How well do you succeed in making your antagonists come off as "evil?"

How well do you succeed in making your antagonists come off as "evil?"

I write it in the alignment section of their character sheet.

Appallingly, I can never get the balance right between "Bruhahahaha" and "Misguided methods".

So either end up with a Saturday Morning Cartoon Villian or a Not-Tau.

How well do your attempts go?

I feel i've had a 100% success rate. It's really not that hard.

All you really need is:

A) Irrational hatred

or

B) They are an asshole with little value for life.

I don't try to. Good and evil don't exist.

Typically by having him do SOMETHING to dick over either the party or the people they care about.
Flattening the city where they've got a home base, putting their loved ones in jeopardy, threatening to kidnap/murder that one noble who backs them up in the court of public opinion, that sorta thing.

Tekkadan did nothing wrong.

They caused a drought so that the locals would be forced to use forbidden magic, giving them an excuse to roundup and enslave them as criminals, to use as slave labor.

IBO was a mess.

My PCs ended up terrified of the last villain they faced even after they killed him in one hit.

He was a genius sent mad by his research who had, simply put, discovered he could use memes and subliminal messaging to influence the realms of heaven and hell.

He had worked out gods were empowered by faith, and set about using coded broadcasts and numbers stations to brainwash people, subtly rewriting religion and myth to pursue his own ends - a society where he was able to influence God and thus affect creation and call down divine intervention at will.

The only problem was long term exposure to his broadcasts caused brain damage and eventual braindeath. He had long gone mad from sustained exposure by the time he realised this.

The PCs had found one of his brainwashing facilities before it was finished, realised something was very wrong but didn't know what. So when they confronted him they let him talk.

He revealed a party member was his first "experiment", a demon summoned in the image of a fantasy show character via his broadcasts. At this point the party shot him dead. He died.

They then found his broadcast centre, and catatonic test subjects. And burned every document there immediately. He needed not only to die, but no trace of his work to survive.

His only power in a superhero game being such iron faith in his superiority everyone around him lost any superpowers they had also terrified them.

This

My last villain was when I did a Vampire the Masquerade campaign and despite him being a Tzimisce he still ended up being nicer to the coterie than the Camarilla.
I just wanted affably evil but the way I had his minions worshipping him and how nice he was kind of had the party considering switching sides.
Doesn't help that he didn't like abusing his ghouls, but my coterie took that to mean he was doing it out of empathy but I just wanted to portray a pragmatic, affably evil, charismatic villain. He was nice to his szlachta because he knows they're more likely to get the job done if they think good jobs are rewarded and won't lie about their failures if they know lying is punished more than actual failures.
I guess I went overboard when I had one of his footmen they ran into surrender before the fight started because, "I'm not a war ghoul, I deliver blood packs! Plus I'm like one ghoul and there's three of you, I'm sure master will forgive my surrender." and the fact that one of the things they learned before meeting him was he killed the previous arch-bishop for hurting one of his ghouls but it was supposed to be less of a "don't hurt my friends" revenge and more of a "don't touch my stuff" revenge.
Anyway, end result is he ended up as the nicest villain in any game of Vampire any of us had.

I apologize in advance for not being able to properly articulate this.

To fix your issue, stop viewing evil as it's own thing. It's either the opposition to the forces of good, or the total absence of good in a person.

Example: one of my villains isn't evil for its own sake, he just enjoys murder and rape, and hates things that get in his way.

This may not initially give you the BBEG you're looking for, but it will start you on the path of writing deeper characters.

TL;DR bad guys shouldn't be bad for the sake of being bad.

And this antagonist is from what show?

The best BBEG was my character who the DM took over after his fall from grace.

I know it's cliched but, starting off as the naive fresh-faced young hero who wants to do right, and through the course of the journey his views of the world came into conflict with the reality of everything.

He morphed into a more radical Frank Castle.
I enjoyed it, and even toppling him when the time came for it.

TL:DR the best villain is the one that you realize you're one step from becoming.

Sadly it's the protagonist from Gundam: Iron Blooded Orphans. He's an unlikable autistic edgelord from a series known for it's moralfag protagonists. IBO itself is a trainwreck of conflicting narratives and styles that drops multiple promising hooks.

My players usually end up evil. I need a good guy just to give them an antagonist.

I believe I've been quite successful, however, in making them unlikable. And ultimately, my players will be much more motivated to take down an insufferable jerk than they would be to take down an actual evil overlord.

Mmm, pity. I was interested in Gundam - have you seen any worth recommending, or is it all the philosophizing just edge?

w-w-whoa........

Depends on what you like, really. There's enough gundam series to appeal to anyone. My personal favorite is 0079 08th MS Team (0080 War in the Pocket is good as well) It's mostly just grunt pilots doing grunt stuff.

Don't forget the painfully obvious shadow of death moments.
>fat logistics dude starts talking about his sisters back home on Mars
Welp, guess he's screwed.
>10 minutes later
Yup.

This happens with like five different characters, and each is painfully obvious.

I came into this thread to tell you to watch the original UC shows and form your own opinion.

You say this like the backpedaling in S1 didn't happen. Also, let's not forget the bizarre morality going on in IBO when we start talking about evil.

Like said, I personally think War in the Pocket and 08th MS Team are the best. I thought the new-ish Thunderbolt series was interesting, too.