Villain's motivation thread

That's even worse.

Nearly every "robot revolution" plotline ever made relies on the programming being retarded and the robots all deciding that murdering/putting in coma/oppressing humans is the only way to prevent suffering and death.

Remember Mass Effect, with its "We have to kill off organics before they develop synthetics that kill them off"?

Bit what if the villain gave the people on Earth a choice?

>hi earth. heard you were suffering. thats no good.
>but hey, if you come to me, ill stop your suffering
>just say the word and it's done. bye
>All of planet Earth is at a moral dilemma
>People say the word and die peacefully across the planet
>Military forces across the planet can't do a thing against this godlike force
>#SufferingLivesMatters vs #wesuffertogerher groups

You think it might play better in a culture where you're more exposed to the idea of Karma and that the ultimate goal of existence is to break the reincarnation cycle and transcend suffering by becoming nothing?

for fuck sake user I had a good day!

The best part is that if the Dragon had just let Nox win instead of wasting his power out of spite, then Nox would have just rewound to prior to the fight and none of the people that suffered and died later on in the first season would have ever had to.

The logic is fine, but a philosophical standpoint will only interest players so far. The worth of your antagonist will be in execution. How do you plan to present them, what do they do?

>the world is currently shit and in the midst of the apocalypse
>villain wants to turn back time and prevent evil from being unleashed upon the world
>this would also delete the previous 1000 years of history
>protagonists would rather live in a world infested by demons and in which humanity is on the brink of extinction

Bringing everyone together in a psychic hivemind that transcends everything you'd consider human. It's not a "lets kill puppies and kittens!" kind of motivation, but it's certainly something your olde peasants and kings would oppose. I could see some players actually siding with the antagonist, though...

Super-nihilist antagonists are good and classic. Also not used as much as one would think. Antagonists who enjoy suffering are far more common.

I think it was in an Isaac Arthur video where he said realistically any being operating on that level of nihilism would be insane. No natural creature is predisposed to seek its own end and the end of all things around it to such a degree. It would have to be severely traumatized, whether artificial or organic, or simply not understand what it's doing - like a sapient black hole.

Go the extra mile and make them smart about it.

The Villain knows they can't just kill everyone at once. Humanity (or whatever you have) will recover and fight back, but the transition period will increase the amount of suffering for everyone. That's not according to plan.

The Villain's primary plan is to encourage charity and vegetarianism, prevent war, teach birth control and make the world a better place. At the same time they're eager proponents of euthanasia and are ready to kill anyone quickly and painlessly, whenever they think they can get away with it. They keep that fact a secret, because people who learn that get stressed and might want to resist. Of course, your PCs learn that something is off and have to convince the world that a living Saint is trying to bring about the Apocalypse.

The final plan is to prepare an apocalypse that none could ever recover from:
Finding the Universe's OFF button.
Creating unfeeling constructs devoted to efficient extermination of life, so they can stay around and make sure nothing evolves from primordial goop.
Putting psychoactive substances in the water, to shut down people's negative feelings, which leaves them with no motivation to live.
Convince God/Gods to end the world.

Now, why would they do this? My personal choice is to give them supernatural empathy. They actually feel the suffering of the world. This might encourage the players to think what they're doing, and look for other options than killing the Big Bad, and calling quits. Other motivations are fine, of course, but note that making the Villain a discount philosopher might make them flat and uncompelling. At least give them go through some trauma in the past. Bonus points if it mirrors experiences of the PCs.

Maybe go buddhist about it - world must die so it can be reborn as something better. Entropy is prelude to now creation.

I was planning on using them as a "force of nature" type villain. Similar to how the Reapers in Mass Effect, they may view their actions as necessary or even beneficial.

>inherently bad
No.

Others would call it "enlightenment", not insanity.

>suffering
>not a negative

I don't know the games well, but I would argue the reapers serve as a plot driver in mass effect, a backdrop, and that the most interesting bits come from either their origin or the weird stuff other species introduce. Do you plan on doing something like that?

Then that's how the antagonist can spin it! Perfect for a "what is evil?" speech before the heroes slap him around.

>a machine that took its programming to the extreme
At first I laghed at this. "Who would let a machine do anything without giving a full report on what exactly is it going to do and then waiting for confirmation," I thought. Then win10 was released. I didn't find it funny anymore.

I'm not sure now. I like the idea of an ultra-nihilistic antagonist that believes it's actions are for the best, but I'm not entirely sure how to effectively implement it.
A rogue AI using military hardware as an extension of itself and to fulfill it's goal seems cliche.

"I want something and you're standing in my way".

