Is the BBEG in your game actually evil?

Sometimes standard is what works. Especially when I'm trying to innovate in other parts of the campaign.

By definition he has to be evil, but he's only big in a figurative sense.

Except the ones who are dead.

Define 'Evil'

Well he's a Danish Nazi who's using the concentration camps as soul harvesters to power his (demonic) super-weapons to win World War II, so yeah, he's pretty fucking evil.

...

No, he's rather morally neutral actually

He's just an arrogant, self-importance, pretentious, uncompassionate, little twat. Which in, the eyes of my players is much worse than being evil.

good and evil are sorted out by those who pay. there is no good or evil only money.

i believe that was the assassins guild of ankh morpork's concept

Standard is a breathe of fresh air honestly. I'm tired of every villain being a misunderstood good guy or having a moral motivation or what have you. Sometimes villains are just sadists whose evil tendencies are completely alien to anyone with a lick of morality.

He's the type that sincerely believes what he's doing is the best thing for everyone, but also happens to be a colossal dick about it.

those that are opposed to his plans consider him evil, and a horrible being, father of horrors that plagued the lands for a millennia, instigator of the worst war in recorded history, and is generally seen as the setting equivalent of the devil if it had one

to him, hes just a guy that wants to go home

Standard is good, so long as it's not trite. In other words, if their motivation is just "for the evulz" then it's trite and not good. But that can be part of their motivation, just not the main driving factor.

This is of course just me. Like you guys said, sometimes, standard fare is all we really need.

He is a source of power, a bargain bin outsider peddling wishes and willing to offer the PCs exactly what they need for seemingly arbitrary prices. But every time he is called he seems satisfied and he always knows more than he lets on. He is ever advancing some unseen plot, for anyone can call him in secret and only he can see how all the pieces move upon the grand board. But what could an ancient and forgotten god ever desire?

>That doesn't sound like good BBEG material, user. There must be more to this.

Just in case, but you get the reference... right?

>Xorvintal in Space
Yes. Very yes. Several of them. Not all of them, but most.

>Magic-is-petrol-and monsters-are-everywhere.
Yes, but it's the kind of evil where you're just fed up with the way civilization has been going for you. It's not cosmic evil or demonic evil incarnate, it's just mortal cynicism and self-preservation.

>Warcraft WOTLK for days when I didn't remember I was DMing.

Look there's cartoonish evil at work abound in that setting but none of it compares to the level of disregard for life and altruism that the PC's have managed. Then again, it's my "oh shit I'm DMing this week?" campaign so I can kinda understand that they might not give a damn either.

Think that's all the ones I'm running right now. lvl30 one wrapped up and legacy-item one got cancelled for lack of interest.

He's forgotten normal life. He can't remember at what point in his service he had stopped thinking what it would be like to have a wage, pay rent, get a girlfriend, or any of those things, but he had to start when the war was finally over. The cheers of success and fanfare of victory made him feel great, but when he was told to go home, he had nothing but confusion and worry. Responsibility always scared him, but free choice is his nightmare. His undoing would not be someone else's victory or failure, it would be entirely his own, and there's no squad to cover him, no medic to keep him alive, no strong bonds of camaraderie to help him connect with others. He knows nothing but war, so instead of abandon everything he's ever known, he makes one.

He started a civil war to make friends, keep himself fed, his hands busy, and his mind in order. Also because someone was a bit of a dick and people were already kind of rowdy but really he just needed an excuse to form an army.

I mean, the main motivation of the drow is to return to being the dominating force of the world, but that's got plenty of evil for the sake of evil entwined in it.

She's going to kill thousands of people to gain a spark of divinity and then challenge the goddess of Undeath for her throne.
She's bad news.

After I read the other user's continuation if it, it sounds really familiar, but I don't remember it

something something cake is lie

Are you truly evil if you're making a unified army to fight off the demonic hordes that will invade in two decades time? Sure he's an eons old Lich and the army he's raising is from the corpses of the inhabitants of the numerous cities he has and is sacking but its for the good of the world right?

im a fucking retard

It starts with Glad. Ends with Operating System.

Don't help him any further.

