How rounded, well-developed and relatable is your current BBEG?

How rounded, well-developed and relatable is your current BBEG?

It just wants to eat all your souls, especially those in distress or filled with negative emotions so it manipulates every single set piece to create as much chaos before the big dinner bell goes off.

Whats so wrong with that?

My BBEG is ammoral, sociopathic, and non-relatable by human standards. This is because he has non human psychology. The players kept trying to humanize him and it didn't work.

My current BBEG is the penis of an extradimensional deity. Completely unrelatable, but certainly well-developed.

I can relate to the extradimensional beings penis wanting to fuck out dimension.

We are a sexy, sexy dimension.

The party leader is playing a succubus who boasts about being able to fuck anything. I took that as a challenge.

As you read his journals you slowly see how more and more obbessed he became with the idea of exploring a place that seemingly bends time and space first out of curiosity, then out of a secret desire to change his fate, and then finally becoming a disciple to a thing he now feels greater then himself and wants his son to experience this new found faith as well.

Awkwardly, the players have decided that he isn't all that bad and maybe working for or with him isn't so awful. Never mind all the historical encounters reported with the guy. Or the million gold bounty plus noble title for killing or capturing him on his head. Or the fact that a naval headquarters was destroyed without obvious provocation just a few years ago, and it's filled with tormented and angry souls now. Which the players ran from like chickens.
Seriously, y'all are packing how many enchanted weapons and armors and potions and spells?

Not at all. My current BBEG is as one-dimensional as it gets.

He's a frail old man who thinks himself better than other people and holds grudges for the pettiest of reasons and is bored easily. Such motivated, his actions are exclusively defined by an odd sense of humour that's really just an excuse for me to throw my players into one hillarious situation after the next.

His background story amounts to a series of BBEG things he did in his youth before retiring, then being brought back from retirement by the players on accident.

Yet my players love him more than they ever did any of the better written BBEGs, so I don't worry too much about it.

I am the BBEG.

It's a child who doesn't want to die.

Very well-developed and rounded, if you know what I mean.

She's an ogress masquerading as a goddess for an orcish city-state hidden deep in the mountains. Despite racial differences she's considered very amiable by the party and half of them are secretly working for her (with neither being aware of the other) and the other half are following along and unwittingly doing her bidding. Of the two she interacts with, one views her as an agreeable business partner and ally despite her overt sexual advances while the other is reluctantly growing warmer to her in their love/rape relationship and is slowly understanding her motivations and aspirations through their intimate discussions and hate-sex. Inevitably she'll use the party to backstab itself and then enslave/kill the rest as she ascends into true godhood using the artifacts the party is gathering for her, although she hopes to spare the party member she's falling in love with to make him her concubine for eternity.

What does an ogress in your setting look like? I can't take ogres seriously after Shrek

He's never had to push out a kidney stone if that's what you're asking

Pretty much a 10' tall version of pic related most of the time, but that's just magic. Her real form is a hairier version of the cave trolls you'd see in the Lord of the Rings films.

...

Small time crook that accidentally kickstarted revolution and has risen on it into way more power and responsibility than he ever asked for. Mostly just tries to keep things together by any means necessary. Robin Hood meets Stalin.

>Her real form is a hairier version of the cave trolls you'd see in the Lord of the Rings films.
Sounds hotter than her illusory form. I want it.

>their love/rape relationship
what?

He managed to destroy a portion of her palace through PC shenanigans so the party abandoned him when she claimed she had a right to hold onto him for a while. She then spent the night forcing herself on him because he kept resisting (which only turned her on) and by the third day he managed to nearly escape after slipping past the guards. Due to a number of lucky rolls on the player's part he managed to run through the orc city in only a bathrobe and foiled all her attempts of capturing him as she flew after him throwing spells and shouting for the guards to stop him. He nearly made it out of canyon and scot-free before she lost her temper and transformed, landing in front of him and grabbing the PC before nearly killing him in a fit of rage. After that they started to get along after showing their shameful sides to one another and they began to grow more intimate.

Oh, I should mention that this is the party's barbarian. He thought of her as some opulent noble-type who used her wealth and magic to get what she wants but found out that she was actually the type who took what she wanted when push comes to shove, which he found admirable. I don't pretend to understand, I just roll with it.

My BBEG is an immortal whiny emo teenager.