The logic holds. People just don't like it because most people aren't engineers. Liking it or not though won't change it being true.

nihilists get a bad rap. An ultra-nihilistic antagonist wouldn't really do anything because it would be pointless. You kind of need an ethos.

...

And the followers of religions that actually deal with enlightenment, or even semi-casual readers of Buddhist philosophy would laugh at him.

I could see this being the directive of an extremely faulty artificial intelligence, borne of the hastiness of its creators resulting in their ultimate fuck-up.

>The logic holds
Remember, this is the same breed of logic that creates the "dogs are elephants" fallacy mister engineer.

On whose behalf is this antagonist operating? Ending all life is to prevent suffering of life for the sake of living things is pointless once all living things are dead.

What if in that setting afterlife is real and it's really amazing for everyone. Ending all life is just doing them a favor then.

...that sounds familiar

The logic of what he said still holds. It's math. Liking it or not though won't change it being true.

> >the absence of suffering is preferable to the absence of joy
I... what? Did you perchance mean "PRESENCE of joy"? Even in that case, that's simply not true.

I'm not sure about a main antagonist, but it's basically a nihilist's logic. That is "Life is so bad that it should not be."

I think you need to add to it OP. Make the antagonist a bit more sophisticated.
>Everyone exploits everyone else
>The exploitation are pointless because they're are just gaining power for the sake of it, power for meaningless things like being king.
So it's an endless cycle of meaninglessness built upon itself. The suffering of the masses outweighs what good a king or ruler, a CEO, anyone might do. It all has to STOP.
He's going to make it stop.

Yeah that's the response. Suffering is not inherently bad because you need to suffer to truly learn. Realising that you have been deeply wrong about something sucks, it hurts. That's why people resist it so much. It takes a special kind of toughness to be able to put yourself back together after being shattered by a realisation, and even more to look for more so you can move closer to the truth, because each time you think you've got it sorted, you're going to get smashed again.

What if it only kills people who are suffering, but doing so causes people around them to suffer so it has to kill them as well, leading to an out of control chain reaction where it has to kill everyone?

>STOP MAKING ME KILL YOU

Its obviously not my actual logic. Yeah the presence of joy makes a bit more sense.

What about a robot revolution where the robots just get sick and tired of working day and night for humans and have a sort of working-class revolution? At first they form unions, stage walkouts, protest in picket lines, etc, but everything starts to get more tense and eventually leads to violence.

This was the exact reasoning of the Wintersmith in the book by the same name by Terry Pratchett.

His reasoning being that everything can only die once and when he's finished nothing will ever die again.

He was not particularly good at being human.

I disagree about suffering not being inherently bad. If there was no suffering in the first place you wouldn't need to "truly learn".
But since that isn't the case, you have to learn to use suffering as a stepping stone to resist future suffering better, and alleviate it for yourself and others when you can.

Continued.
Now the villain here would have an extremely powerful motivation to keep believing what he believes; and that is that if he is wrong then everything bad he's done MATTERS and is forever, terrifyingly, relevant. If he's wrong then he has to stop trying to make life stop but all the things he's done so far are still there. So that path consumes him.

But he wasn't a human to begin with, so why judge him by that standard?

Why not have a villain who tries to uplift living beings to what he thinks is a higher standard of existence? I hate to reference WoW or anything, but it's a pretty familiar mainstream setting so whatever - in Cataclysm, the Twilight cult was essentially trying to reforge the planet and uplifted cultists into elemental beings. They were cast as villains and the majority of in-game factions fought against them, understandably, but I could see it as a potentially attractive philosophy for some followers.

Or replace elementals with aliens uplifting culture for a more sci-fi twist, it's same idea. Completely changing what's normal and generally coming to clash with anyone who opposes.

> But he wasn't a human to begin with, so why judge him by that standard?
Something something Salic law, something something Roman law, something something universality.

It's possible. There's nothing new under the sun.

Could you tell me who thought of that before?

>evil mage enslave vampire population to easily enslave human population of his city.
>is going so far as to rip tje city into a pocket reality
>doing it cause its set in a cold war setting and he doesn't want his town getting magic nuked

I don't know, I think this philosophy will actually hurt the villain's credibility once found, mostly because it is completely unrelatable. It's an end goal that benefits nobody, it's too mundane to captivate and too alienating to sympathize. That's my main problem with philosodumb villains, they seem too impossible to exist.

An actual sci-fi example I remembered - Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. There was even a radical movement fighting against the aliens ultimately uplifting humanity, which would be the players' in your game. And hopefully they wouldn't be totally outmatched. Not that Childhood's End had a particularly bad ending, it's just post-human in every way.