Lofwyr?

...

But you could have used necromancy to diplomatically unify the same people and had a living, less level-adjusted and more strong-willed army if you'd just told them there was a demonic horde on its way. You probably could have outsourced too; there's usually a Sequestered Circle or Tower of High Sorcery or Hackmasters' Guild to call on for that sort of thing.

The man himself? Not really, just incredibly misguided and bereft of morality.

The artifact whispering to his mind? Oh yes. Yes indeed.

I've been working on a plot where the villain is basically an ancient hero driven to madness, being manipulated by 4 lords of hell, trying to get him to spread their respective ideals (Corruption, Death, Fear and Pain respectively) and hope to manipulate him to kill the other 3.

The whole time, the hero still believes himself to be a hero, and talks about Justice and True Love conquering all. He isn't joker crazy,so much as out of touch with reality. When all the lords of hell are dead, he'll essentially go off the rails, with nobody to guide him, he loses himself even further and becomes far more dangerous and hard to predict.

So while incredibly destructive, and his death more or less necessary, I don't consider him evil, and his death would be more of a mercy killing.

Yes, quite. Though there are three.
The King of the Beaten, who damned the souls of his race for a chance at redemption.
A demon Prince who bound their souls to torment.
And the all reaching encompassing darkness that is the out realms, who wish to foothold deeper in the world, and burn it to cinders.

Cara bella, cara mia bella
Mia bambina, o Chell

You'd probably like Birthright

When the demons would be summoned in the free lands very large area of cooperative city states that resist the influence of neighboring kingdoms together to maintain autonomy you kinda don't want to listen to a figure who has been relatively passed down as a hated foe of life for millennia it does not help he was part of a legend that has been warped over the long years to state that the heroes of legend were his adversaries and not his former adventuring party Never piss off a young elven noble they will fuck over your plans long after your friends are dead, you are asleep, and a new impressionable generation has arisen

D&D, more unethical than evil. No more than some of the proper nobility, anyway.

Fallout... he sincerely believes he's doing the right thing, but also is definitely racist. He is also not smart enough to realize he's falling into the same fallacy as Caesar.

my current BBEG is the lich of an ancient sorceror. he tried to use magic and reach the plane of the gods, the gods were angry and punished him with an unquenchable hunger to learn everything in the universe, yet unable to remember anything he learned the day before. He's currently trying to learn every spell in the universe that can be used to kill. While he is fully aware of his actions he is unable to stop what he's doing.

Love the look of the art, and I live next to a comic store. I'll check it out.

Yep.

He doesn't act out of malice, really. It's mostly fear and pride. But fear, pride, and an utter disregard for the wellbeing of any other life on the planet make for a real asshole.

It isn't really sentient enough to be 'evil', but it does want the extinction of the planet so, you know, kind of a dick.

It's pretty great user. It's not exactly like what you described, but it's got a lot of similar elements.

If he didn't try explaining the whole demon invasion first then yes, yes he is evil

My BBEG spreads chaotic magic all over the world ranging from Alice in Wonderland Nonsense to unholy nightmares come true because he used to be a god that no one believed in.

He reasons that the only way for them to notice him is if he goes all out with his power and teaches them by force that he deserves reverence.

Pretty bad/10, imo

>Reputation is an obstacle.

When I suggested using necromancy for diplomacy I didn't mean play nice. Kill and animate the rulers as your keys to power; the living are better as soldiers, not allies or servants. It just sounded like you were killing the population at large for your efforts. One or two Demise Unseen castings and you'll be in business.

once had a campaign where there were 7 BBEGs each one being the personification of the 7 deadly sins.
party wipe from Sloth

Evil is subjective.

No it's fucking not. Objective morality is based on mutual respect.

>I can respect a cannibal eats people and that's his way of life
>Cannibal must respect I don't want to be eaten nor be a cannibal myself
>If no one wants to be eaten by the cannibal but otherwise respects his way of life, the cannibal might need to reconsider eating people.

Yea pretty much.
Started from nothing: a street urchin. Struggled and clawed his way to Godhood. Now is slowly destroying all others gods till he is the One True God.

