Do you prefer your villains to be sympathetic but unsaveable or just outright evil?

Both are good.
I started re-watching JoJo recently and I remembered one of the reasons why its great- the moral ambiguity. Dio is ultimate evil and JoJo (certainly the first) is a paragon of virtue.

Grey morality can be interesting but there's something refreshing about such a straight forward good against evil struggle.

Or rather, lack of moral ambiguity.
Fucked that post up.

Both of these crazy bitches are recurring villains of ours, but the most interesting is the one on the right, Aynfean.

Initially a friend, an elder sister of an NPC attached to our group, it became increasingly clear that she was working against us, manipulating and playing with us, both for her own amusement and to advance her agenda of causing a large scale, destructive war between our world and another one.

We learned from her sister that she's a true sadist and sociopath, completely willing to kill, exploit any vulnerability and do anything to get what she wants. We couldn't trust a word she said about anything because she would always be using us to some degree. Her own sister was terrified of her.

And then we learned more about her past, how she was once a friend and teammate to a few older NPC's we know. How she was always a sadist but managed to keep a lid on it, how she coped with those feelings by making strong connections with her friends... Even falling in love with a diplomat. One hailing from the other world we teetered on the brink of war with.

They were engaged to be married when they were attacked by forces from the other world, trying to halt the peace process. She and her friends survived. Her fiance didn't. And something broke inside her.

She abandoned her friends, ruining one of their careers in passing, and focused all her power on making the other world pay. They'd killed one of their own to try and stop there being peace, so she would bring upon them a total, destructive war that would utterly obliterate every last trace of her culture.

The loss and pain she must of felt, how much it must have hurt her to keep doing such terrible things, puts it all in perspective... But it doesn't change that she's a terrorist and a murderer who could get billions of people killed if we don't stop her.

We hate her, and yet we empathise with her. We want to stop her, and we want to save her. It's a really cool and interesting situation.

GM here: And yet your PC keeps damnwell trusting her every time she's manipulating the toaster.

I like it most when they've completely lost sight of people and the human factor. No matter how lofty the goals, people are no longer people to them and just pieces to be moved around, to be subjugated, to be swayed, to be 'saved' from themselves, 'shown the correct path', etc. They've basically wrapped themselves up in their own heads so much that others simply cease to register and have simply become obstacles or prizes.

>that beret
uniform autism status: TRIGGERED

Oh?

Band's at an angle. Proper uniform wear is a level band, and you get the "tilt" by pulling the fabric to one side.

90% of the time, I tend to prefer just a straight-up evil character. No bells, no whistles, just a clearly defined evil guy who does evil things.

It's not that I can't appreciate a sympathetic villain, but I have such a high standard for story telling that I can't stand how people try to handle it. Most of the time, their "grey line" morality and philosophy is at a level you could have already solved in high school, another good portion of the time it's someone who is really stupid and self-interested in the short term, and the remaining time, it's just some dude loading a sob story off onto you when you could care less about his bitching.

At least with a generic Saturday Morning Cartoon Villain, you can more easily shut off your mind and just take it in.

Even worse is when the entire game is grey line philosophy, because what it invariably winds up becoming is an exercise in justifying EVERY action you take to the DM through the proxy of NPC conversations.

>Kill a guy
>NPC1: "Why did you feel the need to take a man's life? There is always a way to convince them to stand down, or at least remove them non-violently. Explain yourself."
>Don't kill a guy
>NPC2: "How could you let that man live? All of the evil he's committed, and all of the power he has, he's going to just be out on the streets again, committing more crimes and putting innocents in jeopardy. Your actions are far, far worse than if you had killed him! What say you to this?"

I guess I'd have to go with sympathetic but unsaveable.
Even characters that have previously proven themselves redeemable can go past a point of no return. I like to see a villain that's capable of doing the right thing.
youtube.com/watch?v=6lbh2oVGMRY

Depends on the game I'm playing.

