Villains

The question was about villains. Obviously you need an antagonistic force. Don't be retarded.

You just need some goal the party wants to reach. Whether there is an actively antagonistic force or just natural hardships is rather secondary, although with most goals there will be some kind of antagonistic force. But if you, say, want to RP crossing an ocean, would you consider weather an antagonistic force?

>But if you, say, want to RP crossing an ocean, would you consider weather an antagonistic force?
No, I'd consider an angry sea god an antagonistic force.

bad example. the antagonist is a giant fish.

I could run something like that, I guess.
Timezone?

Not at all. Person versus person is only one form of conflict. Person versus environment, self, and society are also valid choices for games.

Well
>remove villain
>remove reason monsters have to be an antagonistic force in the first place
>monsters are still bad, but they have no reason to be organized
>players are fighting a disorganized mess
>there is no end goal, just fighting endless hoards of disoriented, confused orcs that don't develop in tactics or in any way because they don't have a higher power controlling them

You CAN run endless sidequests with no real end-goal, but a villain is the best way to represent the core running intention of the big bad force and gives a solid easy end-game goal of 'kill the villain to make everything better'. And, often, it's plausible too when you think about dictatorships. I mean, you can argue a dictatorship might be run by several 'villains', but they're still villains imposing their will.

Of course, the big bad force might scatter without leadership and wreck havoc but it won't be furthering the destruction of the world so much. Killing the villains thus is still a nice, understandable goal.

Also, putting a lot of the big bad force to one particular villain allows better characterisation. A single powerful entity's character, wants, hopes and dreams matter more than some goblin, even if you can make a bit of a sob story out of a goblin.

Yes. I mean, from a narrative perspective. Most exploration books or things that narrate the deeds of man who braved the wilderness of Africa or South America, the oceans, the Arctic etc...Will at some point star attributing some human emotions or elements to the weather, or the jungle, or the waves, without really meaning it, but as a narrative tool. The heroes become heroes as they brave against the -cruel- see, or the -uncaring- void, or the -brutal savagery- of the jungle. They build this passive, natural things as antagonists. They turn mere obstacles into a coherent antagonistic force that must be overpowered for victory/success to be achieved.

>Villains
An essential part of any feudal economy.

>dungeon crawl
The dungeon is the antagonist.

Man vs. Man(D&D, most games involving fighting)
Man vs. Self(Everyone is John)
Man vs. Environment(Survival RPGs)
Man vs. Society(Shadowrun)
Man vs. Technology(Paranoia)

Villains aren't necessary. Conflict is.

>person vs. nature
>figure out why all these orcs keep appearing and how to stop them for good

>person versus society
>assemble society to fight off the orcish scourge forever

>person versus self
>how do you keep fighting a war you can never win? Can you keep pushing back the tide?

Waiting for godot.

Yes, you can make a story like that.

It's not necessary to have a villain for a good story, but it's not as easy and it tends to get too philosophical for some faggots to deal with.

Villain is easier, tried true and tested and can still work fine.

Heck, I guess you could say 'anything works if the writer is good enough'.

The moment someone asks "Yes, but -why- are we in this dungeon?" unless your party is motivated purely by wealth you need a villain.

The thrill of discovery, a desire for fame, it holds a powerful artifact needed to resolve some external non-villain problem, it was once a passage through a mountain and they're going to be late for something of they go around, they took refuge here during a storm and there was a mudslide so they can't get back out... C'mon, man, it's not that hard to find a reason.

They're not. Villains are just one flavor of threat, though they're a good one. What is necessary is some sort of adversity to overcome or otherwise deal with. It can be a monster, winning your love interest, a magical curse that directly involves nothing sentient, dealing with the environment, the hostility of another country, or whatever else.

But villains are good for summing everything up about a threat into a neat little package. An enemy army, for example, is a large and vague sort of problem. A particular division and a few key commanders can have a stronger sense of their habits, personalities, ambitions, and so on. Better yet, they speak to the more level that the protagonists can address and make a difference on - assassinating a key figure can make a big impact on local conflicts even if it only marginally shifts the entire war.

Also you pretty much need villains for any story that involves politics. Anyone acting against your interests is automatically a villain. Maybe not evil, but still, opposed.

>Also you pretty much need villains for any story that involves politics. Anyone acting against your interests is automatically a villain. Maybe not evil, but still, opposed.
Not necessarily. You're assuming a single organized opposition. You might just be dealing with a bunch of different interests that have to be unified.

Someone asked this question to Marvel comics and we got Civil War. Never a good idea to pit heroes against heroes. Unless the normal narrative ensures there are no heroes.

They're not necessary, but I'll say they're extremely desirable. After all you need conflict, and what's better than man vs man conflict? Maybe it's a matter of taste, but fighting someone who has a personality and his own objectives is the best kind of conflict for me, the one that really shapes our history and our day to day lifes. Man-to-man interaction, including conflict.

