To write a villain that is well written and affirm that they are irredeemable or beyond saving is to state the notion that there can be no hope for yourself in your darkest hour.
Are your villains redeemable user? Worth saving? Or have you abandoned hope?
Depends on what we did last and what the party is feeling.
Right now I'm jonesing for the thug bbeg who is dumb as fuck right up until he outsmarts you and drops you off a cliff.
why must plots have centralized evil villains commanding underlings?
Why can we not have decentralized evil committees that plan and execute their evil separately without the oversight of a central authority?
Because you usually want to have a very definitive "win" condition.
If you have one Big Bad who is Behind It All, you beat him, you have a dramatic moment you can point to and say "we won".
A decentralized glut of evil doesn't really offer that.
No one ever said they "must" it's just easier so the person creating the story can focus on other stuff and not worry about a natural build in stakes and intensity.
A good villain would have a network of terror cells set up in exactly that communistic mannert to ensure that his plans came to fruition despite his demise, or in the case that the heroes convince him to turn good
>"good" villain
Opinions, brah, opinions
>Are your villains redeemable user?
Probably? My current villain (since Veeky Forums dislikes the term BBEG, we'll use villain here) isn't really evil. He just wants to unmake history past a certain point in order to save a culture that was destroyed by something beyond their knowledge. Said culture isn't even his but he believes it to be better than anything since then and that the gods willingly kept certain knowledge from that culture in order to let them destroy themselves. As a celestial, he dislikes that duplicity.
>Worth saving?
Eh. If you even consider him to be evil in the first place, he's probably worth saving? He was once a powerful and righteous champion of good and law, after all. Now he's more of a hyper-powerful archaeologist with a historyboner and a grudge about divine dickery.
>Or have you abandoned hope?
Yes. For unrelated reasons though, outside of the game.
>since Veeky Forums dislikes the term BBEG, we'll use villain here
What? When?
Hope is only for people with assets to extort. The only thing I have left to hope for is an early death.
...and free food.
Obviously not. A lot of villains may be redeemable, but why would anyone bother? A bullet to the head solves a lot of problems. Besides, redemption doesn't mean absolution from your crimes.
If a mass-murderer has a change of heart, I'll let him surrender and then I'll kill him. He was going to be executed anyway, I'm saving everyone the rigamarole of a trial.
Also, the girl in the opening image has incredible tits, but that hood is really silly.
>To write a villain that is well written and affirm that they are irredeemable or beyond saving is to state the notion that there can be no hope for yourself in your darkest hour.
This statement is incorrect.
The villain is fiction and thus need have no basis in reality whatsoever.
That is all.
If a villain is redeemable is one thing.
If they are going to take the opportunities that would be needed for them to be redeemed is another.
That the PCs are at all interested in a redeemable villain managing it is another thing entirely.
When all three things align, there can indeed be redemption. Most of the time, though, I've found PCs tend to be pretty scorched-earth in dealing with their enemies.
Which can get kind of irritating at times when they're not consistent with it, like when they're more willing to try being diplomatic with a creature they know is PURE EVIL than with a fellow human whose goals run contrary to their own.
Kind of two very different answers to that question, man.
The first answer is that I don't really have villains in my games. I design characters who have goals, motives, and reasons for being who and what they are, and even if most people would consider much or all of what they do to be wrong, at least in their own minds, they have logical justifications for their actions, and see themselves as ultimately "good" people.
The second answer though, is that it doesn't matter what kind of "villains" I make, because there is no such thing as good, evil, hope, or redemption as far as my players are concerned. Are you a baby murdering Nazi who pays us money? We'll do whatever you say. Are you the embodiment of kindness, but you said something we took as a sleight? We'll kill you and burn your house to the ground.
They don't care about whether my villains are redeemable or justified. Anyone who crosses them deserves to die horribly. Anyone who doesn't they can barely be bothered to remember their names.
Yeah I thought that comment in OP's post was a little strange.
The Empire is beyond saving.
The Emperor must die, and his puppet Vader too.
They are pure evil, having enslaved most of the Galaxy.
But Vader does get redemption.
Ehh. Some of them are. The 'main' villain is probably a write-off though. He's a monstrous sadist who only maintained a pretence of being good and noble while he was trying to live up to the hopes and expectations of a single person. When that single person died due to the neglect of a few other important characters, he lost all reason to hold himself in check, gained a newfound loathing for society, and proceeded to knuckle down and start making the world awful for everyone in the most efficient manner possible.
I mean, it's certainly possible for him to find redemption, but it'd take too much effort to be worth it vis a vis the fact that while you're trying to do that, he is actively committing horrible atrocities and causing the pain and suffering of thousands if not millions of people.
Better off just taking his head, really. He'd be happier in the afterlife.
Yeah, but that's at the hand of his fucking son the magical space wizard, who is dying before him being electrocuted by a man he hates.
We're no-name chumps with a big mission, no funding, and little hope.
You'll excuse me for not wanting to show him how life can be free and beautiful.
The Emperor approves.
My game's villain is a genocidal Emperor.. but he only kills the demon infiltrators the party don't know about.
Depends if the party find out I guess. The Emperor is unique that he doesn't see the illusions, so everyone thinks hes crazy and serve in fear.
When I formulate the villains for my players, I just imagine them playing as the heroes for a different campaign and pit them against that.
>To write a villain that is well written and affirm that they are irredeemable or beyond saving is to state the notion that there can be no hope for yourself in your darkest hour.
You base this on what exactly?
>Are your villains redeemable user?
Some are, some aren't. My villains aren't all carbon copies or some expression of my "deeper self" or some bullshit. They are constructs, constructs that only exist to move the story onward into the most interesting and entertaining direction. Sometimes that's redemption, sometimes it's not.