The Overclassed Villain

[Wrathzog]

The contract already exists, but whether or not Mr. Bad is automatically a party to it depends strongly on his social status.

Admittedly, I can see how something like that can maintain inertia because everyone who's anyone is part of the big game... but otherwise, I don't understand how the contract got to exist in the first place. If I can't figure that out, the rest of the scenario falls apart.

Now, Rothbart's father is the Landgrave of Dorne, and is quite rich due to his position. Once you've discovered his son's nefarious deeds you can fight the boy to the death, or offer him a chance to surrender. Allowing him to means that you can random him back to the Landgrave for 500,000 GP. Killing him means that the Landgrave will instead give that 500,000 GP to the assassin's guild and you better not fail your sense motive check the next time you accept a drink from a stranger.

This seems feasible... but how's the party supposed to know that when Rothbart's begging for his life about how his father would pay anything to get him back that he's not just making it up so that they'll spare his life?
More realistically, we're still going to kill Rothbart, ransom the body back (because seriously, the Landgrave can afford to bring his stupid son back to life), and potentially murder the Landgrave when he drops off the money (and he probably sent assassins after us anyways, because I'm pretty sure that being a douche bag is genetic).

But this assumes a lot out of the players. I can set up the situation and nudge them into a direction, but I just can't help but feel that, nine times out of ten, my players are going to end up fighting the Assassin's guild.

Wait, suffering consequences for being a murderous fuckstick is grimdark now? Mindless slaughter should have consequences so people don't go around mindlessly slaughtering everyone. If you don't want to suffer those consequences, don't murder everything.

There's more to it than just having someone going after you for revenge if you kill a bad guy. Look at it from the general populace's view. There's a chance every month that the BBEG is going to break out of jail (again) and cast cloudkill on everyone you know and love and nothing significant will ever be done about it.
And he gets stopped every time by Team Good, but only after he's left behind a mountain of bodies. This happens Every Month because there's some sort of agreement between BBEG and Team Good about how they can't kill each other... but the rest of the populace is fair game.
That kind of sucks.

[Dean]

the rest of the populace is fair game.
That kind of sucks.

Yeah dude. Welcome to world. Cheney could blow your fucking face off with a shotty today and you would have to apologize to HIM. Scooter Libby can try to get your wife straight up murdered and even when by MIRACLE he is actually sentenced to jail he's just gonna have some buddies tell the legal system that it can go fuck itself and he's not setting foot in prison.

Welcome to being one of the masses. We're not rich, we're not powerful, we're not noble-blooded, and we don't have super powers so we get shit on and can't do anything about it. We, you and I, are "the rest of the populace" and we are very much fair game.

[DSMatticus]

but otherwise, I don't understand how the contract got to exist in the first place. If I can't figure that out, the rest of the scenario falls apart.

It's not that complicated. Consider animals challenging eachother and competing; actual violence which can lead to actual harm is rare. Most non-predator animal conflict is about posturing, intimidation, and non-injurious violence. Now, it looks violent to us sometimes (seeing two antlered animals charging eachother, for example), but in terms of serious injury rate it's fairly low. One backs down and goes away.

Basically, any system of conflicts that isn't totally one-sided where one side can crush the other without risk naturally selects for surrender conditions which are less injurious than the lose conditions. Even if your victory is guaranteed, it's better for you (in terms of resources and risk) if your opponent surrenders earlier instead of fighting until the end. And if you're guaranteed to lose, and surrendering is less injurious, then you would rather surrender. Surrendering leaves both parties in a stronger position than not surrendering, and that means people who surrender and people who accept surrenders are more likely to survive future conflicts. Natural selection, hurrah.

When you stop accepting surrenders, not only do your opponent's losses become worse, so do your's. And that means you're less likely to stay in the game than someone who accepts surrenders. Nevermind the fact that everyone who might ever someday be your opponent is now acutely aware that you do not accept surrenders, and you are rocking their surrender boat and they may get together and make you go away.

Joffrey is a good example of that; he beheaded a surrendering nobleman and was just generally an annoying brat who refused to play by existing conventions. And they poisoned him to replace him with Tommen, who shuts up and listens to adults who knew what the conventions were and why to obey them.