>Episodic, mission-based with little to no over-arching plot besides the PCs fighting through things?
Outright Evil

>Long running campaign with a consistent plot with time to flesh out setting and characters?
Sympathetic but unsaveable

one of each, and i try to milk each one for all they've got

bonus points if they are all on the same team, constantly bickering and arguing, but still pulling together to fight the PCs

>3 good, 2 neutral characters, one evil character
>Evil character sets off swarm of bats at low levels
>no one has any area attack shit
>evil character moves AWAY from the party
>struggles to save herself while everyone else retreats
>realize we have splash weapons
>bear and sear the evil character with acid and alchemist fire
>heal her
>one of the others asks her why she sacrificed herself
>"I might eat people. I may be a coward and a murderer, and your priests may hate and fear me. I may torture and curse people. I might think you people are strange. But you're my tribe, and the tribe must survive, even at the cost of my own life."
>seriously consider joining the evil witch's coven

sympathetic is fine but the more villains in the setting/story that are sympathetic makes it lose its edge more and more.

sometimes you just need a complete monster.

Outsider looking in: her motivations are hyper-overreacting to her semi-tragic backstory. I wouldn't call it hitting the nail on the head, or even close to it, personally, but it is an attempt.

What's really the difference? They can be sympathetic in their backstories, but as they are outright evil and unsaveable. And all this really relies on the PCs ever learning about the villain in more depth than the cackling dark wizard on some tower.

I guess overall I'd prefer outright evil for the average hack and slash, because sympathy is hard to force - give the villain as tragic a backstory as you want, that doesn't necessarily mean I feel sorry for him. It can end up the equivalent of regaling the party of the loving wife and daughter left behind by the bandit you just killed, who had only turned to banditry because his family was starving...You can make me respect or fear a villain a lot more easily. without making it ever feel hammy.

The only time I think it's necessary to try and make the villain sympathetic and understandable is if you want to have him ever team up with the party - against a greater foe, or as a change of heart somewhere along the line.

Evil villain with sympathetic second in command.

I like both but for the latter I like for them to have a reason to do the things they do like pic related, not just because the writer needs a guy to fuck shit up who is inherently evil.

Depends on the kind of story, desu.

On an epic kind of scale, e.g. LotR, I appreciate the BBEG actually basically just channeling Satan, being the ultimate evil that must be defeated for the prosperity of the innocent yadda yadda.

But I also love stories about redemption and mercy, so I also really like villains that we can gain some personal attachment to and hope they "see the light" someday.

Seems like a good attempt.
Not perfect, though. I don't find her that symphetic to be honest.

Utterly evil BBEG with sympathetic henchmen

I just want an antagonist with a reasonable enough objective that the players may desire to stop.

Enough of this "villain" nonsense. That's an instant redflag for a campaign, same as describing someone as "evil." What is evil anyway? We have enough trouble defining good.

Both are excellent

if cobra commander isnt evil i dont know who is

user...are you saying that you consider villain and evil to be overused terms?

I hate to take the easy answer out, but it really depends on the setting and the story you are writing.

But giving your villain a pathos is still better writing by default.

"Villain" implies wrongdoing, as does "evil".
This requires us to define what wrongdoing consists of.

I do not care that a character does "wrong," until we have defined wrong. Instead of defining "wrong," we instead receive is a display of actions from the antagonist that are so irreconcilably immoral, that they become laughable. By appealing to common morality and attempting to turn the antagonist into a villain, we destroy the character. We turn him into a caricature.

I cannot take a caricature seriously. I take it as an insult. Per the GM's instructions, I have gone and created a character, written out five pages of backstory, answered a list of ten questions written by the GM, and my reward?
A caricature that I am told I must stop. Why must I stop him? Nothing in any of our character backgrounds gives us a reason to stop him. Oh, but the GM insists that he is "evil" and that he does "wrong" and will then narrate events to us that make the antagonist out to be "evil" and "wrong," except the act is blown. The caricature is incapable of doing wrong. He is not real, he does not exist. He does not even believably exist as a fantasy, because he is so poorly conceived.

Even now I am still referring to the caricature as the antagonist, but this is not so. Antagonist implies he is working against the protagonist's objective. But he is not. He is simply existing in the setting to cause trouble, because the GM has decided that we need to spend time building our character, but he is free ignore that essential task himself.

It's a joke really. Through his inattention the GM destroys his own game, because he insisted on flinging vague concepts of morality around, and mistaking moral cause for true motivation, of which he fails to provide any.

