How do I successfully build up a BBEG Ugh dear fa/tg/uys?

Candle Jack, a villain from Freakazoid, a sort of spoof super hero cartoon by W.B.

Candlejack from Freakazoid

The most important thing to remember is that you want to have the villain do things the PLAYERS don't like. Plenty of people treat their characters like a pair of pants, and put their character motivations after their real motivations to play the game.

Dick with things the players value. The villain attacks the party's favorite vendor, or the woman who stitches them up after they get injured. Or simply have the villain interfere with the quest the party is on (steals the thing they were supposed to bring back, helps the person they were supposed to capture escape, ect.)

The goal is to get the players to go "Fuck that guy!" Then they'll spend in game resources to get revenge by fucking with his plans. Which means that the villain will have reason to invest more resources into fucking with the players. Which will cause the players to invest more in fucking with the villain.

When it comes to motivation for saving the world, heroism has nothing on vengeance.

Why don't you tell us a little bit about your Party OP. Let us help you fuck your party.

>Do you feel you need to make the villain scary for some reason?
Mostly to make the final encounter with them be more important. I don't care if they are pissing their pants just by looking at him, but I'd like for them to not treat him like Goon #00351
>Are your players having less fun because they aren't shaking in their boots and pissing them selves at the thought of fighting you BBEG?
They are the kind of people that always cheer you and never voice their complaints, so I really can't tell.

I'll actually try these next time. Thanks!

I really don't think that a villain's motives makes them necessarily effective, but I'll keep it in mind.

I am planning on running a Masquerade game this time, but my players are always the same.

Dude #1
>very opinionated on everything, IC and OoC
>always makes hot-headed character that jump into action
>roleplays them like cowards and overthinks every course of action
>most likely will make a Brujah and will play him like a Nosferatu

Dude #2
>huge weeb but controls it
>characters are pretty snowflake-y but don't do much until pressed to
>made a Malkavian with OCD that wants to cure thin-bloods

Dude #3
>actually hot headed individual
>most character he makes end up very successful if a bit overspecialized
>he is the kind to completely sit out a scene if he fails on one or two rolls
>made a Camarila Ventrue with some great hand-to-hand skill and a 3dot Coward Flaw

Chick
>kind of an airhead but not bad
>every character she makes is a variation of "can do one thing" and "is kind"
>probably the biggest headcount in total kills in the group
>made a Toreador with high Empathy but she'll play her more over the top than a Malkavian

>miss the joke
It's my fault I guess

Heh now that you point it out it's kind of funny, but I think the thing with him is you have to say the name out loud.

the joke is if you say his name he kidnaps you
people used to interrupt their post with a hyphen to make it seem like they got snatched away suddenly mid sentence, sometimes even midway through saying the name "candlejack"
canonically though that never happens, the characters from the cartoon were never interrupted, they always finished their sentences, so it's actually a good example of plebs not knowing what the fuck they are talking about

gotta say i'm glad to see that retarded meme die off of natural causes

First session of my game I had the players rescue the princess from orcs who were trying to sacrifice her at a lake. They kill the orcs, get her down, only to see a big hydra thing coming out of the water. Before they can run the Bad Guys show up and kill it easily, thus projecting the info: these dudes are stronger than you! They then tell the princess to go with them, and take credit for rescuing her. Players now hate the bad guys. The bad guys also told the players to go save the princess's guards, then they skedaddle. Players do so- that way they still got to do a bunch of stuff, fight some orcs, save the day a little and feel like heroes while still getting shit on a bit. They fucking hate these bad guys now and the guards were able to give them some info which helped too.

I ran this game for two groups at once (my sister and a few of her friends as a 'beta test' since I'd never dm'd before, and my main dnd group who were a few weeks behind the girls basically.) The girls were always very respectful of the bad guys' power and treated them like real threats. The guys acted like idiots like it was a fucking cartoon and openly mocked Vecna to the evil warlock who likes to kill heretics. That PC got fucking acid in his face. After that they were a bit more careful about dealing with the bad guys.

So basically throw acid in someone's face.

>BBEG

*cringe*

I used these two points in my game, but instead the villain outright nuked a friendly NPC in front of the party so they understood not to fuck with him, then later he showed up to steal an important treasure right out from under the party, who happen to be lead by a compulsive treasure hunter. So yeah both the characters and even to an extent the players are fearful of the villain but also want nothing more than his demise.

