What kind of BBEG works for sci-fi?

A luddite if you want to be original without being TOO original.

>BBEG

Is there a dumber way to say "villain"?

what about an ancient alien resurrected by a cult? the alien is basically a dragon

Didn't accomplish much, if anything.

>villain
Ugh.

FUCK YOU AND FUCK YOUR MARKER

>dumb
Ugh.

>BBEG

Ugh.

AI, who is worshipped as a god

>AI
01010101 01100111 01101000 00101110

A sentient manifestation of the word "Ugh." that appears out of otherspace to attack the PCs whenever they mention its name.

Hive minds are pretty popular- you have the Zerg, the Flood, the Necromorphs, the Borg.

Fallen Paladins a la Darth Vader and Kylo Ren

Can always play a "to serve man" twist. Someone/thing shows up offering peace, prosperity, immortality, with either a terrible eventually cost, or to lull you into passivity.

Don't we all consistently see CEO's, AI's, and aliens as the BBEG's?

The PCs are the worst BBEGs a sci-fi game can ever have. Everyone else is either fodder or small time, compared to the wanton destruction a PC will unleash in a day-to-day game.
Yes, killing 100+ mooks do make you a horrible person, no matter you claim, justification or rationalization.

Tyranids and their necrotic flesh cults.

Let's try to approach it from an angle.

We take a class and increase the grimEDGE to eleven.

Paladin = Overlord
Mage= Undead Necromancer

Let's go with sci-fi.

A warrior with his power armor that suffered wound after repair after wound, so now it is unclear if he is more man or machine.

Sniper. Your usual dark eldar.

Pilot: this could be interesting as no obvious stuff comes to mind. A Psycho who accept suicide missions and routinely explodes hsi spaceship screaming "BANZAI", only to return after every death as his brain is backuped microseconds before each death?

What other classes do we have?

P.S.EGO from Guardians of the galaxy 2.. Nothing feels better then fighting an entire planet and winning.

>Ugh

Ugh

>?

Ugh

>>

Ugh.

Displaced powerful ayy dudes from a world different than ours
Actually aliens, probably not even organic or mechanical
Want to destroy the world and then rebuild it into their second home
They don't even know that they're on a different planet
They think that this is their planet but everything changed overnight for some reason, so they have to restore it

dumb madafaka

A cave man who found advanced tech; says ugh alot

Massive star is close to going supernova. Can you evacuate the systems effected in time. How do you deal with relocation and the power vacuum that follows powerful societies being uprooted.

That would be an interesting one. Every inhabited system within 30 light years of a star going supernova would need to be evacuated.

There's what, 150 stars just within 20 light years of earth? If there were multiple inhabited systems you'd have to be able to relocate billions of people per year just to keep up.

A cave man who doesn't age and has been watching humanity progress into space travel.

Misses everyone living in caves and plans on reverting everyone back to that stage.

>BBEG

No thanks.

So, Vandal Savage?

>BBEG

Ugh.

Why is "ugh" a thing?

This is the proper answer.

So, some guy used to pop into threads that used the term 'BBEG' as a shorthand in the OP specifically to express displeasure about those four letters in that singular order.

Now people are copying him. Its the trashmeme of the month.

...

>>BBEG
>Ugh.

Ugh.

BBEGs are lazy railroad terminals for shitty GMs.

You are not writing a novel. You are DMing a game.

You give your players Encounters and let them drive the story, not plan shit out and force them into playing parts in your dumb improv episodes.

BBEGs are shitty DMing.

No BBEG works for any games.

Thank you for explaining that.

Oh, it's you. The "BBEG Defender".

There's actually a copypasta prepared to dismiss your lies that you keep trying to spread in hopes of defending your favorite pet phrase.

>People have been complaining about "Big Bad Evil Guy" for years. The early complaints seemed to be mostly about the concept itself, with many people disagreeing that a plot needed a character as a central antagonist.

>Now, it seems that some of the complaints are about the language. "Big Bad Evil Guy" was coined to sound corny, and is more of an in-joke than a designation like "Central Antagonist." It's also grown to be somewhat vague, with some people using it as the central antagonist, others using it as the final antagonist, and still others using it as simply any antagonist, which can get confusing when trying to communicate about one of these specific ideas.