It's interesting you say that because Araki has actually stated he regretted making things so clear cut in Phantom Blood.

thanks wittgenstein, that was very enlightening. if you're such a fucking philosophical genius, how come you don't have any satisfactorily clever friends to play with?

maybe you should accept some human limitations (your DM's storytelling, or your social skills) and attempt to have a good time anyway.

>cant take pure evil seriously
I, AKU, SHAPESHIFTING MASTER OF DARKNESS AM THE GREATEST THREAT

Hey man, I know that I don't know anything. But that's no excuse for the people around me knowing less. I've got a standing belief that the GM should be competitive for the title of best-cultured, be it through reading, movies, or even comics if he really wants.
The core thing is that he should not present me with the type of non-cohesive narrative I saw in my undergrad screenwriting classes.
If we're going to be goofy and do dumb things, cool. Tell me at the start of the game, and use a better word than "evil" to describe why we should care about stopping the antagonist. Otherwise it's a redflag that the GM wants to run a silly game, but is taking himself and his session too seriously to actually pull it off.
AH, BUT AKU, I WIELD THE HAMMER OF INDUSTRY. HOW FARE YOUR MACHINATIONS WHEN THE WORKING CLASS REFUSE TO CARRY THEM OUT?

>her motivations are hyper-overreacting to her semi-tragic backstory

GM here. Oh god yes. The girl is not following 'Proportional response' at all and really should have seen a shrink rather than going straight back to her job in a spy agency but to provide a bit more context...

These two planets have been in a cold war (With border skirmishes) for generations, so him trying to bring peace between the two was a very big deal and he'd been through hell over the idea that the two nations, if they worked at it, could be friends rather than opponents.

Hyperion, his nation, had been close to genocided by the precursor to the PCs nation and had reformed itself into a very militaristic planet with a focus on nationalism and their own survival above all else. They generally avoid contact with other nations and have sealed themselves off from basically any outside communication.

It's not just 'These people killed him, so they must die' and more 'He was the one chance this nation had to change it's course to a better future and they shot it down'. She's also very mistaken about the idea that he was the one chance/that his own nation hated him.

The PCs have also found out that, in the end, his death was pointless as far as the actual people pulling the strings. They are a pro-democracy group that have been trying to get the people of the world to rise up against the current AI government and install a human government instead as they believe that humans should rule humans, not machines. He was just collateral damage in an attempt to focus anger at the government that ended up failing in the end.

She has not taken the fact that she did all that she did and wasn't even on the radar of the real villains well.

Depends entirely on the mood and story I want to do. I've done both and both are good when used properly.

Don't confuse "I can't connect with the boring-ass conflict" with "pure evil is always shit".

sometimes the puppy kicking, all-ham, super villain is the most fun

Lulu, sweet thing.

20 minutes.

If it's creatively and proportionally crafted then I don't care.
I do have a soft spot for good men doing horrific deeds in order to prevent, preferably delay, true evil, whether on a single instance or ongoing. Even better if it ultimately has no effect on its advance.
Though that would come back to the question of what is evil and what is good.

Yes.

If you do it right they can be outright evil AND sympathetic. More fun that way.

>they can be outright evil AND sympathetic
Give 6 examples.

...

>le psycho clown man
>"""highly intelligent""" bimbo doctor
>sympathetic

the lego versions definitely are

Full evil with a complex background that the PCs typically don't unveil.

Alright, I give up, explain.

Also known as the Fable III method.

In theory, sympathetic. In practice, outright evil.

Almost all 'sympathetic' villains fall flat on their face. Typically, they overreact to a tragic backstory, inciting a 'oh for fuck's sake, suck it up! You're not the only one who has issues you prissy little bitch!' or a run of the mill political zealot, resulting in 'see? This is why your aims are retarded.' Given about 90% of professional writers fuck this up, I wouldn't trust a GM with this.

A pure evil villain is almost always at least functional in the story, unlike a sympathetic one who can break the entire plot. Besides, in a TTRPG, it can be very satisfying taking these purely despicable villains down.

That being said, I thin people put too much focus on the villain motivation and not enough on their actions and especially personality. Bill Cipher from Gravity Falls for example had no real motive aside from generic shits and giggles, but he was entertaining as fuck since he did all this twisted and funny shit while having the absolute time of his life.

>brother decided to become a tyrant
>when he could just as easily buy all the property in the land and make bank
he was just dumb

Honestly, if you've ever known someone in an abusive relationship, Harley can get pretty sympathetic at times.

