How can you have a BBEG be Lawful Good, Neutral Good, or Lawful Neutral without making the Player Party a bunch of baby-eating rapists, murder hobos, mindless monsters, and edgelords? Is that possible at all, even if you take the "BE" out of BBEG?
I'll say it again, BBEG. Not duty or honor bound Captains or underlings just doing their job. Main antagonists.
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They have conflicting interests to those of the players.
That's pretty much it.
Like a very powerful Paladin trying to bring law to a pirate haven. The players could be pirates, and are just trying to preserve their way of life. Or something.
Call it an antagonist instead of perpetuating the needless use of "BBEG"?
Perfect happiness vs maximum happiness, justice vs freedom, reasonable suspicion vs Jean Valjean motherfuckers...
...
>king dies under suspicious circumstances
>power struggle ensues between rival claimants
>dead king's heir apparent takes the throne
>dead king's brother decries him as a fraud and a murderer, goes to war with the heir
>brother is inflexible and stern in his pursuit of justice, but is never needlessly cruel and honestly believes he is fighting for the right
>party must defend their kingdom from a man who honestly just wants to help, because the only way he can make anyone listen is to murder them
BAM, Lawful Neutral BBEG. Hell, could be LG, depending on the DM.
> file name
kek
Wouldn't they be the Big Antagonistic Major Foe, since they're neither big nor evil?
I see what you did there
Neither bad nor evil*
Why bother complicating things, and not just call them the antagonist? Or just the Foe if you're concerned about how many letters you type?
I don't know, something about the acronym BAMF just speaks to me.
You just posted an example; a good character can be an antagonist if they're unknowingly committing an act that will eventually lead to great turmoil and pain, especially if they're addled or otherwise not completely sane.
It's undeniably the best onomatopoeia for teleportation.
If we took the "BE" out of "BBEG," wouldn't that just make him a Big Guy?
For you
But, if you take out the EG, you get Black Beard. ;)
He's not a good guy, he's not a bad guy, he's just a big guy.
1. Lawful Good doesn't always mean correct. The BLGG could be operating on false information that they nevertheless trust implicitly.
2. Lawful Good can be hegemonistic. LG doesn't necessarily respect things like national sovereignty or self-determination. If they think they can do a better job of running things than you then they might well move to take power. I could picture a BLGG general moving to conquer a city state, or tribal lands, or maybe a loose federation of towns and villages, etc, all who are basically True Neutral. There wouldn't be any massacres or raids or anything. The BLGG could basically show up with an army and say "we're in charge now", and start immediately acting like they own the place. They'd set up government and courts while trying to win hearts and minds. The BLGG would default to non-violent action. If his rebellious new subjects disagreed and became violent, well then the LGs would fight back seeing it as a matter of self-defence.
You could pitch this as freedom vs constricting order. LG is basically compassionate, but it could still have a lot of assholish, prissy laws like not being able to keep your tavern open after 10pm, or banning certain local festivities because they honour some dubious gods, or chopping down a sacred grove to build a wooden wall around a village, etc.
3. If the conditions are extreme enough, LG can become extremist. I'm not a fan of the "one guy got bit by a zombie, so let's burn the whole village" Edgelord interpretation, but in a high fantasy, high stakes, there-can-be-only-one titanic struggle between Cosmic Good and Cosmic Evil, the side of Good might take extreme measures to defeat Evil.
Alien morals. Or in the context of the average P&P game, somebody doing something crushingly horrible to avoid an even worse fate. The guy who has to kill 50 people to say 5000.
My all time favorite example of what you're looking for is Star Control 2. The primary antagonists have an achingly tragic reason for what they're doing and it is STRICTLY in everybody's best interests. It is simultaneously cruel and fair. Start at around 5:30 or go download Ur-Quan Masters and experience it if you've never played!
youtube.com
The Ur-Quan Kzer-Za are intense antagonists and then you realize they're at best the #4 or #5 most evil thing in the universe!
>Alien morals
That will depend on system. In DnD morality is both objectively absolute (the same for everyone) and non-consequentialist (the ends never justify the means).
And rewatching the clip, the answer at 1:08 to "Why do you wish to enslave us?" is maybe my favorite antagonist speech ever given.
"You will revere... and even love us... for this gift."
>Lawful Good
>Lawful Evil
>Lawful Big
For a stand-in to "alien alignment", one could consider using a dynamic alignment for a particular character/object that changes every turn. Since it's always changing, they technically have no "real" alignment, at least not in a way understandable in the typical D&D fashion.
Easily with LN.
Harder with good BBEG: either definition of "good" is shit or those who oppose good are assholes. The only way I see heroic neutral/good PCs opposing someone good without being edgelords is GBBEG being heavily misled.
The BBEG in my campaign is trying to recreate the world without evil, but to do that he must destroy the old one. He's LG because he's trying to ensure the maximum happiness for the most amount of people, yet he's working towards a goal that the players have to stop for non-selfish reasons.
Is BANE? chaotic big
Hank Pym is basically a NG BBEG.
I think dragonlance actually had a BBEG the wasnt technically evil.
The king at the time was the highest holy fucker ever. He wanted to stop the ravages of goblins, orcs, draconians, ect. Se he went on a crusade. Sadly, even after the evils stopped resisting and were running, the king still went on the path of mass genocide. Then he started to look for the evils in man and root them out.
In short, over zealous morals pave the road to hell. All the right intentions, done wrong. Maybe your BBEG is tryiong to stop an ancient evil from arising, but only knows it was bourn to a small farming village, so he burns them all. Maybe the good king is being fed lies from an advisor, and starts a war that leads to him having to scorch the earth or be wipped out.
While he wasn't the bbeg per say, there was that inevitable in the book of elder evils who wanted to release something that would destroy the world because other people agreed to it and it just never happened.
Lotta morality for a hired gun.
NSA, FBI, CIA
>inB4 /pol/
This is litterally GoT.
>stannis is the BBEG
nice try, heathen
Two Lawful Good leaders, each for the betterment of their respective people, fight over something only one of them can have.