What are some instances where you think you have managed to create a truly engaging and intersting antagonist?

Well, yes, but no.
I'll probably get shit on for this, but I often imagine it like writing a plot to a book, or a game. While you're right, the priority is the players, if you don't make an interesting foe, then it kind of falls apart. It's like having Gordon Ramsey cook you dinner, then eating a McDonalds Ice Cream for desert. Sure, you still got desert, and yes, combined with Gordon Ramsey's meal, you probably feel great. But it would of been better if Gordon Ramsey had cooked you desert, over getting McDonalds.

I think the best comparison would be Dragon Age: Inquisition, if you don't mind me saying so. A lot of people went on about how much they enjoyed concepts like the open world, the dialogue, the companions, etc. Even the side quests. But when it came down to the BBEG, they just weren't impressed. I can find sources if need be, if this helps my argument at all.

Long story short, yes, the narrative your players experience is important, but so is the opposition and challenges they face. And if you're going to have a "BBEG", he better be the most interesting challenge you can cook up. There is no greater challenge the PCs will ever fight, so neglecting him is a shitty thing, too.

I don't create an antagonist in the sense that it's one person. I think the closest thing to that was a rival prince from another kingdom, who wanted the hand of the same princess one of the PCs did. So through their lives, the two battled it out in everything, whether it be fencing, who could horse-back ride fastest, etc. It never reached a climax, but looking back, it was probably one of the better rivals.

In order to have good interaction with the players, you need something to base it on. Goals, personality, abilities, etc.

I mean, what's the fucking alternative, Mr. Naysayer? Just pulling it out of your ass?

>if you don't make an interesting foe, then it kind of falls apart.
No? Just flat out no?

If you have an UNinteresting villain in your story sure, but many stories and campaigns don't even have a villain you can point to and say "He's the problem"
Yes, yes. There are big bad scaring NPCs you still need to fight something. Yes yes you can go arty and say Concepts or Events are the villains.

But HAVING to write a thinking human be the problem behind ever RPG session? That's pigeon holing yourself into one way of telling the story.

Dragon Age: Inquisition is garbage. I appreciate your analogy and see where you are coming from but I hate that garbage game.

Don't worry about the BBEG. Focus on telling an engaging adventure. If that adventure has a BBEG then they will arise naturally.

>.>

You base it on the players...

I'm feeling like talking about Don't Rest Your Head a bit more, so I'm going to repost with a bit more depth the Nightmare I unleashed.

DRYH is a rules very lite (like one side of one page lite) game with dark tones to it. Players are insomniacs who can see the Mad City the exists betweent the cracks of the real one. Fighting to stay awake lest the Nightmares eat them.

I wanted to give each player their own personal Nightmare. Not sure where I found pic related but I decided he'd do as a base

I named him Stiches. He is the essence of that time between when you last played with your favorite toy, and never played with it again. The crystallization of that moment when you stopped being a child. He's always accompanied by this: youtube.com/watch?v=0ewQiU3q5jM

He seeks to steal from you all the good times you remember from your childhood, and uses them to grow stronger, while leaving you the burned out husk. Since, you won't have any good memories of the first 10 or so years of your life, you'll be kind of like a hard core child abuse victim. he doesn't kill you outright, you end up killing yourself in despair. THere are three memories he cannot take from you, because you have forgotten them on your own. In the Mad City there are clues that will lead you to remember those memories. Then you need objects from the real world ties to those memories to actually kill him. He just stitches himself back together again if you do it with anything else. Of course, he is still an eternal monster. So if you "kill" him it just means he can't come after YOU anymore. He'll just find some other prey.

So you just pull it out of your ass, then.

Its scary how reasonably and well emotionally balanced he sounds.

You know how people always claim that they want morally ambiguous antagonists and stories where both sides are just shades of grey rather than black and white?

They're liars.

I tried that in a campaign, and my players were utterly unengaged by the overlord who wanted to conquer the world to end the endless petty bloodshed between various feuding lords and kings. Instead, they damn near fell in love with one of his generals, a sadistic power-hungry necromancer who was only serving said overlord until he figured out how to kill him. They bantered with him, debated their own morality with them, and had fun with his almost playful attempts to kill them off, while the first time they encountered the overlord directly they just mocked his ideals and shut down any attempt to engage.

He was originally meant to be an early game villain, but I ended up elevating his position to the overlord's top lieutenant, and eventually had him off the overlord after the players weakened him enough, and made him into the final boss of the campaign.

