How do we make a 90s style cartoon villain a good or at least creative bbeg for a campaign?

How do we make a 90s style cartoon villain a good or at least creative bbeg for a campaign?

For every combat check he's involved in, there's an intelligence or wisdom roll.

Knowing is half the battle.

For an original villain go with what you like, but for me, I love my tributes.

All you need to make that villain good in my book is to make sure everyone playing knows the villain you base them on, and then play that villain very faithfully. Shape the campaign, the setting around him. Make it fun or silly if you must but make sure that all the pieces fall to make that villain a reality.

Never name the villain, let your players put it together. Pace the clues and characteristics with your setting and his character so that this doesn't happen for a while. When the ah-ha moment hits, it hits hard and it's a 3-month long punchline to a joke they didn't know you were writing until it all falls into place.

After that there's no hiding it, so the campaign needs to wrap up soon while the players on on the high of that session. Timing is everything and done right it crescendos in a way that is very memorable.

Beast Wars Megatron

Or that other CG cartoon with the villain called "Megabyte"

> How do we make a 90s style cartoon villain a good or at least creative bbeg for a campaign?
He is cruel.
He is ruthless.
He is immoral.

But, at the same time, he is not stupid. His cruelty is calculated, his ruthlessness always serves a certain goal, and most importantly - he is human, maybe even moreso than heroes are.
His goals may be atrocious, but his character might be more relatable than that of the heroes.
He may be a cartoon villain, but he isn't a Saturday morning cartoon villain - he has clear goals that clearly benefit him upon success.
He has backup plans. And yes, he is fallible just like any other human, but he isn't prone to stupid mistakes.

As always, the devil is in execution. If you're pulling the "Just as planned" shit out of your ass, it won't be good under any circumstances.
However, if you lightly sprinkle that shit on top of an already well-written story, it will work.

Bump

The penny probably dropped when he started invoking them "Ancient Spirits of Evil" to get all swole and shit.

>retro
>creative
Is that how it works? I don't think that's how it works. Help me out here.

The new is the forgotten old.

I guarantee you that no amount of digging through layers of rocks formed throughout hundreds of millions of years of geological processes will make you find any Cambrian ignition engines.

>dense user-kun immediately goes for a geology metaphor

>good
>creative

Subjective as shit homie.

You want Cobra Commander in your game then just throw him in there.

He's bombastic and theatrical all the time because he is constantly very drunk

He wants to take over the world because he's the leader of an ambitious warlike state whose economy is based on the forced annexation of assets.

>Or that other CG cartoon with the villain called "Megabyte"

Reboot. Same company made both shows.

Man Cobra Commander's a megalomaniacal warmonger who chills with a smoking hot brunette chick in glasses, an arms dealer with no face, and a ninja, and that's only two things about him, that's not even counting the literal army at his beck and call. He's already a perfect BBEG, the only problem is he's in a cartoon so he's gonna lose pathetically every Saturday morning at 10. Throw him in a game that isn't a cartoon and he basically is already great.

I'm not dense, your dumb quote just doesn't make any fucking sense no matter how pretty it sounds.

Whatever you do, stay as far from the phrase "genre savvy" as reasonably possible.
That doesn't mean your villain has to be completely devoid of self-awareness, but using "practical" tactics such as shooting the hero while he transforms is not an improvement.

Since I'm going to be running a Saturday Mourning game soon, it seems like I should be the one asking the question.

The way I see it, go with whatever fits the mood of the campaign. If the big villain doesn't really 'mesh' with the rest of the game, it comes off as a little jarring.

>The look on my Shadowrun groups face when the breach the vault and run head long into Cobra Cimmander, Destro, Baroness, and Storm Shadow.
>I didn't name the characters, but half way through describing Destro the guy playing the hacker shouts "Oh you son of a bitch."

An evil parody of Dobby the house elf would be interesting to observe.