>As far as the shitstorm, I think that comes in part because it takes very little effort to say "BBEG sounds dumb", which is enough to trigger some people who use that phrase. These people then go to say things like "you need to respect this acronym, it's Veeky Forums's acronym, every true fa/tg/uy uses BBEG exclusively," and that gets even people who had no real interest in the matter upset, because it starts to sound like there's people who are actually actively trying to push BBEG.

>BBEG is a meme, and like most memes it doesn't have much of a shelf life. The old joke has faded, and now it seems like people are just finding it weird for people to be so fervent in holding onto it.

Hi BBEGanon! I was wondering when you were gonna show up to repost your copypasta.

>BBEGs are shit
So Red Hand of Doom is shit because Tiamat counts as a BBEG? A story isn't made worse for having an antagonist.

>Let players drive the story
Plenty of players like having somewhere to go; a direction to travel. Giving them options is good and railroading is bad, but leaving them with no narrative whatsoever will likely make them lethargic. Having an evil Orcus in the horizons is often very helpful, to both the GM and the players.

The evil lich trying to destroy the kingdom is a BBEG. How many players have joyfully struck one down?

Why do you keep trying to insist it's only one guy?

It really hurts your attempts to defend your favorite phrase when you need to rely on hoping it's only one person who's come to the conclusion that "Big Bad Evil Guy" sounds retarded.

Sure thing BBEGanon.

That's not "my" copypasta. It's the copypasta people post because it's basically a formula at this point. Some idiot makes another pointless "bbeg" thread, we complain, you try to defend it, and then we provide the copypasta to shut you up.

Samefagging doesn't help your point, BBEGanon, it just makes you look more retarded.

>"Big Bad Evil Guy" sounds retarded.

This. There's hardly any mystery as to why people don't like it.

I think that's why they use the acronym instead of just the full phrase.

Antagonists are necessary for anything that isn't slice of life. There's no story without struggle and having some outside force make that allows players to express themselves through their reaction to it and everything it puts them through. It's a tool, and a damn good one for what it does. Having it as a single individual is useful because it establishes a clear power structure, power structures we're familiar with because the neural circuit that establishes them in our brains is so old we share it with crustaceans. Even if there's a group, chances are good it will have a head of some sort, even if it's a council.

I don't give a fuck what people call the main antagonist, and I don't get why there are anons who are ass blasted about it. Put filters in your browser and change BBEG to villain instead of spewing your autism. You can't regulate other people's use of language and to do so is to be a totalitarian asshole.

That, and the people who use it tend to be morons. It's a pretty tell-tale sign that you're dealing with the worst kinds of grognards when they choose to use BBEG. That might even be why some people like to troll the BBEG-users so much, because they're practically guaranteed to be autistic manchildren.

I'm currently using a race of humanoids that worship a cybergod who is giving them DnD style priest abilities due to "worship" in the form of hyper advanced cybernetics (even for the setting). Think of it like a giant mashup of people like Irkens, UMSC Spartans/ Mjolnirs, Mass Effect N7 ops, Battletech, etc. The religious faction's tech is way higher than any of the above, and almost Warhammer tier. However, they can't generate their own power for their tech which is a plot point and also a reason why they serve the god as a zealous warring race of psychos for this asshole. I should mention that the race has been serving this god for thousands of years. It's so ingrained in their system, literally, that they don't rebel at all, and in the hundred years that one might, they die,

I love how both the guy(s) who like the term and the guy(s) who hate the term both accuse the other of being a single person in this thread.

"The BBEG Defender" and "BBEGanon" should obviously be your next campaign's BBEGs.

they can be two diametrically opposed people who are arguing over something fairly inconsequential to everyone else yet both insist that their own victory over the other would benefit society for the better.

>I don't give a fuck what people call the main antagonist,

Actions are louder than words.

>You can't regulate other people's use of language and to do so is to be a totalitarian asshole.

You can't regulate other people's reactions to your choices in language. To even try to do so is to be a hopeless idiot.

>To even try to do so is to be a hopeless idiot.

And yet... here we all are.