[Fuchs]

It could work very well if you don't have team good vs. evil, but team red vs. blue, and everything is a bit more grey.

You're not letting mass-murdering cultists who want to destroy the world surrender and go on their merry ways as a paladin, you're accepting the surrender of a knight as a noble yourself because you still have more in common with each other than with the peasants you both got killed in your feud.

Modern values best be left out though, idealized medieval "honorable combat" doesn't work if a peasant has the same rights as a noble.

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, surrendering is obviously a much less attractive option if the sides involved are locked in some big time ideological struggle as opposed to duking it out over a stretch of land. Think of it less as honor and more as credibility: having a reputation as gracious in victory and implacable when defied makes ultimatums that much more effective. For example, nobody ever talks about how nice the Mongols were but their idea of an ideal conquest was getting the city to agree surrender before the horde was in earshot. The part where they set everyone and everything you love on fire if you didn't surrender quick enough was mostly to give the next city something to think about.

[Wrathzog]

So, here's what we need to set up this situation:

1) We can't have a single dominant team. Otherwise, we end up with Aegon coming in with Dragons, destroying the game, and conquering everyone (yeah, I can use GoT references too).
This includes The Party... which means that they gotta get their asses kicked every so often, otherwise they start thinking that they're above the rules (which leads to murders and more murders and TPKs and thread derails).

2) We need more than just red team vs. blue team. We need at least a Green team, who sort of sits around on the sidelines being very threatening. Probably a Yellow team and a Purple team too. They all need to be around, keeping each other in check... making sure that no one risks overextending their power.

Hurm... this might work in a politics/social heavy game... but I just don't see it happening in your average D&D campaign. It just seems like a house of cards situation once you introduce player characters.

Joffrey is a good example of that; he beheaded a surrendering nobleman and was just generally an annoying brat who refused to play by existing conventions. And they poisoned him to replace him with Tommen, who shuts up and listens to adults who knew what the conventions were and why to obey them.

Actually, that's a terrible example.
Joffrey was poisoned primarily to weaken House Lannister's hold on the Throne. It was probably going to happen even if Joffrey wasn't a total prick (and thus didn't execute Ned Stark). As long as Tommen was better suited to being a puppet king, Joffrey was always going to be in dangerous of being removed.

[Ice9]

It could work very well if you don't have team good vs. evil, but team red vs. blue, and everything is a bit more grey.

You're not letting mass-murdering cultists who want to destroy the world surrender and go on their merry ways as a paladin, you're accepting the surrender of a knight as a noble yourself because you still have more in common with each other than with the peasants you both got killed in your feud.

Modern values best be left out though, idealized medieval "honorable combat" doesn't work if a peasant has the same rights as a noble.

Yes, it works as a dark setting. No argument there.

I don't know why people keep trying to claim it isn't grimdark though. That part where Lord Blood grinds up a village to make magic fertilizer, and then you both have a good laugh about it, because hey, peasants aren't really people? That's ... pretty grimdark. And yes, this does mean that a lot of things in actual history would count as dark/grimdark, not that I think most people would doubt that.


That said, you can totally have foes where the "gentlemen's agreement" makes sense. Just - don't have them do anything that horrible. Having the Dashing Swashbuckler Thief who keeps showing up, and maybe you even have to work with sometimes, that's fine. It's when you switch him to the Dashing Swashbuckler Cannibal that things gets screwy.

Yeah, that means the really horrible villains tend to get killed - so what? It's not like you have fixed actors or a limited budget. The comic book hard-on for the status quo barely makes sense for comics, much less for an RPG.

[Fuchs]

That said, you can totally have foes where the "gentlemen's agreement" makes sense. Just - don't have them do anything that horrible. Having the Dashing Swashbuckler Thief who keeps showing up, and maybe you even have to work with sometimes, that's fine. It's when you switch him to the Dashing Swashbuckler Cannibal that things gets screwy.

Yeah, that means the really horrible villains tend to get killed - so what? It's not like you have fixed actors or a limited budget. The comic book hard-on for the status quo barely makes sense for comics, much less for an RPG.

