ITT: villain tropes you love

>The BBEG is not incredibly strong or particularly tough, he just has hundreds of backup plans to act upon if he gets foiled by the heroes

>BBEG keeps coming back after he gets killed, even more powerful than ever, bonus points if he goes "For every time you hurt me, I shall give it back tenfold"

>PC create the BBEG by accident, due to bad luck, or just bad decisions

>BBEG starts to get more and more gaudy and hammy as he keeps gaining power, until he's decked out in a golden armor and being carried by slaves

>BBEG grows in power at the same rate as the PC, starting from a lowly peasant to a god king that razes the earth

>bbeg

Ugh

>Ugh
Ick

>ick
bleh

Great Thread

>bleh
gross

>storytelling makes you trust the BBEG until the very end

>BBEG has no real long-term plan, just makes stuff up as he goes along.

>PCs legitimately want to take him out because he humiliated/beaten/outsmarted them several times, not some "killed your family" GM plot fiat.

>BBEG has a few good points/is more responsible than the PCs.

>An even bigger big bad shows up, two parties have to work together to take him out (or alternatively, both make plans to take out the new guy, but they get in each others way).

>Mooks follow the big bad because he's a better alternative to what they were doing before.

>BBEG thinks of you as their super star and is constantly trying to get you to join him

BBEG created the hero, either literally or symbolically.

In my current campaign the BBEG is a witch and mother of two of the players, knowing that their father would help breed strong children. She’s trying to win them over

Necromancers who use their powers for utility:

>Put zombies in a hamster wheel with a brain out of their reach for free energy.

>Have a Hydra farm where you come by to chop off one of their heads every now and then for free meat.

>Fleshy suits of power armor/bone mechs.

>The Deep Rot computer.

I've been seeing a lot of this recently. What's the deal?

It's a pretty reasonable, useful, and long-standing phrase that says just what it needs to.

It's one or two people who dislike it and have decided to act out every time they see it instead of accepting that different people like different things.

>The BBEG was merely a puppet of the true BBEG

>Nigga just wants to blow stuff up. Good, bad, it all burns the same. No apologies or backstory, he just has fun wrecking shit.
>Jesters, clowns, and Harlequins.
>The villain was your friend or spouse all along and he genuinely thinks of you still as a good friend, even if you're just having a spat right now.
>Ancient, sealed away evils that you spend the campaign slowly finding clues to along the way. You never even knew until the end you were on a quest to stop it.

>BBEG is just an unknowing pawn who wakes up an eldritch monstrosity and gets fucking nom'd to death

>The BBEG's only real ability is to sucker the PC's into doing his bidding through incredibly obvious ploys that the moron players nevertheless fail to see through.

I am probably DMing for the wrong reasons.

It's a fossilized meme regarding this asshat who would spam every thread with copy pastas when he saw the term because presumably he was raped by the letters B, E, and G.

He stopped for awhile but now shitposters took up his mantle because they thought his autism was funny.

>bbeg

*cringe*

I did this with Not!Nyarlohotep and actual Nyarlohotep. The party shit their pants

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.

>PCs ruin some random NPC's life for no reason
>retcon them into being the BBEG

The villain deliberately acts like a stupid buffoon to put his enemies off guard

>tobi (Naruto)
>Sojiro (Kenshin)
>Cobra Commander (GI Joe Resolute)

Also badass when non villains do it, like Jiraiya, Master Roshi, and Kenshin

Deep rot computer?

>BBEGs who have a life outside of villainy. Friends, hobbies, anything. Pretty much anything to distinguish them from murderhobo PCs
> BBEGs that arent actually evil. Making them heroic with diametrically opposed goals to the PCs, or else have not evil goals which they achieve with realpolitik.
>BBEGs who draw their power from the same sources as the hero. This works better in a more traditional hero vs bad guy game. You both have the power, what are you going to do with it?

bbeg = bad guy. Plenty of stories have Bad Guys. From Hamlet to Pride and Prejudice. There's a guy and he causes the main problem for Our Intrepid Hero.

There's nothing wrong with your campaign having a single main bad guy. And there's nothing wrong with using a common acronym.

You're responding to pasta. Cold, moldy pasta that's been sitting in the back of the fridge for two months.

Bad guy is pretty straight forward. Adding a "the" in front of it even designates him as the most important.
But, Big Bad Evil Guy is awkward and unnecessary jargon.