Rouge AI, horrible alien infections, ancient progenitor races that don't care for low-tech sentients, a race who seek to exterminate all other life, a race who seek to enslave all other life, multi-national government conspiracies to use one of the above, eldritch beings. A cosmic scale Boltzmann Brain that's decided to destroy itself and is in the process destroying whole star systems without noticing, or worse is doing that while trying to expand itself to understand the purpose of its existence. A

A really really big rock going really really fast.

>Ugh.

Bah.

Any kind of BBEG you would put in a fantasy setting.

All you have to do is add the sci-fi twist to it.

Bro, you reminded me of a thing.
>Rogue black hole
>Virtually undetectable object of massive mass travelling at unchecked speeds.
>They exist in real life.

AIs are some of the most fun bad guys to have in a campaign. They have ridiculous strengths and weird weaknesses.

>Rogue AI taken over the planet and operating off of the planet's power grid, and damn-near omniscient on account of having the processing power to simultaneously be aware of every event taking place in front of a camera in the world; take down some fusion plants to essentially downgrade its PSU and take away some of that edge

>PCs find an obscure data record on an ancient (or unregistered) ship. Unbeknownst to them, it contains an AI (in addition to whatever else it had on it). Once they plug it into anything, the AI slips into it, and is not immediately hostile--nor does it make its presence apparent. It learns about whatever it has access to and makes decisions based on that. At one point it will directly intervene in something and the party will shit its fucking pants. Whether it helped or hurt them might depend on what it saw.

There's so much shit you can do with them.

Also, any base/ship with an AI hooked into it gets switched to fucking nightmare mode.

>Blast doors slamming down as PCs walk under them, diving the party at best or crushing somebody at worst
>Life support systems turned off/atmosphere vented in areas the PCs are trying to navigate
>Lots of robots or turrets, all being piloted with the simultaneous full attention of the AI and reporting their encounters back in real time (more accurately they aren't "reporting" anything on account of each of them being an extension of the AI, but whatever)

AI friends are almost as scary as AI enemies, and the fact that they operate on such a different level compared to humans makes it easy for a GM to manufacture a reason to go from one to the other, or is at least sufficient enough to make the PCs wary of what exactly they plug it into. If a PC ever hooks one up to a space ship or, god forbid, a public network on a planet, the dynamic of the campaign is going to change drastically.

>30ly blast radius for a supernova
JJ Abrams is that you?

Kill yourself, you autistic faggot. Enough of this fucking bullshit already.

The more upset you get, the more people start to wonder why you love such a dumb phrase so much.

>autistic rage at four letters he doesn't like
>dude shut the fuck up already; it has been months
>continued autistic rage
>dude you are autistic
>lol u mad wow i win now
Kill yourself, you autistic faggot. Enough of this fucking bullshit already.

Whoa, I didn't mean to trigger you, you nutcase.
But you're really doing more harm than good by getting your panties twisted like this just because some people don't like a phrase.

God I hate you people.

Begone thot

>Tiny bacteria clinging to comets. "Die, colonizer imperialists!"

>You have to fight them using tiny remote controlled spaceships

Space locusts
Malevolent AI that pretends to be mindless until it's too late
The Qu from All Tomorrows
Space Australians that fill all networks with shitposting (even military voice channels)
Entropy Embodied

Nigger, you're the one getting mad and feeling the need to shitpost over an accepted shorthand phrase. If you weren't so autistic, you'd just hide the threads and move on.
But no, you get so upset that other people don't have a problem with it, you have to make a problem of yourself, just to express your autism over it.
Playing the "lol u mad" card doesn't work when we all know that you wouldn't be in this thread at all if you weren't unnecessarily mad about a phrase.

Something very uncommon or at least not so expectable in the specific scifi setting being used.

I think you'd stop being so angry if you realized it's not just one person who doesn't like your oet phrase.

I should have just said villian jesus christ.

And it's not just one person who wants ypu and your imaginary friends to eat shit

Planetary superorganisms ala Gaia

I just say Ugh because it's a meme at this point, and so I won't notice your rants from the ironic use.

Please don't, it's like the FAMAS of Veeky Forums at this point. Rest assured that people that have something to contribute will do it anyways, and the rest is just free bumps.

You'd probably be better off not getting so invested in defending a phrase. It can't be healthy.
What's next? Getting upset that people don't call cars Horseless Carts anymore?