Indeed. I was merely pointing out that by applying modern values, many if not most of history's figures would be horrible villains. Having a peasant killed for daring to hunt deer, for example, was pretty normal in the medieval times, and raiding your neighbor's serfs until you get your kidnapped father back would also not be considerred a crime if the feud was properly declared.

[Blade]

The reason why comic book good heroes and villain don't kill each other is because they're respectively GOOD and BAD. And not just good and bad people, they're avatars of "good" and "bad".

As such, the hero can't kill the villain. He has to give him a chance to redeem himself. He wants to help him.
The villain can't just kill the hero. He has to corrupt him or to utterly destroy him and his faith in everything he fights for. He doesn't want to destroy the character, he wants to destroy the concept.

Back to the topic, I think that another important aspect is that it's not just about the fighting potential. In most RPG, the player's team will be able to kill/banish/capture/trap pretty much every opposition in a fight. Sure, the GM can always put someone more powerful, but a TPK isn't what will make the big bad more interesting.

The thing is that there are more ways the big bad can confront the PC than just a fight. On the top of my head, you can have:
- The popular icon: you can kill her easily, but then you'll have the whole world hating you for it. To defeat her, you'll need to reveal who she truly is, and she's a master of deception.
- The Good (bad) Guy: Why would you fight him? He's your friend, or at least a good guy. He considers you his enemies, but you don't.
- Legion: Either he has the ability to resurrect or he'll be replaced by someone else who'll do the same thing or it's not about the person but about the idea. In any case, killing him won't change much.
- No big bad: you don't fight pollution, starvation, injustice or a disease by killing just one big bad.

[mean_liar]

So the same reason that the Noblemen of medieval Europe would ransom each other back to their respective countries (instead of murdering each other) is the same reason Superman puts Lex in jail, and Lex puts Superman in kryptonite restraints. It's just polite war.

Uh. They ransom each other back and forth because they make lots of money from it. That captured nobles were by-and-large an exploitable resource mattered a hell of a lot more for ransoming than the fact that they were all members of the same fraternity.

Superman lets Lex Luthor go because he has a code against killing, not because he likes playing cat-and-mouse.

[Lago PARANOIA]

The reason why comic book good heroes and villain don't kill each other is because they're respectively GOOD and BAD. And not just good and bad people, they're avatars of "good" and "bad".

As such, the hero can't kill the villain. He has to give him a chance to redeem himself. He wants to help him.
The villain can't just kill the hero. He has to corrupt him or to utterly destroy him and his faith in everything he fights for. He doesn't want to destroy the character, he wants to destroy the concept.

But then the hero stops being 'good'. When Superman repeatedly lets Luther get off because he thinks that he's redeemable or doesn't want to break his code against killing, he's actually being incredibly cowardly and/or short-sighted to the point of being immoral. Why is Superman's personal code more important than the thousands of people Luther has killed in his schemes that could have been avoided?

The only way out of it is if you introduce some kind of confounding factor that ties the hero's hands. Like if Batman did kill the Joker, he'd come back as a demon from hell. Or if Captain America really did kill Red Skull it'd release some primal force that made everyone on the planet more selfish and hateful, so he doesn't. But that just makes things even more grimdark -- it makes their crimes not preventable tragedies but sacrifices for the greater good. Sorry your orphanage got blown up by the man I threw into jail who keeps escaping from it, Billy, but if I had done something about it the orphanage and the elementary school would've been blown up. It's really all we can do.

[hyzmarca]

Actually, that's a terrible example.
Joffrey was poisoned primarily to weaken House Lannister's hold on the Throne. It was probably going to happen even if Joffrey wasn't a total prick (and thus didn't execute Ned Stark). As long as Tommen was better suited to being a puppet king, Joffrey was always going to be in dangerous of being removed.

Joffery was poisoned at the request of the Tyrells so that Margaery wouldn't have to marry the prick. If Joffery wasn't such a giant asshole, the marriage to him would have been preferable.

And Margaery certainly didn't want to make Tommen into a puttet. She was actually trying to teach him out to be a decent ruler. It was Cersei who wanted a puppet.

So in his case it was the domestic violence that did him in. Beheading his fiance's father certainly didn't help with that.

