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Quick & Dirty Guide to Great Villains

Misc Gaming Mechanics Index | NPC Building Index

1. Assign Your Villain a General Power & Success Level

Don’t go through your character creation process and try to roll-up your villain. That takes up precious planning time. Instead, give your villains an overall power/success level to use during play.

For example, give your bad guy an 80% success level. Any time he tries something, roll a die and if it’s 1-8 it’s a success.

Keep track of what skills & abilities your villain uses during play and you’ll have your villain fully created in a few sessions without sacrificing your precious planning time.

2. Give Your Villain Some Strengths & Weaknesses

Strengths and weaknesses are important because they make all your villains realistic and different from each other.

Here are some example categories for strengths & weaknesses:
  • Behavioral (intimidating stare, flinches easily)
  • Physical (incredible strength, poor vision)
  • Mental (always cool, genius, fear of snakes)
  • Political (Emperor is ally, merchants are openly enemies)
  • Economic (healthy bank account, poor credit)
  • Social (people never suspect him, nervous around ladies)
  • Military (large, well-trained army, poor general)
  • Family (mother is Queen, must protect his sons)
  • Special (spells, the force, intuition)

3. Give Your Villain an Objective & a Point Form Plan

IMHO, this is the most important thing when creating your villain. With a goal and plan on paper you suddenly have direction for your campaign, ways the characters can get involved and a great tool for GMing on-the-fly.

You can plot out a villain’s plan at any time. But I do mine after determining strengths & weaknesses. I find it easier to create unique plans when I know more about what a particular villain can and cannot do. Otherwise, every plan I make starts to sound the same: capture and kill the PCs then conquer the world!!

Start with the villain’s objective in mind, then work backwards to the present campaign day. Try to have 3-10 steps in your plan. Fewer steps make it hard for you to act on, more steps can create too much work for you to do.

For example:
  1. Objective: Become Emperor
  2. Build a powerful army
  3. ind a general
  4. Establish a base of operations
  5. Raise 100,000 gold pieces
  6. Steal the money, find magic items and sell them, loot tombs and graves
  7. Trick a group of mercenaries/adventurers into doing the stealing/finding/looting.
Hmmm, seems like I’ve got a good campaign in the works there just by quickly creating a villain and his evil plan.

Here’s a special challenge for you now: quickly create three villains using these three steps, then mesh all their individual plans together into a timeline for one grand, multi-threaded campaign!
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