>Neither the PC's nor the BBEG really want this fight, but they know it has to be done
But only if the motivations are logical and not forced.
> The BBEG has some feature that makes it fun to see what he does, or he struggles with non PC stuff occasionally
This makes him seem more human.
>Some BBEGs are just evil to the core and a clear threat that has to be eliminated

>The villain is not opposed to stopping everything to challenge the heroes in a non-lethal manner, be it a Skill-based duel, hand of poker, or just a round of tennis over the lava pit court he just had installed
>Actually plays by the rules and shows a little extra depth and fun to what seemed like a shadowy figure of hatred
>The villain still ends up his old self by the end, but both parties find a newfound respect for one another

Haven't seen this pasta in awhile. It's nice to see old pasta trotted back out from time to time.

>>PC create the BBEG by accident, due to bad luck, or just bad decisions
One of the best campaigns I played in was exactly that. We had to retrieve some shit from I guy to progress, so we first tried to buy, but it didn't worked, then we tried to intimidate or convince him, but he was dead set on keeping it (some family bs). So we waited until night and let the rogue go into his house and steal it, while we waited outside in case something happened. The rogue fucked up and he caught him, so we barged in, knocked him out and ran with the thing.
We move from that region of the world, go through several cities and dungeons, until we get news from a raising army ruled by a bloodthirsty self proclaimed king who was just conquering everything south, and marching towards us. We teamed up with the good guys of the north and went to war, only to find out that the king was that guy we stole from. He literally got so fucking mad that he caused a bunch of problems in his town, the guards tried to arrest him so he took it over, made a bunch of slaves, built a small army, conquered all the other villages and towns nearby, got a bigger army, and little by little was eating everything on his way towards us.

What did OP mean by this

>PCs acquire titles or nicknames due to famous actions
>Ruler pretends to be manipulated by everyone around him but is really in charge and could end anyone else's threat to him immediately
>Several different plans from opposing factions converge and are in conflict, the PCs decide which ones work through their actions

Nothing I like more than seeing the Dragonslayer, the Sage, the Mighty, and the Righteous go up against the the Cruel.

>But, Big Bad Evil Guy is awkward and unnecessary jargon.
>awkward and unnecessary jargon

TV Tropes in a nutshell

>trope
more like rope, the day of

>BBEG doesn't have a ton of backup plans, he's just really good at improvising when Plan A goes wrong.

>BBEG is sympathetic, a good man doing the wrong things for selfish reasons; i.e the guy performing dark rituals to bring back his son from the dead, a fallen king who has sold his soul to demons to gain an army, ect.

I hate villains who are just capital E Evil, or The Joker "I just do it for the chaos" type characters because people don't do it right. I rather make my players feel conflicted about what they are doing, second guess themselves and see if there is an alternative way to make everyone happy (although it might mean the players have to sacrifice something important to their characters to do so.)

>gross
bbeg

>No one knows who the BBEG is, but his shadowy hands are felt everywhere in the dark kingdom.
>When he reveals himself you find out he was the castle maid or the house janitor or something.

I'm a real sucker for that. My players watch any unnamed background character very carefully.

Bonus point if the Dark Queen of Murder is an attention catching sorceress that players will assume is behind it all, while the true BBEG is the small, polite wrinkled man that clean the latrine of the castle or something.

See, this is PCs here...what if they try to kill, woo, rape, steal from, or recruit this rando?

I've been wanting to run a game where the first npc they kill without reason comes back as a revenant and hunts the party as the BBEG.
Never been a dm, though

>The BBEG has a genuine reason and motive for his actions and is just as, if not more willful than the player

>BBEG is a villain stereotype taken to its logical extreme

>Villain is Ozymandias and has pre-empted the players

>>.what if they... recruit this rando?

This is the stuff legendary campaigns are made of

> PCs unwittingly recruit BBEG as a retainer or follower.
> BBEGuy / Gal researches history and finds 'quests' for the Party
> BBEG 'finds evidence' of local corruption. PCs defeat local crime bosses (unwittingly putting the BBEG in charge of local crime syndicate as the remaining elements hide).
> Party completes quest to destroy 'evil' artifact - unwittingly providing BBEG with other artifacts, needed info, and/or spell components along the way.
> BBEG finds clues that "help" party seal a magic portal ensuring that a vastly powerful evil entity is barred entry to the area for centuries. (Which also frees up said entity's minions who can now work for the BBEG...)

Far far down the road the PCs are baffled by the fact that they're known far and wide for their reputation for heroic deeds and great successes without fail, and yet evil seems to be flourishing throughout the land...

The looks on their faces will be awesome when they realize that they've been assisting the BBEG every step of the way.

>bbeg was trying to get rid of a greater threat using any means necessary but the party fucked it all up for him so now they have to work together

>The BBEG that is an actual good guy, but her methods become too extreme

Sometimes you do evil act to make the world a better place.