You know, maybe it would be more interesting to make a list of themes rather than opponents. Because that's usually what sci-fi is about, rather than some specific individuals.
AI and NRBC threats are Icarus all over again
Military is militarism (duh)
CEOs and bounty hunters are deregulation and weakening of the State
And so on.

Nah mate, I didn't even knew what BBEG meant before I followed the trail of "Ugh"

And give in to such reckless faggotry? Let terrorists win?

You're kind of sad, in the most pathetic way.

>The sinister masked villain taunts the players through hacked TV feeds and computer viruses
>Constantly leaving bizarrely worded and bizarrely detailed threats on their smartphones, leaving behind mysterious clues for them to piece together, clearly the result of an otherworldly intelligence
>His manner of speech is stilted and seemingly rehearsed, as though he's unfamiliar with human speech and has had to memorize his lines phonetically
>His turns of phrase and unusual behavior have the players thinking he might be a robot, or even an alien, disguising himself as a human using a mask and a vocal distorter
>They catch up with him and tear his mask off
>It's just some guy with autism

Actually... if you do like a 2001 thing with this, that could really be something. He's not just a caveman, he's the first human, and he's not upset about people walking amongst the stars, he's upset about the spread of transhumanism because he personally was the original uplifted primate that sired humanity.

Actually, it doesn't even have to be a guy, it could be Adam or Eve, give this person some sort of biological powers plus untold centuries of experience...

>People being so new they don't realise BBEG used to specificly be about antagonists who's main drive was "i'm so gosh darn evil lol"
>People are so autistic think there is no such thing as "main antogonists" in "real" struggles since groups of humans never ever have had leaders

Hello newfriends!

>What kind of BBEG works for sci-fi?
Anything that works in any other story suitably attired in the correct sci-fi trimmings, same way that fantasy stories get by with otherwise technological based threats by just saying they run on magic. Robots replaced with golems and warforged, AIs replaced with intelligent magical artifacts.

You can pretty much make a threat out of anything, even a mysterious villain who only communicates in "UHG"s and his minions who merely simulate intelligent life by copypasting expressions. If the players aren't impressed show them this thread and I guarantee they'll want to kick ten kinds of shit out of these people.

You can have histories without antagonists. Getting rid of a curse is a good motivvation to move forward for example.

Honestly, this thread has just made me realize just how dumb "BBEG" really is.

Hello BBEGfag.

pls kys k thnx

automated self-replicating defense bots.

>says the man on a personal crusade against a specific word on Veeky Forums

All the effort you put into your personal crusade to defend the phrase just highlights that there might be something very wrong with the people who attach themselves to phrases like you have.

Reminds me enough of Buffy's use of Big Bad for the ultimate threat of the season pulling the strings of most of the minor threats she'd faced earlier. Or just the head of a group of lesser threats. Or just a fake out plot twist not-reall-the-ultimate-villain.

>says the man on a personal crusade against a specific word on Veeky Forums
Veeky Forums has created it's very own Barneyfag? A Veeky Forums BBEG, if you will. Incredible.

The problem with hive minds is the pressure ultimately to humanize them, which could be argued as defeating the purpose. By humanize I mean take away a lot of the mystery and their force of nature mentality and replace it with an overall commander who is pretty much human by any other means, made to make the hivemind relatable, give you its list of demands, tell you the sad tale of its people which is why it's murdering everyone etc.

The Zerg had this worst with Kerrigan, but really it was always there since the Overmind. Flood and the Gravemind. Necromorphs wind up with the Brethren Moon. Borg and their Queen. Locutus was more an ambassador and interesting because despite being more self-aware could no longer remember why he despised assimilation, so it's like he was still too far gone and could never really fulfill his purpose of easing the takeover of humanity. Which wasn't going to happen anyway.

Advanced tech that serves a purpose that does not exist so it freaks out.
Energy beings playing army men with the meatsacks is an option.
Really, there's a lot but it would depend on what kind of sci-fi it is. Is it hard sci-fi? Soft sci-fi? Science 'oh hey by the way magic and space elves and shit exist' fi? Those are kinda important to know, you know?

The Timekeeper from neverness by david zindell