Start from nothing stop for nothing

The way I run a game, there's always a choice of antagonists and the players' actions define who ends up being the BBEG.
But unless they go evil themselves, all the possible antagonists are evil. Except the ultimate, most powerful that only becomes a direct threat of they really screw up.

That BBEG is simply so chaotic that it transcends concepts of good or evil.

Technically, there are a few major foes the party's on the path to going up against, soooo...

>The Alberro Prince's Sister
Yes and no. Split personalities. Around her bro, she's sweet and innocent. Behind the scenes, she summons period demons into virgin maidens to stir up a race war between humans and not!beastfolk.

>Magical Hitler
Yes, undoubtedly. Seeks power for it's own sake, seduced a chick to teach him magic, then had her killed, and also murdered his way up the chain of command. Doesn't care that he's split the empire, just wants to rule.

>The Last Prince of the Elves
More bent on revenge, as he blames the humans(and his twin sister) for the destruction of his homeland. But going so far as trying to wipe the entire human race is a bit much.

>[Redacted, let's call him Stan]
Yeah. Came from an evil empire, killed a messianic figure and absorbed his essence, turned into a monster, and has been sealed away for a thousand years. Over the centuries he's been planning to wipe the world because he's gone off the deep end, thinks "they're" all mocking him.

>The one pulling all the strings
Maybe? Controlling humanity through religion is one thing, trying to kill the true gods to make it so only he can influence humanity is another. Being wholly responsible for 70% of the fucked shit going on in the world, including Stan being what he is, is yet another. Also, this guy's a MASSIVE dick.

>The former party member(that the players have no clue is planning to kill them)
Fairly evil, though she really just wants to kill the party members after a good, hard fight.

Maybe? Is an extra-dimensional being with an insatiable hunger for mortal flesh evil, or just hungry? The 4-5 minor bads trying to steer it towards galactic domination, though, they're definitely evil.

Yes, Its the unleashed experiment of creating forks of serial killers and psychopaths and combining them together in a "super brain" it has spherical head that has slots to each of the consciousnesses that it houses.

Current bbeg is currently skullface crossed with diavolo, so yeah pretty evil

Yes, because trying to use logic, reasoning, mercy and appeal to justice stopped working for him centuries ago to bring his wife back.

Nah. Morality is subjective and thinking otherwise is the path of cuckoldery.

Might makes right, sorry moralfags.

Yes. He's done what he did because he's petrified of dying. He cannot even entertain the concept of his own mortality; it would unstring him.
So to ensure he lives forever at any cost, he's done a whole bunch of super evil crap to innocent people who didn't deserve it.

Bullshit. If that were true there'd be no such thing as crimes.
Genocide? It's ok, we're strong enough that we were able to kill them all. Rape? Well, she couldn't stop me, so if I'm never caught, my strength has won the day and no wrong has been committed. Theft? Hey, he should've protected his stuff better if he didn't want someone strong like me to take it.
Murder would be the ultimate moral act in your nightmare world.

Yes. But a couple of his underlings are objectively good.

I have some fags in my group that rolled evil characters in what I told them was a good campaign. I shine a light on their evil shittiness every chance I get and try to polarize the party, not for a split but for some actual character development.

Too bad they all are too gay to roleplay in the roleplaying game they're playing.

>If that were true there'd be no such thing as crimes.

I mean, except for the part where the stronger party declares them to be crimes. Which is how it works.

If you were stronger than the government, yes, there would functionally be no such thing as a crime for you.

He's letting a crazier, albeit less dangerous BBEG do his thing so he can swoop in at the last minute, claim the glory, get rid of the heroes and then enact his own plan, which involves upsetting the political, economic and other, more esoteric balances in a region of space, just so he can get money from the neighboring sector. All in all, it's trillions of lives lost in the name of profit.

Yeah, I'd say he's evil.

Is the BBEG the most evil dude in the game, or is it just whoever's the main antagonist? Because if it's the main antagonist, then it's actually a group of totally 2-dimensional hero-types who try to beat the party repeatedly like some kind of Saturday morning cartoon.

