Of The Week narratives.". While the people who make these threads are saying "I want to have a Villain Arc in my RPG, how do I write a villain as a three dimensional character rather than having General Eric von Fuckface the Third as a time-sink for my players characters."

Child murder is fine, child rape is not. Everything else is fine.

>tgtards are so autistic they think a clear cut villain and good guy is good writing
So.... this....is the power... of reddit

This post is retarded

>only 50 shades of bad guy and worse guy can be good writing.

Projecting much you obvious newfag? Lurk more faggot. When Veeky Forums says bad guy or BBEG for that matter they mean antagonist, when they mean good guy, they mean protagonist.

On a second note moral relativism is edgy fedora tipping shit that more often than not falls flat. Presenting an antagonist as a bad guy is not necessarily terrible, as long as that evil is human and justified.

Jesus Christ.

I'd like plebbit to evacuate

My players were entirely cool with signing up to work under an evil merc captain that took a little too much pleasure in her job of gunning down pathetically armed insurgents and peaceful protesters in the employ of a morally absent corporation.


But when the merc leader started sacrificing her own troops en masse without hesitation to win THAT is where the party started to get uncomfortable with their own expendable nature that they started plotting the takedown of the evil company that was paying their salary.

So, genocide, blasphemy and standard war crimes is A-okay apparently in my circle of players. Just so long as you look out for your subordinates.

On the other hand, I couldn't stomach the things my players described while torturing a young woman that was an alien sympathizer (where this human world peacefully transitioned into ayy hands).

They honestly got way too fucking descriptive. I should have just faded-to-black and told them she says whatever, but I kind of just called the session there when they were done and never really picked it up again.