Good thread. Getting some good ideas and advice on making a villain here.

but he did nothing wrong

The last Shadowrun game I ran I introduced a rival runner team on the party's second mission. Originally they were supposed to be just a one off set of adversaries, something to complicate that run and nothing more. After the run the team put a lot of work into digging up info on them so I fleshed the characters out and they became the runners...not nemesis exactly, more like trusted enemy. Every couple of jobs they'd turn up working against the group and the two teams developed a Tit For Tat relationship. They would put our infiltrator in the hospital with a gut shot where it was clear they could have killed them, next time our decker would hit their technomancer with a black hammer and put them down for a week or two. They were rivals, but everyone was professional about it and had an understanding of how the game was played.

The high point of the rivalry was when the Face went down to a sports bar to watch an Urban Brawl match and ran into the other teams Infiltrator doing the same thing. There was a short strange dogs standoff moment, then the two of them sat down and talked whIle they watched the game. If anyone here has watched Seige of Jadotville, the scene where the Irish captain has a drink with the mercenary commander would be a good way to sum up that scene. We're enemies and working at cross purposes, but we can be civil about it.

Then the new guy went and fucked it all up.

Two jobs before I wrapped the game we picked up a new player who rolled a rigger and none of the existing team told this guy all the details of what was going on with their frenemies. Long story short the rigger killed one of theirs when he didn't have to and it wasn't a game any more. The next run was the last of the game because the other team showed up out for blood. The Face and Decker walked away from that one. No one else from our team got out.

Next game I run I'm using the survivor from the other team as an NPC.

I'm sure that your four or five players are an excellent sample size to make that claim.

maybe you are just bad at making characters outside the black/white-morality box?

This guy. I remember reading this story for the first time and thought he was so freaking cool despite being a literal asshole of epic proportions. I would love to deal with a guy like this in game.

I know this kind of villain.
except that we never had the means to capture the fucker in the end

Uh...I don't know about you but I try to get familiar with my player's characters before the game.

He also never gets angry, even when his body is getting turned into the doom bunny

Honestly it might get ripped apart, but if it does, good. I don't want to subject my players to shitty antagonists because I lack a critical eye on my writing.

BBEG of the campaign is trying to resurrect his wife, who was the goddess of story and song, hearth and home. While other gods made children by siphoning a bit of their power, she made one with a mortal. So they killed her, and removed her story from the world.

So BBEG, who at the time was a Bard, decided that he'd try and find a way to bring her back. But he couldn't do that if the gods could catch glimpses from him. So he removed his own story as best he could, went into hiding, and started learning all he could about resurrection and rebirth. Eventually his natural lifespan ended, and in order to keep going, turned himself into a Lich. His unspeakably evil act was to rip out the divine connection of a Paladin, his best friend, and take it for himself in a twisted manner not unlike how Ur-Priests get their magic. So Paladin friend turns into a form of undead, Bard puts him somewhere safe on a remote portion of a plane that's hard to navigate, and Bard-Lich now tries to gather what power he needs to resurrect his wife.

In order to resurrect his wife, he needs special maguffins. Gathering these things takes a lot of time, and they're super temporary, so he's needed to learn to time certain events so that he gets all the maguffins he needs all at once.

So here is where the players get involved.

The players are responding to critical events and disasters that he's put into motion. Stars are eaten, overgrown forests with animals possessing magic, faerie courts are disrupted and almost removed, etc. etc.. Players deal with these, and along the way, if I'm lucky, discover sorta similar things in the past. Stars shifting alignment, titanic creatures emerging from nowhere, faerie emissaries disappearing, etc. etc.. They get to look at the BBEG's past mistakes in different cultural cycles while dealing with his attempts in this cycle, and at some point discover him if they catch on or if he reveals himself to them.

So it can go a couple of ways, but either the PCs sympathize with the BBEG who proceeds to resurrect his wife, who then takes revenge on her kin. Or the PCs protect the natural cycle of the gods and battle with the BBEG, and then they can choose whether or not to question the gods further about the murder.

I feel like I'm doing okay in the beginning, but the last part it falls short and uninteresting.

This. Imo, betrayal really gets the players motivated. I've had players abandon whole quests because a minor re-occuring character they had a hate boner for showed up peripherally.

I'm going to have to remember to save this when I get home.