I haven't decided yet, but I'm trying to think of things from his perspective.

He belonged to a species that mastered magic to such a degree that death due to old age was no longer a worry, but the flipside was that death due to war was a very real worry, because like humans, they made war on each other an awful lot. During their worst war, their civilization got wiped out because one of their number decided to end all war forever, and in doing so, merged their entire species into a collective consciousness super-being, which promptly fucked off to the Celestial Realm and never returned.

The badguy in question was a former arcanist and researcher whose crimes against nature were so vile that he was put into space-time prison, which meant that when the grand spell washed over his planet and ripped their souls from their bodies to merge into a single entity while reducing their bodies to their component atoms, he was chilling out in the Near Void.

After a few thousand years of immortal solitude, he learned how to project his consciousness not just outside of his body but also across the planes, and he discovers that his people destroyed themselves. However, he finds that their little science experiments (the moons of a gas giant terraformed to support life, where the game takes place) have grown into civilizations much like their own, albeit in a much earlier stage of development.

My two assumptions for this guy are that he
>1: Wants to break out of his time-space prison, and
>2: Wants to rule these silly little creatures

What were his crimes against nature

I was thinking typical mad scientist blatant disregard for ethics and sanctity of life type stuff. Creating horrible mutants whose mere existence is agony, live experimentation on members of his own species, enthusiastic use of torturous biological weapons, that sort of thing.

He's essentially an Oni Cenobite who wants to unleash the horror upon the party's parents, because those parents drove him to death by exposure by the horrors they inflicted upon him. He found enlightenment in a bad evil wicked place and he wants to turn the party into Oni like himself because he's got a really fucked up way of viewing thing.

He's Freddy Kreuger by way of Pinhead's voice and general attitude. He's a very shitty uncle to the party, but he just wants what is best for them.

Wants to be rich and powerful, has cronies that want to ride his coattails. Will step on anyone to get what he wants.

No.
The BBEG in my campaign has become a surrogate father for the players.
My BBEG truly believes that he is helping the PCs.
Unbeknownst to the players the BBEG is a genetic engineer from an enemy alien faction.
The players are all mind wiped clones who are unwitting agents of the aliens menace.
Despite this the BBEG regards the players as his adopted children; he truly cares for and loves them.
Ultimately the BBEG hopes that the players will betray their own kind in favor of helping the aliens. He truly believes that it would be in the players best interests.
That is unlikely that the PCs will turn traitor.

I can't wait for the final confrontation when the players discover the truth.

I hope that it destroys them.

Now that's a quality future plot twist if I've ever seen any

Sssorta? Lich who stole a chunk of the Heart of God, the only way to get true immortality imw, and is now trying to eradicate death as a thing. More 'criminal against reality' than evil.

Oblivion maybe?

He is absolutely evil, but he does it to fight off a greater evil.

Sortof an "ends justify the means" kindof guy, where the means was jumping off the slope of evil while laughing and flipping all the heroes the bird.

This was in no way required.

Raging God of Nature, barely coherent.

It's really more a campaign about relationships and stuff, much in the way that zombie campaigns are not about zombies.

One could argue that the king that is chugging a choking coat of ash onto the forest with his industrial metropolis and slowly poisoning it is the BBEG, but he's not evil, and doesn't even know there's a problem.

I'm not sure if the BBEG of my game is evil or not because the world has lots of stuff going on and there are plenty of potential antagonists. If the PCs really upset someone to the point that they have a nemesis on their hands, it's pretty likely that that person would be evil.

The most evil faction in my game has nowhere near the reach or capability of many more notable powers. There's plenty of room for conflict with personal tragic evil on the everyday scale in D&D without a final bad.

What's Oblivion got to do this with this? Wasn't the plot pretty straightforward? Dagon wants to come in and make ass to ass contact with the material plane, and that's about it. Where's the plot twist?

I think that it's fair to call any main antagonist with a PLAN THAT MUST BE STOPPED a BBEG, but it's also fair to call a personal nemesis who is willing to do bad things to hurt the party a BBEG.

If they're honestly good characters then I don't think the label fits. But why should it have to fit?

