As an NPC, I love playing villains. Being the character that PCs love to hate is, in a strange way, rewarding. Even when PCs want to do terrible violence to your character, knowing that you, as an actor, have facilitated an emotional bond is exciting. Furthermore, as a PC, I realize how essential villains are to many LARPs-- especially in PvE LARPs, villains can amp up the intensity of a plot, provide motivation, and offer a moral foil for players. However, while most games have them, I do not think that playing a fully characterized villain is particularly easy: villains have been in fiction for a long, long time, and it's hard to play one without stumbling on some established trope ("evil faerie" and "mad scientist" are my usual go-to's). So, with that in mind, how can you make a villain interesting? How can you make one painfully boring?
As either a PC or an NPC, how do you play villains? From an observer perspective, what types of villain characterizations are successful? Which ones are failures or tired cliches? Do you have any favorite LARP villains (against whom you've fought, or with whom you've "worked")? What makes their characterization so good? What tips do you have for playing good villains?
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ReplyDeleteMy simple answer: I don't.
ReplyDeleteMy more complicated answer: I am aweful at playing villains for the most part, I just can't get into it. I can get into playing Evil Monsters just fine of the "Grog SMASH!!!" variety, but I just can't put my heart into RPing one, which makes it hard to render a villain-centric plot interesting to PCs. As a result, I've ended up developing other elements of plot focus to encourage interest since I know I don't RP villains all that well.
I will say a word on cliche...I think it can be useful if it's done properly and consciously. Often in a LARP setting you don't have very long to make a first impression before the PCs will start ascribing certain traits/nick-names/etc to you. Conscious use of cliche in a deliberate and conscious manner can be used to very quickly establish how the PCs will relate to a given character.
There are of course right and wrong ways to do this...having someone come out half way through a dramatic duel to declare you're someone's father/brother/uncle will probably come off as completely hackneyed and ridiculous (see Eragon, book 2...ugh...gave the books away after that...and if I just spoiled it for you, I don't care). On the other hand, intentional use of certain styles of costume and other effects that make use of well established tropes can help set up an effective narrative, provided one doesn't go overboard with it.
I think one of te key parts of playing a villain is knowing why that villain exists in the LARP. Some villains are there as an excuse for PCs to hit things without too much moralistic hand-wringing. Some villains, however, are more fully developed plot antagonists.
ReplyDeleteStarting with the latter, the key to making that kind of villain work is knowing why he does what he does, what his limits are, and, ultimately, having a creepily good explanation for why he is *not* actually a bad guy. The litmus test is PCs walk away from talking to him and say to each other "Damnit, he really has a point there." he can still be a bad guy, but a fully fleshed out and interactive villain has to not know it. they need comprehensible and interesting motivations. Knowing these makes it much easier and more interesting to play one.
The pitfall of the first kind of villain, hwoever, is to treat it like they're the second kind. Sometimes all a villain is meant to do is get beat up on without consequence. So sure, you toss out a line of text to give them some kind of vague motivation, but it's important to not over characterize a punching bag with feet as something more lest you bog down the more beer and pretzels gaming experience that that particular villain is meant to be.
Motivation is most important in creating a memorable villain. The bad guy is a bad guy because of the actions he takes, but the reasons behind those actions need to make sense in order to make the character believable. Are they greedy, jealous, or just plain nuts? A character who goes around hacking off people’s ears is obviously bad, but without a clear motivation, your PCs will probably kill him without much more thought or concern than they would kill a wild animal. That can still be fun, but while people might remember the fight, the villain is unlikely to stick in their minds.
ReplyDeleteIMO, the two best motivations for a villain are “Personal Survival”, and “For The Greater Good”. They are both understandable to outsiders and open the door to truly horrible individual actions. Anybody who is faced with imminent death will find themselves open to doing things that they would never consider otherwise, and if you honestly believe that your long term goals will lead to a positive outcome that will outweigh the short-term negative actions you are taking, why not take them?
I was given a one-shot villain to NPC for an event. The basic premise was that he was a physician who specialized in diseases, and that after he was infected with a disease, he went a little bonkers and started experimenting on other humans to find a cure. Rather than play the usual crazy scientist, I decided to play both the “Personal Survival” and “For the Greater Good” motivations for the character.