Who's the guy in the lower right?

This is a flawed image, simple motivations can be interesting, as can sympathetic. Even then, Ganon's lust for power is sympathetic when presented in say, Wind Waker. Sympathy doesn't mean they're right, however.

Oh him? That's candleja

Yeah, but the joke doesn't translate if you say cnadlejack and complete the post. There is not a clear way to indicate having been abducted without leav-

Ha, hey everyone, look at this cringing faggot! He's visibly affected by words! HA!

1. Have them be a credible threat
2. Have their lieutenants kick enough ass that the players should be legitimately worried about fighting them.
3. If they're really that BBE then they really shouldn't be defeated by mundane means. Have them be absolutely unstoppable aside from one weakness/method that the players are aware of.
4. Ramp up tension: have the bbeg become aware of the players and start sending trouble their way directly. Wreck their world, make everything difficult for them. Have regular mooks delicately bear an ornate, cursed arrow into a fight and pin one of the players with it. Have the BBEG's magic and minions and machinations harass them at every turn.
5. Resolve that shit as a battle of wills: in their final encounter and the ramp up to it, have the villain be aware of what their plan is, and do everything to stop them. The player's plan should prevent the BBEG from just outright killing or hard-stopping them, so his goal will be instead to do what he can to fuck up their plan. With this sort of a paradigm the BBEG is still powerful and not to be fucked with, but the players have found a way to contend with him on a more equal footing.

That's incredibly fucking stupid, don't do this OP. If you need to give the players an IC reason to go after the BBEG, you should keep the reasoning IC to avoid the players feeling that you're targeting them OoC.

Also, try not to establish that the BBEG is bad news by nuking their character's friends/family, it never works out for anyone involved.

*cringe*
Ugh.
Don't make him a player, make him the game.

Otherwise let the villain gain the trust of your players. Traitors, liars and manipulators are the most memorable and hated enemies.
- If you want a scary villain, making him a bit pathetic is surprisngly effective. Doctor Destiny is a good example. A serial killer with the mindset of a boy but the cunningness of a man.

>In my last two games the villains were completely mocked instead of feared and despite numerous displays of cruelty and savagery, the players just treated them like any other NPC once they met them after a titanic build-up.
>You got any tips?

Your villain came off as chuuni, that's why. I don't give a shit how much of a legitimate threat your villain is, if his personality makes him come off as obnoxious enough, I'm just going to start belittling him and making light of him.

One thing that I tell my players before each game is that I'll always fudge numbers for them in regular encounters to make sure they don't die to a random mook, but I won't pull any punches when it comes to any kind of "boss." Then, most importantly, I follow through. I make it a point that the players gain experience for finding out the best strategy for fighting the boss to encourage them to think about the fight.

Players want to min/max and they want to screw around chasing shit that you don't think is important. I can't change that, so instead I find out ways to reward them for it. Then I use the promise of rewarding them for doing what they already want to do as a tool to lead them down the paths that I want.

>I'll always fudge numbers for them
Stopped reading there.

Fair enough. It works for me, but I know it wouldn't work for everyone.

>One thing that I tell my players before each game is that there will be 0 tension unless the boss shows up
Fuck off back to /v/ with this shit.

Most of the time, I'm not trying to build tension. Most of the time the group is just having a fun adventure travelling from place to place and trying to figure out how to reach their next goal.

I like to play in games where tension is always building and it's a struggle that makes you feel great when you finally succeed, but I don't really like running that kind of game. I prefer running one where the players have plenty of time to relax so that the major moments stick out from the rest of the session and so that it's easier for me to BS a new route when my players screw around and go in a direction I wasn't expecting.

Don't try to make the party fear them

Make the party hate them

It's vastly more effective

The most important thing is to make the BBEG competent. The motivation doesn't really matter that much.

Motives are a small part of a villain's effectiveness. Characters are defined by their behaviour. They need to be have presence in the moment in which they appear. Whatever their motives are they should tie into the character's personality, the personality should supply a method of perusing that goal. That method should tie into the situations in which they interact with the party.
They should be able to be effected by the party and have a reason to effect the party in turn.
>Ask: in a normal job, who is my villain? Who have I worked with that is like this villain.