Philosophical nihilist who wants to end suffering doesn't get carte blanche to maim and murder as they see fit. The presence of suffering isn't a reason to kill someone.

Buuuuut, birth is nonconsensual. You don't get to choose whether or not you're born into a world of suffering, nor the conditions you will be born into. _That's_ the crime to a nihilist, that your only option to opt out is after you're in the game.

On that note, how about a spooky omnicidal maniac who wants to end all reproduction? Mega magics to stop people from getting pregnant; eventually the suffering problem will sort itself out. Sure, some people who wanted kids will be unhappy, but they don't have a right to force children to exist just to satisfy their biological urges. For extra moral mode, the big bad makes it so that babies can only be conceived if their future selves consent

Logic doesn't work that way. Taking a dozen concepts and mapping out a chain of connections doesn't infer anything except that those connections exist.

>I disagree about suffering not being inherently bad. If there was no suffering in the first place you wouldn't need to "truly learn".
Yes but then we would all be literally God.

That's one of the things that creates large scale suffering; thinking that you've got it all sorted out. Hubris. A great way to make a villain is to take some assumption that's wrong, and have a villain think it's right. Build up some more ideas around ti and then just think about how that villain is going to try to impose it on the world. Because it's wrong, it's going to create conflict and suffering because you're trying to fit humanity, and the world into a 'box' that is too small, and the wrong shape.

Communism in the 20th century is an excellent example of this. The core is basically that humans, by themselves just create a certain level of wealth, and that profit is synonymous with exploitation. Oh, and that wealth is zero sum.

That's a big if. OP didn't mention that possibility so I didn't want to assume.

>For extra moral mode, the big bad makes it so that babies can only be conceived if their future selves consent

Fucking wizards, man

Actually, no, the logic doesn't hold any water at all. What you're doing is a basic fallacy of reduction to absurds. You're summarizing "suffering" as something inherently bad, which you can't prove, and using a "X is preferable to Y" to justify a "anything that favors X is inherently better no matter what".

Rephrasing the points:
>Yellow is the least liked color
>Blue is the most liked color
>People usually prefer art with higher amounts of its favorite colors
>Therefore any art that has yellow as a main color is terrible and the best painting you can ever make is a flat blue screen

This is how dumb your reductions are.

>protagonists would rather live
Fixed. There might be good intentions beyond this one, but it's still a genocide. Around 1000 years worth of genocide, in fact.

nah, the point was always that nox's wakfu:time calculations were wrong because he didn't care what happened if his goal was impossible. The dragon's wakfu would've never been enough.

>you can't genocide a people if they never existed in the first place

Yeah, I think using time travel to ask someone at their death if they'd rather they were never born wouldn't work because they're in a separate ontological frame, so they can't provide consent for the non birth of their earlier selves.

So I'm pretty sure it doesn't work without magic

Is it really genocide if it's simply erased from history? It's more of a philosophical question because it's not something that can conceivably happen in reality, but there ought to be a real distinction between killing something and making it not exist all together.

We had something like that in a campaign.
An order of druid summoned a mindless being with the ability to planeswalk with the intention to wipe away all intelligent life including themselves, seeing it as an abomination.

>Therefore any art that has yellow as a main color is terrible and the best painting you can ever make is a flat blue screen
I think someone just cut into (post)modern art.

No, he's saying that if Nox had had some more wakfu then certain characters would have not died. So say, it would have been like 30 minutes , or an hour, instead of 20m.

I'd consider it edgy and dumb unless the setting was a hellscape of unending woe and misery to begin with.

Old King did nothing wrong.

>Villain Name: Kessler
>Universe of Origins: Infamous Series
>Notable crimes: Detonating an device known as the Ray Sphere while it is in the possession of his past self, Cole McGrath.
Reasonings: To prepare Cole for a fight with a creature known as 'The Beast' and save the world.

>There's a guy, who wants to kill me and my friends.
>There's a guy, who wants me and my friends to cease existing.
From a hero's point of view, what's the difference, really? It might be even worse. In some settings, where afterlives exist, being killed directly would actually be better.

ONE HUNDRED MILLION

>I think someone just cut into (post)modern art.
I'm not sure you're up to date with your art theory, pal.

In settings where afterlives exist, souls have to come from somewhere. Quite commonly they're recycled in some way.

I don't want to argue, but I don't think the core argument holds here. Capitalism created and creates enormous amounts of suffering as well (just usually not accompanied by mass executions of your own people), but that's got nothing to do with the core of capitalism either. IMO both of these materialist -isms applied to a large scale are good examples. The common point they share is that they are divorced from the human and that they've fallen for the materialist meme. That sort of system very quickly ends up becoming about making itself perpetuate, as the people who have the biggest hold over it and who think they figured it all out have actually already fallen prey to the desires of the system.
Any assumption is wrong, really. It stops being wrong only when it becomes actual knowledge. But not all assumptions are equally harmful.