The logic was straightforward. My character was a person who researched diseases. I assumed that he had had some measure of success in the past and that he had in fact cured a few. It was reasonable to assume that he would cure other diseases in the future. This research would save lives. Therefore, saving my life would save lives in the future. My life was objectively more important than that of a mere farmer who could probably be easily replaced in the event of his death, as tragic as that might be. Therefore, sacrificing two or three replaceable farmers to research a cure that could save the life of a scientist who would cure many other illnesses and save the lives of many more in the future (including farmers I suppose) is a small but necessary price to pay. What’s that? My best friend since childhood has found out what I am doing and wants to stop me? He is working against the greater good. I can’t let him talk to the people in town, they would not understand. Well, I do need more research specimens…
Yeah, he was still crazy, but he was “rational crazy”. There were a few encounters with the PCs before they figured out what was really going on. We had a Dreamvision/Flashback type encounter, where they see a vision of me explaining my logic in a cold, rational fashion to my childhood friend, ending with “My life is simply more important than yours”. The looks on the PC faces were priceless. I had several people go out of game after that to tell me how much they hated my character and were looking forward to killing him (but in the good way).
I can tell you that as an NPC I have never once played a villain. Undead are cold and in pain. The sweet warm flesh of the living provides comfort in this excruciating existence. Elementals seek to restore balance to the environment. Demons are servitors of the will of their master. Sure, they usually go crunch by the end of the encounter, but none of their intentions are evil, harsh though they may be.
ReplyDeleteIn RP roles I've been motivated primarily by survival, or emotional dysfunction. I played a principal demon left by the goddess of disease and harvest in a place so unfit that the earth would not hold the dead. I played up his abandonment issues and a sickening emptiness that pushed him to consume any food he could get his hands on, including the player characters crops.
When that character was put down, I took over the vacated role of the demon of the god of technology. He was at a basic level, a hacked automaton; tasked by his new administrator to raise my previous character. When I was unveiled to the PCs in this new role, I intimated a gruesome narrative in which I deconstructed the harvest demon and used him as a case modification. Over the time I played this character, I imagined him as a computer that hadn't had its OS updates run, infected with spyware and completely under the control of a malicious, inserted operator.
I've played mages and bandits that are primarily motivated by a paycheck. Sometimes it's just a job, and everybody has to eat. There's also pride to be considered too. I'm an adventurer just like the player characters! Who says they get to just run over me? (of course, they usually do, but the character shouldn't know that going into the encounter)
In short, my advice for someone playing a villain is to remember that you are the hero of your story, regardless of how short it may be.
That's excellent advice. I think some people, myself included, fall into the trap of "I need to be evil." In doing that, you lose motivation and reasoning for your character. That, in turn, makes for a flat character who doesn't actually react to a lived environment (as jjmarika introduced below).
DeleteOf course, having a self-aware character, one who is fully aware of immoral decisions, can be interesting too.
A bunch of people have talked about playing villains who are people, who have backstories and motivations and all that good stuff. I agree that those make for way more interesting characters. Granted, some times I just want to kill something that is bad and not worry about it's horrible childhood, but all of my favorite villains have been ones with interesting stories.
ReplyDeleteOne of my pet-peeves about villains with a backstory, though: if the backstory doesn't matter to the villain, it doesn't matter to us. I remember doing a lot of research on a bad guy and discovering that he absolutely couldn't stand X. Hated it. Heard several rants on the topic during TV mods. Yet, during a moment when we needed to distract him from something going on at the other end of the field, someone mentioned X. We all knew the villain was probably going to lose his mind and kill us all, but hey, if he was killing us, he wasn't disrupting the ritual at the end of the field. Instead, we got... nothing. He glared, then proceeded to the other side of the field where we had to try like five times to get the ritual off. If you want your bad guy to be interesting/a person, the things that are supposed to be impactful for him should actually have some influence on him. If it doesn't... it's just flavor-text, and worthless flavor text at that point.
(Note: not saying that your bad guy has to break down into tears mid-fight at the sight of an elf because he had an elven girlfriend at some point, but if you're trying to make your bad guy into a person, he will have flaws, and those flaws *should* affect him sometimes and not just when there is no possibility of combat. Taking the flaw, "Is afraid of the ocean" is not interesting in a game that takes place in the desert.)