He accidentally lucked into a unique and persistent form of immortality: when killed, he automatically and permanently takes over the mind of a random sentient being somewhere in the world. This process takes between five seconds and five hundred years.

As it happens, this is a fairly shitty way to live and after who knows how many years he's sick of it: every friend he makes dies and everything he's ever built crumbles into dust, so he's decided to kill himself.

By killing every sentient being in the world.

He's relatable (I hope) in that his situation can be sympathised with, but personality-wise he's fairly unlikable; he's a socially withdrawn and melodramatic wanker, prone to grandiose descriptions of his own suffering. Also, he wants to kill everyone.

And your players are...okay with all of this? Because it sounds like some Breeding Season shit

He's a real cocksucker ill tell you what

I don't have a bbeg.

After the last two campaigns with an ancient dragon concubine who ran around nude covered in gold piercings and demanding all the world's chocolate and an amputee Tony Stark vampiress with a huge M streak who enjoyed having sex with her clockwork arms and legs removed? This is tame. Our group rotates the GM hat and now that it's finally my turn I'm trying to keep the lewdness on the low side. Although I am also guilty of forest elves that look like pic related.

About as relatable as a green Dragon can be, I like to think.

As a Dragon, he's impossibly greedy, covetous of lovers, and has called all property that isn't currently owned by him "Pre-maturely stolen from me".

All that said, he legitimately loves his children (partly because he rules multiple nations through them) and has actually given up major gains in his long-term plans when PC's took a child hostage.

You certainly wear your fetish on your sleeve, sir.

He's a centuries old alien kept alive by nanotechnology/temporal displacement who wants to kill everything in a ploy for petty revenge

He's a terrible conversationalist

Standard-issue eldritch abomination locked in a contest of strategy against the greatest general of the age using the entire world as their board.

I mean, if he wins he'll conquer all of the known world, but hey, he brought the snacks!

Help, tg. How do I make an age-old black dragon 'rounded, well-developed and relatable'?

He's currently masquerading (as he's done for many fake lives) as a powerful lord-mayor. He's trying to resurrect his 'dead, yet dreaming' goddess. He was, essentially, her house cat.

That's mostly what I've got.

There are 3 main people who could be interpreted as villains, and depending on what your personal beliefs are, you may see one as more heroic than another. One would stereotypically be seen as the "good" one in a Robin Hood sense, but I also tried to make him the most heinous of the three. The one who could be seen as the most evil one of the three I tried to make the one with the least unjustified blood on his hands

We'll see how well this writing goes in practice

Well if you're trying to make him her house cat (and you're willing to delve into the ridiculous a little bit) make him have very cutesy cat-like personality traits (e.g tsundere, muses about how no laps are as comfy as hers, likes having the back of his ears scratched)

Failing that make his goal something the players might not see as such a bad thing (make the goddess really likeable or have her stripped from the dragon as a result of injustice)

Just to be clear, is he the BBEG? Because if he is, then there should be a reason to prevent him from resurrecting his goddess. Maybe the ritual requires a lot of blood sacrifice, maybe the goddess is evil.

Another option is having him be something of a fake BBEG. I mean, everyone thinks that the dragon's the bad guy right?

That'd be an interesting plot twist that could lead to a nice reveal for the real antagonist.

Demons

My current BBEG is a 3000 year old sith who believes that the Force is the most destructive thing in the galaxy and wishes to wipe it from the galaxy. Much like Kreia, he wishes to see the galaxy free from the force and it's destructive nature.

If I were to ever DM I'd kind of want to make a BBEG who, assuming the players went down the road that lead to this story, has the ability to see various calamities in the future and a single way to potentially stop each one but due to a combination of blind trust that the vision shows the only way and incompetence he almost always either creates a lesser disaster, seems responsible for the one he failed to stop, or he directly causes the disaster he tried to avert. Not sure how it could even be pulled off especially since I'd intend him to be the unknowing avatar of some god of either chaos, misfortune, or mischief and thus give him a randomly changing power set for each disaster including the ones he actually stops.

>Pre-maturely stolen from me
That's a really good line

...

A formerly omnipotent bitch and her revenge-bent lackey who gave into his villain genes.

He's a powerful sorcerer/emperor after the world was nearly destroyed by a magical war between other wizards. He tightly controls magic and magic-users, since in his eyes, they cause the apocalypse.

He was really my own PC I used in our previous campaign before I became the DM. They don't know it.