I preffer to play villains of both kinds.
But when it comes to dealing with the competiotion I preffer the first type.

>if you've ever known someone in an abusive relationship
Define abusive.
Or more accurately, what do you consider the threshold of an abusive relationship.

Pure evil and fabulous, fabulously evil.
Like Nagash, Nagash from Mike Lee's trilogy sends shivers down my spine. Or Dio.

Someone who is being hurt either actively or passively by someone who they genuinely care about.

Harley loves Joker, Joker loves having a loyal minion. Never red the comics, but from what I can remember from TV Harley wants to change the Joker into a good guy, even though she knows he's a baddie.

the anti spirals come to mind (sympathetic; want to do good Outright Evil; Murdering planets)
the joker and Harley like the other user posted (mental illness combined with genuine malice is a pretty sympathetic, but also evil, thing to me)
Griffith from Berserk is/was sympathetic for a bit there then he went hole hog and hit the event horizon
Rita from the original power rangers, sure she's a right venerable bitch, but i'm sympathetic to ones who aren't outright killed and are imprisoned, so i get the RAGE
Hisoka from HunterxHunter is a pretty evil guy, goes around killing innocents and what not, but i too have his blood knightliness so i am sympathetic to his desires (not the uhh... boys fighting makes me horny ones)
Daleks. Everything they've ever been has been HATE and they are outright evil. But they can't know anything else, and that makes me have the feels.

That being said, having sympathy for something is pretty individualistic, i like outright evil shits who are sympathetic to my sociopathic world view. So, a lot of villains qualify for me, just to different degrees.

this is going to go well.

lego jokers goal is to get batman to recognize him as his greatest nemesis, and is evil through and through, he even calls himself evil

but they do a very good job of getting the audience to empathize with him, you really feel bad for him when batman spurns him, and he really sounds like a hurt person

The even dumber thing is that he already owned all the property.

He had in fact transcended mere dumb.

Not only could Prince Dogfucker raise enough cash to somehow fight an evil tar monster but he also managed to renovate the kingdom, lower taxes, extend his protection to friendly nations, improve the quality of life of every citizen and still have enough left over to buy the snazziest clothes and live a life of sexual and alcoholic excess undreamed of by any monarch before or since.

The only thing he failed to do was kill Reaver despite the obnoxious little shit turning up to your castle in person not long after trying to kill you.

He-Man is the bad guy, he stole Skeletor's house.

>little boys don't make him horny
weirdo
>i like outright evil shits who are sympathetic to my sociopathic world view
Do you have two sides?
Would I think you're the nicest guy I've ever met?

>skeletor is an allegory to what happens when you treat homeless people like they're evil

>Would I think you're the nicest guy I've ever met?
That's common when talking to psychopaths, not sociopaths.

I prefer my villains to be just...gone. Maybe they're an otherwise normal human that is just a little bit off, or maybe they are clearly just not all there, but it should become clear at some point that they lost whatever last bit of humanity they had, if they ever had it to begin with. Genuine psychopath type stuff, blue and orange morality is the only thing driving them forward towards their goal.

...

Depends on the kind of game or the type of villain I'm going for I guess.
I don't have any "preference" beyond being entertaining, which sometimes means simplicity and sometimes does not.

>ruining funposting this early

Useful chart

Sympathetic but unsavable, definitely.

There's just something about a villain with goals that are sympathetic, even laudible, but whose methods cross the line several times over that makes them leagues more intimidating than the usual, mustache-twirling villain.

Your players/audience completely understand why the villain is doing what they are doing, and realize that this person will stop at nothing to achieve their goals.

At this point I'm really longing for some outright black and white evil, because I don't know if it's just coincidence in what media I consume but it seems like fucking everything these days is just anti-heros fighting symphatic villains in a morally grey world, and it's never written well. Grey morals are great and all, but if you paint a whole canvas grey, you haven't made engaging art, you've made an oversized paint swatch.