There is no such thing as crimes, they're a myth made by your mind.

BBEG's are the main opposing force to the PC party. At least, that's how I see it. So, in that way, they might not be evil at all, they just oppose whatever the PCs are doing.

Found mama's little boy. Having fun with your internet time? Don't waste your goodboy points on being an edgelord, you'll have more fun if you be honest and try to make friends!

you mean almost exactly fable 3

Oh, in that case the BBEG of my game is a medusa that used to be a queen, long ago. She hates her cursed form and longs for the admiration and companionship she had when she lived long ago as a human. Unlike most with her curse, she has not fallen to depravity or madness, but she is willing to kill innocent people to get her way, so yeah, she's evil.

She's also pretty much guaranteed for her quest to fail; at level 5 the party already used the temple that she has been looking for and planned to use to wish her curse away. That temple is now sealed away in an alternate timeline and was her last hope. The party wished for magic armor and wands and stuff that showed off how cool kobolds are.

Spooky

Not that Oblivion, the Tom Cruise movie. I thought at first that you said you said you hadn't seen that twist before, so I was mentioning Oblivion where He thinks he's an earth man gathering up the last of Earth's resources to leave Earth with a colony of humans after an alien attack ruined the Earth, but it turns out the scavenger aliens he protects against with drones are actually the remaining humans, and he's a clone created by an inter-dimensional AI sapping the Earth of its resources

Is he?

>End goal: Restructure the cosmos in a way that prevents the end of the universe that was woven into the plan of creation, so that he can truly live forever
>Invented the afterlife after stealing the power of Death's physical incarnation, gave it out to the gods for the small fee of getting to devour the souls of the faithless
>Also allowed necromancy to become widespread, and his rise to power was marked by a week of the living dead (unintentionally, but still)
>His methods have little care for the current contents of the world, would gladly kill everyone if it would make his job that much easier
>Also killed some of his siblings, mentors, and the like for personal gain

Yep, evil. His end goal would be good for everyone left, but that might not be many people.

She just wants to live forever.

Too bad it includes soul-harvesting murderhobos that grind for XP killing anything they dont like, until she re-absorbs them.

and thats how i explain player characters in setting

The concept of Xenomorph dragons is terrifying.

It's Rogue Trader. Everyone is.

Yes, both are.

But one at least means well and is trying to combat the other one. Said other one is an unthinking force of destruction that can't be reasoned with and wants to eat all existance.

Evil? Probably not. Greedy and power hungry? Definitely. He's not a total ass in that he knows he needs good guys and bad guys in the world to profit, but he's still in it for the money, the infamy, and the thrill.

Yes. No hidden explanations, misunderstandings or cringy histories. He's just evil and not interested in good at all.

Reminds me of Artorias

They want to see a return of the Giant Empires of old, and that includes the subjugation of all smaller, lesser races to serve Giants. BBEG 2 wants to see the surface world destroyed by a great leviathan to please their gods and for a insane and twisted sense of "justice" and to have free reign of the treasures hidden in the deep

He's a fuck up.

>lesser god tasked to observing the worlds in the universe until he gets older/wiser
>"screw that, i'll make my own world, with blackjack and whores"
>runs from the other gods with his lover, creates universe closed from outside
>at first everything goes well, he has his universe, his mortal servants, there's even lesser pantheon cropping up
>then mortals start doing mortal things, sometimes in his own name
>cannotdealwithit.gif
>"why is my world not perfect? What the fuck are you doing?"
>tries to stop it
>it doesn't stop
>cannot curb their free will or everything goes poof
>his lover has the brightest idea ever - if she destroys the keystone holding the world together, they can make a new one, hopefully with more compliant servants!
(one world shattering later)
>Everything is fucked, the mini-pantheon turns on two dumbasses
>massive fight ensues, everything is even more fucked, mini-pantheon is annihilated, but they manage to imprison the would-be worldbuilders in pocket universe
>1000 years later, god's lover pulls Rita Repulsa and tries to free the pocket universe into the main one (which will override the main universe, destroying everything there, including people's souls)
>All because one dumbass did an equivalent of taking your parents' car for a joyride.