It's nice to also have another "antagonist" without personality, a big force that can't be considered a villain properly (nature, society, the plague or even moby-dick) but in my opinion it has too much limitations to work alone. If I do introduce this kind of "antagonist", which I often do, it's always sharing screentime with an actual human antagonist that may or may not be a bigger threat but has the power to generate greater feelings with his interactions than a tornado.

Then you're probably dealing with a pile of villains instead of one. We call that a target rich environment.

Depends on what kind of story you're telling and what kind of players you have. Naturally a human antagonist makes the struggle the characters are going through a bit more easy to understand and concrete and tangible a lot of the time.

But there's all kinds of different conflict that can take the place of a central human antagonist.

Individual vs. Nature
Individual vs. Self
Individual vs. Machine
Individual vs. Disease
Individual vs. Society
Individual vs. Destiny
etc.

Having a whole party opens this up even further with the different characters having their different personal conflicts and of course conflicts against each other.

I think it really comes down to trying really encourage the players to make some interesting or complex characters, and then finding what parts of those characters you can build a story off of.

Hell, you don't even need conflict at all, though. But that gets into some types of story structure that Westerners might not understand or find appealing.

OP here. Thanks for all your suggestions. It's good to have other perspectives to consider.

I ask because I've always wanted to do a campaign based on discovery and the exploration of uncharted territory. The campaign I'm writing right now is all about that and is fairly optimistic and life-affirming in tone because of it. Any villain I write seems forced and contrived.

you'd be surprised.

the number of times I've gotten an elf to shoot a party member just by splitting the team up. or when the group starts bickering over treasure. Or "that guy" and his mimic almost get the party arrested as the customs agent sticks his hand into the pet mimic's mouth.

Never leave the house without 'em

Let your players make their own villains. Any NPC with goals that might conflict with the PC's has the potential to turn into a villain.

The open and surrealist nature of Waiting for Godot allows you really to interpret any of the characters in that play as the antagonistic force. Although yes, this is probably the closest you'll get to having an actual story without any antagonistic force

>>That's the problem with heroes, really. Their only purpose in life is to thwart others. They make no plans, develop no strategies. They react instead of act. Without villains, heroes would stagnate. Without heroes, villains would be running the world. Heroes have morals. Villains have work ethic.

What about Ulysses? The closest to an antagonist is in Cyclops and that's only one chapter.

>He missed the part where Poseidon is trying to fuck him over for the entire journey.
You don't have to ever have been onscreen to be the main villain.

Wrong Ulysses, mayt.

Oh, you're right.

Yes, but not the usual murder hobo, but more of an overly complicated "evil" plan and an atraction to evil lairs. Like the steal something silly to make something wonderful kind of villan. Dr Evil meets Doofinshmert

Non villan problem? Like what?

Some sort of plague, or a cataclysmic storm, or the sun is going out, or there's a meteor heading for the planet. Something that'd require a powerful artifact to overcome.

He went with the one that wasn't garbage for idiots who think a crude clay statue of a man masturbating on his own face qualifies as artistically clever.

Well, they are usually the source of conflict that the players usually wind up confronting in one way or another, though its not always necessary. Its just using a tangible villain the party can defeat is the most convenient.

Speaking of villains, I just got the Complete Book of Villains and the Book of Vile Darkness recently just to get the most out of my villains. Are any parts of either book that you guys would recommend/avoid implementing in a 5e Dnd game?

Villains are all well and good, but they're not integral. All one really needs is a bedrock for conflict, which stems from two groups disagreeing on a viewpoint or somesuch.

Two heroes battling it out can be just as viable as a hero and villain, or even two rival villains.

Bumpoi

Who's going to do your farming, if not the villeins?

Who's the antagonistic force in a Susan Calvin story? A computer error? In The Shadow Out of Time, are the Yithians really proper antagonists or is something else happening?

Mysteries kind of stand out as a genre where the audience's investment comes not so much from identifying with the protagonist and rooting for his success against the odds/a "force"/a bad dude as from directly wanting to know the answer to a riddle.

Failing to understand the distinction can easily end with a shit story. Moreover the mystery/curiosity thing stands up better to action taken within an RPG. Villains are prone to anticlimatic ends when what they do is subjected to the whims of the dice or the rules of the game. They're not a bad thing to have, but relying on them too heavily in a game is building your house on sand. Mysteries make it much easier to manipulate the pace, gravity, and interest of the situation without resorting to fudging or keeping the point of interest perpetually offscreen.

>A child wandered off a few hours ago. There's a natural cavern system nearby. You found a doll and some ominous marks in the dirt at its mouth.
>This cave holds a water weird at its base. There you might find the peace you seek.
>You fell into an underground lake. The ceiling of the main cavern is out of reach, but these side passages might take you to the surface. At the very least they're dry and groundwater is fucking cold.

just replace writer with "DM and PCs" and you'll be good

good luck having all of them good.