I remember reading somewhere that the west is obsessed with grey morality because abrahamic religions are very black and white, whereas the Japanese are more interested in black and white morality because budhist and shinto beliefs are less about good vs evil. Sadly I don't know anything more than surface level stuff about either religion so I can't say how accurate that is.

a good guys and bad guys narrative is often the most timeless and striking, resonating deep within the audience regardless of time and space.

its always nice to have good and bad on both sides, but a clear villain to oppose, and a clear hero (the players) is probably the most simplest way to get everyone engaged in the story

Friendly reminder that psychopaths are worse than sociopaths.

Both. Double points if we're both pretty much sympathetic monsters, and a lot of people don't agree on which one of us, if either, is the 'good guy' in the situation.

My preference, since I used it in my novel I'm trying to get published, is a conflict between Safe but Untrusting and Good but Self Serving

That is, the main antagonist is honestly doing his best to save the city. It's just that it's a FAR more likely explanation that MC is lying and needs to be killed than what's actually happening, forcing MC to escape into the under belly of the city and save it himself to try and clear his name.

youtube.com/watch?v=AeGTV6fvgaM

Is he a hero or a villain?

illidan literally dindu nuffin

Personally I like two types of villains:

1: A villain that is capable of great evil and great good. For examle a telepath that cures people from depression, addiction and other psychological disorders but at the same time murders a family-father and impersonates him to be loved by his fake family.

2: The roman people defined good and evil based on its use. If something worked it was good, if something didn't worked evil. In this category the need for the impossible is utterly evil for it is not practical.
A person who works for an impossible goal, like happiness for all, end of death and suffering is one of my favourite character types.

The presentation is the most important feature. Black Manta is nothing from above but I love this magnificent asshole.

I did an evil pacifist once, it was very interesting. he was a psion, and if Veeky Forums is interested, I might tell the tale of the extremist conflict-hating monster that I created.

Variety is the spice of life?

I can't think of any examples, but I guarantee there's a lot.

I really like villains who are sympathetic not because their motives make sense, but because they are so fundamentally broken that hey can't see the world for what it is. A good man so completely ruined by mental health issues or trauma as well as manipulated by those around him that he takes the actions we'd normally associate with someone who is outright evil.

They believe themselves to be in the right not because they're so full of themselves and their ideology, but because that's the only way the world can still make sense to them.

Batman:AS Clayface was one of my favorites. The best part about the irredeemable villains is that they can usually be traced back to a "pure evil" source, but might surpass them as a threat in the end.

user, Veeky Forums (and especially Veeky Forums) ALWAYS wants storytime

You can be a mind-raping evil bastard and still be a pacifist, assuming you don't kill anything and just force them to see it your way

This is the best.

To me this proves that context changes everything. Instead of an overreacting psychopath, she becomes just as manipulated as her pawns. I like this idea.

The average villain is there to make the heroes seem more heroic, either as a phenomenal challenge to be overcome, or a phenomenally corrupt and evil monster as a sort of anti-role model, their depravity putting the hero's righteousness into stark relief -- thereby making the readers also feel righteous by comparing themselves to the heroes they relate to and contrasting themselves with the villain the heroes fight.

The good villain is there to make the heroes seem less heroic. A good villain is one who brings out the wickedness within the heroes, and by extension, the reader, and not in a "lol ur just the same as meeeee" way. That's just trying to imitate a good villain in a very blunt, straightforward way.

I prefer force of nature villains.

I'm hopefully going live for at least sixty more years, preferably playing /tg for a majority of that time. I would like to play with both as long as the villain is well written.

Both deserve a place and time, and should be used in proper sequencing and moderation

Funny one of you said "mind-raping" there, because that's pretty much what this guy did. But let me establish this campaign first. Now, this was 3.5e D&D, as you could probably guess, and the party consisted as follows: A very angry dwarf barbarian (he was ALWAYS angry), a paladin (this fellow ends up hating the BBEG the most, for good reason), a ranger (least important to this story), and a psion (I think you see where I got the idea for this campaig, this fellow presenting me a psion). Now, I had the party start in a wagon, heading towards a small town. (I took this time to have them talk, and explain their going to this town. to eachother.) They enter the town, and find the central area quiet and empty. Now, the dwarf is the first to get out of the wagon, notices the fountain is standing in the central point of town square rather lonesome, and bellows at the top of his lungs. (Cont. later, I have biz to handle, be back in a few hours.)

>(Cont. later, I have biz to handle, be back in a few hours.)
FUCK
YOU

DON'T STOP THIS NOW