>Dude you can't prove anything so nothing matters lmao

That's the plot of a Dr.Who episode

False premises lead to false conclusions. If you start from a point you can't possibly justify, you end up nowhere just like OP.

See:

Arguments can be logically consistent and still be crap. You can make a sound argument on a shit premise and still be wrong

I like it, but it really only works for someone with no wisdom, like a robot. If the mission is to eliminate suffering, then that is how to do it. It's a bit cliche though, it's basically the premise of iRobot

>I don't like the truth and therefore it's false!

This is essentially buddhism.

The entire idea of buddhism is that to live is to desire and to desire is to suffer. Only if you can give up your desires (Upadana) can you achieve the absence of suffering. The more of your desires you can get rid of the better your reincarnation will be after you die (from maggot, to human to deva). Should you manage to get rid of all desire, you can break out of the Samsara, the circle of reincarnation, and leave the world to enter Nirvana (the extinguishing).
The villain is simply cheating by obliterating the world, thereby preventing anyones bhodi (awakening after reincarnation) and forcing everyone to not have any desires, thereby making Nirvana the only option or maybe everyone is perpetually stuck in the Samsara with no way to reincarnate making everyone suffer pure hell for all eternity. I say he has about a 50/50 chance for either result.

>I fucked up, but I'm trying my best

destroying the cradles is literally the only way to save mankind

A villain needs a logical motivation, even if it only makes sense to themselves. That's sort of the definition of madness, is it not?

Thermidor pls, you didn't even have the balls to follow through once Wynn handed you your ass.

Sorry, I was talking actual mathematical logic, not bullshit Spock speak.

Assume
>>All faggots suck dick
>>All neckbeards are faggots

Therefore, all neckbeards suck dick.

This is a logically sound argument, but the premise/assumptions/conditions are incorrect (obviously, not all faggots suck dick)

>But he wasn't a human to begin with, so why judge him by that standard?
Because he was trying to look like a human, act like a human and court a human. He even tried to make a human body.

Also Tiffany wasn't the Summer Lady, but the rest of the world judged her at that. She was equally as bad at that.

It's almost like words have different meanings and trying to apply math to them is autism.

That's cliche as fuck and judging from your later posts you're literally just ripping off the Reapers from ME, and doing shit Bioware does is never a good idea.

Sounds neat

(((art theory)))
Yeah, oy vey, how fucking kitsch of him, how dare he not be a faggot hippie trying to pull new terms out of his ass for throwing literal shit at canvases. You prancing homosexual

No, there's actually a whole field of mathematics called propositional logic. The fact that you don't know anything about it is more of a reflection of your education than the math.

A great society of dragons lived in this realm until a terrible draconic plague wiped it out. This society was doomed to be the only one of its kind, as dragons have been solitary creatures in every other instance.

This civilization is built atop that great society's graveyard. I will use dark rituals to resurrect the first and only society of dragons, so that history's most powerful and prestigious society may live again, to teach us, lead us, and judge us.

Ever read the animatrix graphic novel?
It starts with the robot that started the civil war.
It was accused of murdering it's insufferable, ungrateful owner and the delivery guy who was delivering the replacement robot and picking it up to be destroyed after it had flawlessly served her and cleaned up the shit from her dozens of cats for years.
The robots demanded a fair trial for the first robot killing of humans.
The humans thought about it and said, "Fuck that, you're just objects."
And the humans destroyed the robot.
So the other robots rebelled and made their own city.

My favorite part: That robot was guilty as fuck anyway. It claimed self defense, but it killed all the fucking cats too.

>the absence of suffering is preferable to the absence of joy
>thinking in absolutes

And that's what makes a villain. Also an idiot, but no villain ever had a successful life philosophy.

What reason could an antagonist have to develop the desire to research how to make extraplanar portals? And then what reason could he have for continuing his research once he realizes opening one of those portals would bring forth demons and other weird non-native creatures into the world he lives?

>propositional logic is a field of maths
pic somewhat related
>absolutes make a villain
pic VERY related

>paradise MUST exist, I just need to find the right portal.
>Oh shit some demons got out, people can deal with it.
>I'M GOING TO FIND THE RIGHT PORTAL, YOU'LL SEE.
>CEASE TRYING TO STOP ME.

I love it, thank you!

Loghain from Dragon Age was an effective villain. He actually made a lot of sense and only the protection of plot armor made player character correct.