A good villain is not necessarily powerful or wise. They are dangerous in some way but that can be circumstantial. A good villain has some kind of drive and something to lose. The only two things that matter about this drive is: what it means to the villian and who it brings them into conflict to the party. The villain does not necessarily need to be able to articulate his drive, in some cases he might even think it's something different.
>No one needs your villain to monologue about what he's doing and why. That shit is dull. Everything worth while in game can be presented with action and behaviour. Your players don't have to get it right.
Telling anyone how to feel is bad way to make them feel. Don't aim to strike fear or guilt into your players. The best horror doesn't exist purely as horror, it has character and lore behind it. Give the thing a reason to be and a threatening way to be. Start with small details rooted in the character's aesthetic, psychology or nature, those tend to be effective.

When in doubt forget all the complicated stuff and just make a dude you think is badass and fun. Throw him at your party full force and roll with whatever happens. Loads of great characters get splattered, sometimes getting splattered is the part that makes a character fun.

With that said:
>The villain is not your DMPC, don't be a bitch.

Who's the dude in elder God tier?

Ozymandias from Watchmen. He started out as a hero, but came up with an "ends justify the means" plan to save the world from itself.

He was also successful for what it's worth.

Ozymandias from Watchmen

Why it's obviou-

If you want your players to fear the villain, you need to make him into something far more subtle than a baby eating monster. Make him fuck with them in ways that they can't just murderhobo him. I dunno, I'll have a quick crack at it.
>Villain's moniker is wearing masks
>He sends mooks and minions wearing his signature mask
>It turns out it his minions were people important to them and they don't realise it until they pull off the masks
>He appears randomly and borrows the voices of the people they killed, a mixture of pleading to be released from his grasp and asking why the players killed them
>No matter where they go, there is always someone wearing that damn mask, but they never knows if it's him or not
>They begin to hear whispers from just beyond the darkness at night
>Seeking out where the voices are coming from, all they find is a mask

>if i nuke new york and say aliens did it, then basic human xenophobia will prevent the cold war turning into world war three with superpowers

I haven't run a game that's gone long enough for a bbeg to really make an impact in a while, but I'm starting a game and this time, one of the players practically handed me the bbeg himself.
His character is looking for his twin who is on their way to becoming this guy. If that ain't bbeg material I don't know what is.

Basically this. My BBEG is an NPC who has been helping the party in their evil deeds because we was rendered insane by a ritual of his own design.
The party managed to restore him, and he has been slowly regaining his mind and his attachment to reality. He is currently appalled with his actions, and is plotting against the party.

His power has already been showcased by the fact that he cast managed to cast polymorph on a BBGG druid, and then power word killed it, which prevented the party from fucking with him.

It's important to establish this. My party was even aggressive towards him, despite my many allusions of his power level, until I displayed that he could power word any of them at any time.

Terrorism and betrayal also works pretty well, but only if there's already stuffthat affects them. If they have an income, have him eliminate it. If they rely on something situational to fight properly, like it being daytime, make their wizard a vampire. Make them hate him.

Give him credit for things that went poorly for the PCs retroactively.

It's my favorite thing to do. If you throw him (or his minions) at the PCs, the nature of chance and player agency means that they can turn the tide and win. Even the most well-laid ambush is prone to being fucked up by PCs.

But what if they already lost an encounter? What if they were captured by bandits or cultists or whatever? What if they failed to protect someone they cared about or any other "failure" condition you can think of? Well, then, it just so turns out that those bandits were there on orders of the villain, or that assassination was done by one of his agents, or so on.

Is it cheating? Sure it is, but it's an easy way for you to give your bad guy a 100% win ratio. You just don't decide whether he was involved or not until after the fight's over! It's perfect.

Baddie gets rid of options by stealing the artifact before players get there, causing useful shops to shutdown, whatever.

Have the player fight something that kind of scared them, and they learn that the thing they were scared of is scared of the big bad.

Hint: if an encounter is insignificant enough that loss will never have a serious consequence whether the consequence be death or otherwise: just skip it.
Unless maybe if you're going for the minor encounters existing to to make the important encounters harder, and decentivise doing stupid shit.