(because seriously, the Landgrave can afford to bring his stupid son back to life), a

If resurrection magic is common in-setting, then death is just a time-out, anyway. It's no different than being knocked unconscious. Soul destruction becomes the real death.

[Chamomile]

Depends on how evil the villain is. You can do some fairly nasty things without killing anyone and not killing someone who's never killed anyone else is a defensible position. It's also much less bothersome if your prisons are way more efficient at keeping villains in as compared to Arkham. If putting a villain away gives you good odds of keeping him away for years or decades, it's a lot more defensible to have a no-killing clause, simply because the current stalemate is only slightly worse than the old status quo, possibly better if Reed Richards isn't useless. On the other hand, starting total war with the villains means you might lose that war. Having society at large on your side is a big advantage when your primary method of winning is keeping your opponent locked up for long periods of time. It's not so much an advantage in a total war where both sides are super powered (even if that super power is "smart enough to invent fear toxin" or "rich enough to buy a batmobile").

[Blade]

@Lago: The point is that Superman isn't "good" he's "The Good". And The Good doesn't kill.

Yes, it can lead to absurd situations or situations that aren't good, but such comics are about archetypes, not about real-life.
If Superman was set in real-life and handled rationally, he'd be much more useful producing free energy for the whole earth than fighting crime in a city.

[ishy]

Or instead of stopping lex and being judge/jury/executioner he could just deliver lex to the law enforcement and they'd judge him and determine if he should be punished / executed or whatever.

I generally assume that most countries don't enforce death penalties so that lex luthor will never be executed because of the policies of the world superman lives in, not because he himself decides that.

[Chamomile]

It's kind of hard to back that up when most mortal law enforcement agencies can't keep the average super villain held longer than three weeks. That's not even long enough for a show-trial.

[Wrathzog]

Or instead of stopping lex and being judge/jury/executioner he could just deliver lex to the law enforcement and they'd judge him and determine if he should be punished / executed or whatever.

This got really funny when Lex hired a team of awesome lawyers, was exonerated of all charges, and then got elected as president of the united states.
You could hear Superman's heart breaking.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Most of the time in RPGs, the boss-level opposition is at least equal to and often superior to the average player character, so that at the bottom of the dungeon or whatever it takes All Your Powers Combined! to defeat the Big Bad.

I've been thinking about this lately, and while it is a valid approach, I've begun to appreciate the villain that is simply overclassed. Most of Batman's rogues gallery, for example, are completely fucking owned in any straight punch-up with the Caped Crusader; Superman is so far and above your average street punk or small-time supervillain he gives them an opportunity to at least surrender, if not mend their ways.

This is an immensely powerful a tool for the MC, at least for a couple of reasons. For one, it's more realistic - if a bunch of high-level adventurers full of magical-glowing-bling pop into a kobold camp, have the little yapping lizard-dog men surrender is both appropriate and appealing to the PCs egos than wholesale low-XP slaughter - and more importantly it allows the MC to use them again. A minor villain that tries to use the Dark Widget to unleash the Eldritch Abomination can be a properly cowardly figuring hiding behind his toughs, and probably crazy enough to be more damage to himself than the PCs (unless he succeeds)...and what's more, could become obsessed with defeating the PCs without levelling at the same rate as them, forcing him to be actually clever.

And the great thing about NPCs that are completely overclassed, their goals can be either cosmic or petty and it still makes for a good story. Whether they're trying to summon a god or steal the lost treasure or just eat the character's horse/animal companion to gain its rich, tasty courage...they can be the main villain, the road bump, or the comic relief until they turn out to be dangerous when cornered, or when the PCs are wounded/sick. The horse-thief that everyone laughed at and humiliated is waiting for the bloodied PCs as they exit the dungeon, with a crossbow and a hankering for revenge.

Granted, this works best in a level-less system like Shadowrun or Call of Cthulhu, because the mechanical disparity between "competent at X task" and "fights well" can be huge, while in level-based systems like D&D being really good at something typically goes hand-in-hand with asskicking potential. That's not to say your 20th-level aristocrat can't get his ass handed to him and by the overclassed villain, but it loses some of its efficacy.

I've set the PCs against opposition they easily outclass in regular combat before. However, I often run into a problem when the enemies realize this. When the bad guys just run whenever swords come out, it seems that players looking to solve their problems through stabbing often end up rather unsatisfied.