>villain genes
?

She's a monstrous spirit from another dimension so I wouldn't say she's relatable at all. Pretty kawaii though.

As far as I know he's a dragon, who doesn't understand how emotions work and is willing to manipulate two countries into a bloody war just to observe the concept of vengeance and eat souls of people filled with emotions he's currently interested in.
He might be also ascending or some shit from the sheer amount of souls devoured but I hope It was just crazy talk

bump

What?

He's a hundred-year old adaptive regenerator in a superhero universe. A WW1 veteran that became the captain of the allies special superpowered agents.

After being trapped inside a living desert for years upon years watching how his allies died he slowly started to wounder what the fuck they were even doing there in the first place. This led to him turning against authority, because why should he listen to anyone weaker then him?

Nowadays he roams around picking fights with the strongest heroes and villains he can find while people believe he's dead.

He's fun and massively dangerous.

Half-orc bastard with royal blood betrays his fathers kingdom due to his younger more incompetent half brother being picked to succeed there father. He now marshals an army of orcs, ogres, and some elves in order to exact revenge on the nobles who belittled him and take his birthright by force.

He could be Jewish

>Eldritch abomination beyon human comprehension that is stuck on the planet and just wants to produce perfect offspring, which it can achieve only by corrupting creatures with a soul through its blood and turning them into living incubators. They're littering the world with their atrocious spawn but no 'true heir' has yet been birthed.
I'm not sure it's relatable.

>two half-orc kids
So the king had severe green fever?

Wouldn't you?

A vampire elf monk, born with a rare defect that shortened his life span to that of a few hundred years. Out of desperation he became a vampire for a longer life, then roamed the world as an outcast.

Eventually ran into other vampire monks, learned how to sustain himself by consuming small amounts of other creatures Ki rather than blood. Came up with the philosophy that for all lives to escape the cycle of life and death and reach nirvana, the monks should consume all of a creatures Ki, taking the creatures soul. Once all souls are within one being, they meditate until they find enlightenment allowing all souls to reach nirvana at once.

Basically a Buddhist Vampire extremist.

Not really relatable but I at least hope the PC's think he's interesting and well rounded enough as a BBEG.

Legitimated bastard son of the most powerful Duke of the Kingdom, he was left for dead at the age of 11 after an assassination attempt from her notmother who just gave birth to an actual heir.
He was saved by one of my PC's father (a simple sergent serving another duke) who didn't know his identity and taught him how to wield a spear. At the age of 15 he disappeared when he heard his father was dead.
Reappeared at the age of 21, he apparently joined the ranks of a ridiculously powerful criminal organisation and quickly became the crimelords' second in command, and that's when the PCs met him.
He's currently taking control of the whole organisation as the crimelord is terribly sick.
He's not really the BBEG yet, but the fact is that my PCs work for the King and that Lambert (that's the son name) plans to kill the Duke (his 9 years old stepbrother) and use both the criminal organization and the Dukedom to overthrow the King and to plunge the entire country into a civil war that he will probably win considering how the Kingdom is already at war.

>BBEG who want to destroy the world
Shit

Developed? Yes. Relateable? Not entirely. I'm running a short campaign for players who have never played the system before so I went with a somewhat basic plotline. The BBEG is generic racist monster who has set up shop in another plane inside a non-euclidian facility which is being used to sift out any non-humans who enter. The players are working for a government organization that has blocked the gate to the plane and are sending in troops to eliminate him. The party met his younger brother who is badly injured and begged them to help his brother before slipping into a coma.

The kicker here is that the BBEG has completely legitimate reasons for his plots. He's part of a nation that's backed into a corner while 90% of the population has sold out to other nations. Plotting to purge earth of all non-humans is not exactly a good thing to do, but watching your species lose their place as a major power before it even got to leave its own solar system is a pretty good reason for anger.

>The kicker here is that the BBEG has completely legitimate reasons for his plots. He's part of a nation that's backed into a corner while 90% of the population has sold out to other nations. Plotting to purge earth of all non-humans is not exactly a good thing to do, but watching your species lose their place as a major power before it even got to leave its own solar system is a pretty good reason for anger.
Gee, I wonder who you voted for

You have BBEGs?

Didn't vote.

The guy in the OP, his arc in season 2 revolved around having a kidney stone

>his arc in season 2 revolved around having a kidney stone
This is the funniest out-of-context sentence I've read in a while