I had an idea to build a villain loosely off virt. They have a thing for elves, and are possibly also gay or lesbian, in a setting where neither interspecies or same sex relationships are accepted, and so they repress their sexuality, leading to self hatred which they express as a deep seeded and violent hatred for elves, white they express through guerrilla warfare, sabotage, and attacks on elven civilians.

Another idea is a villain who is the agent of an evil empire, but upon further investigation the empire has been crumbling from the inside for generations, with lots of abject poverty, and everything the villain has done was to better the lives of his countrymen, just that the "evil" empire happens to be political enemies of the state the PCs are from.

Finally, a villain the PCs never meet but only hear tales of. They hear of massacres, looting, and greed untold, only to discover that the villains in the highly exaggerated tales with various details wrong/missing are actually the PCs

This is actually a pretty good villain concept
The end result should be somthing like the boss has a chance to take over a random player during the fight and have the player actually fight for him.
Can be mitigated with a key item how ever.

Depends, I love funny villains. If you want a BBEG who you should fear, have the party meet him early on at a low enough level, that he can easily get rid of them, also if any of the players mocks the BBEG to his face at that time, kill him with the BBEG.
If you want hate, just do something they'd hate. Take Shane the Shy as an example.

A good vilian is made good by its relation to the protagonists.
You have to build your BBEG to reflect, chalange, disgust, pitty, ect your players.
This can be as simple as looking at their party, finding what they're weak agianst and making that. Have a party of lce mages? Bamn resistant to ice and or magic. Have a party of social faces in a RP heavy campaign? [spoilers]I know I know but we can all hope right?[spoilers/] then make a warlord type of villan, uncompromising and unegotiable. Murder hobos? The villian is a well connect noble that will play the game of power agianst them trying to eventually get a bounty on their heads. This is the simplest way to make them more intimidating or at least threating but it also comes with the most risks. Their is a fine line between chalange the players and forcing them to change how they aproch things and being cheap building encounters just to fuck with your players. If you insist on going down this path a good rule of thumb is to make sure they the players can win useing the skills they have in different ways. For that noble example, maybe They can raise their own forces and political power by befriending neighboring barbarian tribes through shows of strength and battle. Or to stop the warlord they need to turn some of his own rank trator, and get the noble houses to come together in one army.

Now the other method I can't recommend enough is to use ye old.
>I'll get you next time, and you dog to!
Vilians. You BBEG should meet your hero's face to face minimum 2 times before the final battle. And this gives so many options for what you can do with them! Have the villian steal loot or micguffans from the players right before they can get to them or the vilian could kill of clients after the party had gone to the trouble of getting what they asked for. This Also let's you build a character for your vilian during the breif interactions they and the party have inbetween escapes. This does a lot to make them a character....

...not just a spikey black XP pinata. Your vilian of course needs to escape these encounters without killing off too much of the party, there are a few good ways to go about this.
Teleportation spells/scrolls are a no fuss easy solution unless the system you're useing has an easy counter to them. However it can feel somewhat cheep just to have the gm wave a literal wand and poof he's gone.
The next option is to bog down your party in some mobs as the BBEG beats a retreat, but this comes with two risks, the weakness of the mobs make your vilian less intimidating and by starting a combat you could loss the vilian early. As a general rule of thumb, the most you minimise the fair combat he'll partake in, the less likely you are that he gets killed on a lucky Crit. This makes the third option, he beats the party up and leaves them to their fate much more risky than the other two.

Just a few last things. Always make sure you give your players some good loot at the end of an area, if the "real" loot was always supposed to be stolen by the BBEG. Having him kill of random faimly memebrs doesn't have any impact unless you build up to it and give the players a sense that it's all their fault. And if players get really attached to a vilian expect them to want to join his side or switch him over to their side. A good facilitator for this is bringing in an even bigger bad guy for a vilian hero team up rounds.

>Ganon
>just evil
Every time. The person who made this clearly never played Wind Waker.

Why are you both bringing up wind waker like that's the only instance of gannon, and not an exception to the rule? I mean hell that isn't even wind waker's ganonpictured in the image.

nice

Any dynamic can be interesting if you make it so. That is the basic rule of storytelling. The Flood didn't have a motive and they worked perfectly. The Reapers did have a motive and it ended up ruining the trilogy for most people.