Oh, I disagree comepletely! Sorry, but he's the most important character in RPG and when you have major ones, they HAVE to be more just a bunch of stats and what does he DO.
That's the WORST kind of roleplaying IMO.
The archvillain has to make sense, not just to the GM in little notes that the players never see, but in the eyes of the players themselves. THAT'S what's most important. That vastly helps to make the adventure a STORY.
In our adventure, I made the archvillain someone they could sympathize with. Sympathy for the Devil's mother, so to speak. And a profound awareness that without them (the villains), the world couldn't have ever been changed for the better, it would have remained as it was. And change is what they wanted above all others. They MADE it have to happen.
So if you can sympathize with them on some level, they kinda ARE the good guys.
That makes for a better story than, "you met a bad guy. He blasts you with his Firebolt for...". Hell, the godlearner in my campaign barely ever fought with the player characters more than a round or two before teleporting away, having done whatever he was trying to do, or escaping them at the last second. They figured out what he was really doing when he showed them HIS point of view during their Illumination process. They slowly start to see his madness. But it's not Ragnaglar's madness, it's a different kind of madness that nonetheless he is just as obssessed by.
Yet in the end, don't the players bring his world to an end as he wanted?
One of the last scenes in our campaign was Thed, dissolving in the net at the end. The years slip away from her, age by age until, at the end, she's the young sheep-girl, with the big, innocent eyes, that's clinging to the flowers she found that she wanted to give to Orlanth (she had a childhood crush on Orlanth and was busy picking him flowers when Ragnaglar raped her - the players were made privy to that on an earlier HQ) and then she becomes Muriah, collecting water down by the Vilnorn near Weis. And then she's gone.
I think that's a better character than just Muriah/Thed, this % attack, these spells, yadda, yadda yadda.
That's not storytelling. That's not Roleplaying. People get to still fight the Crimsom Bat, and take on trolls and whatnot, but laced in between the trolls and the chaos monsters are plot and storyline.
Powered by hypermail