In one game, the PCs were both better in combat and had a social advantage from being granted status as quasi-police.They were trying to root out some drug dealers that were capturing the manufactured sorcerors of the city's noble caste and turning their blood into addictive magic potions.

Nobody wanted to fight them. After all, cop-killing draws all kinds of attention, very little of it good for a black market. Whenever they tracked down a vendor, he/she would run as soon as someone suspected a sting. They'd leave enough drugs that the PCs had something to show for their troubles, but making a bust that way was really frustrating for them.

I think that one should be careful when designing clearly inferior opposition, since that could produce scenarios players find disappointing. But that isn't to say it's a bad idea. You just need to think about the preferences of your group a bit.

[Whipstitch]

For better or worse I usually handle that by playing something other than D&D to begin with. The oWoD settings or Shadowrun don't really suffer from having a head honcho who mostly call shots and may even literally hold down a desk job but in high fantasy it's sort of assumed that anyone worth paying attention to probably has some trinket that can peel your face right off.

[ishy]

It's kind of hard to back that up when most mortal law enforcement agencies can't keep the average super villain held longer than three weeks. That's not even long enough for a show-trial.

You got trial in absentia for that though IIRC

[Judging__Eagle]

the rest of the populace is fair game.
That kind of sucks.

Yeah dude. Welcome to world. Cheney could blow your fucking face off with a shotty today and you would have to apologize to HIM. Scooter Libby can try to get your wife straight up murdered and even when by MIRACLE he is actually sentenced to jail he's just gonna have some buddies tell the legal system that it can go fuck itself and he's not setting foot in prison.

Welcome to being one of the masses. We're not rich, we're not powerful, we're not noble-blooded, and we don't have super powers so we get shit on and can't do anything about it. We, you and I, are "the rest of the populace" and we are very much fair game.

This going equally for Batman, who is actually a Zorro analogue, updated for a medieval english mindset. He's literally a patrolling knight, who lives in his family's keep, on the most traditionally, defended from land invasion property.

The Jesters (duh), Fishmongers (Penguin), Barristers (Two-Face), Gardeners (Ms Ivy), Circus Freaks (Killer Croc), Farmers (scarecrow), Haberdashers (double duh), and Riddlers (triple duh) aren't able to kill a knight. On a class scale, they'll be branded as killers of someone above their station, and even the plot won't accept that.

As for why the Dark Knight could be considered to not want to kill (after the 1950's Comic Code went into effect, and Batman stopped carrying dual .45's to fight Dracula with silver bullets, yes, yes, wtfbbq) and they're beneath him to do anything except crack the skulls of.

If he kills one of them, he instantly elevates them to be his peers; or he's declaring Total War on all crime (and thus going all Rorshach or Night Haunter on the setting). Either way, they're all going to try and kill him, not merely place him in a terrible death trap.

The death traps also give the criminals possible deniablity. They didn't actually stab or shoot him. He was just knocked 'unconsious'; and the saw cut him; the fire burned him; the machine pulled him in. As well as setting up situations where they could claim he set off a bomb, he went mad with fear; he drowned while swimming into an underwater cave.

Not always, but very often. Usually only nameless mooks try to shoot at a protagonist, and we know how well that turns out.

The fact that Batman is at some level a very well disguised story of class struggle is interesting.

[Chamomile]

It's an interesting take on it, but it's incredibly far-fetched to claim that this is what every Batman writer ever (or even the majority) was actually going for. Notably, Poison Ivy and Killer Croc from your list weren't actually created by the original Batman team. You also can't really update Zorro to a mindset that predates not only his era of creation, but also the era he's depicted as having been active in.

[hyzmarca]

Or instead of stopping lex and being judge/jury/executioner he could just deliver lex to the law enforcement and they'd judge him and determine if he should be punished / executed or whatever.

This got really funny when Lex hired a team of awesome lawyers, was exonerated of all charges, and then got elected as president of the united states.
You could hear Superman's heart breaking.

The really funny thing is that Lex was probably thee best President that DC America ever had, up until he tried to go Metal Wolf Chaos on Superman's ass.