(08-05-2013, 04:22 PM)Ildur Wrote:(08-05-2013, 04:03 PM)Koren Wrote: Which is to say; if you know someone is legitimately evil and acting against you and you have any sort of proof behind this... why wouldn't you tell an authority to really look into it?
There are a number of ways to handwave it. Lack of evidence, is one. Coherent villains are those that dance in the edge of legality and those who obfuscate their villainy well. Maybe your character knows that elezen on the other table is a necromancer who profanates graves to further his experiments. But maybe you have no proof of it to give to the authorities: yes, you could tell them anyway, but then the Law might not work properly: investigators could be bribed, perhaps there's no good protocol to find a grave digger besides 'let's put a watch on the graveyard'. Maybe this villain is smart and knows when and where to strike.
There are also more mundane and selfish reasons: maybe your character is stubborn and wants to punch the necromancer himself. Or maybe he doesn't trust the authorities to do their work.
On a more meta level, you can handwave it with 'that would be no fun'. Roleplaying is collaborative storytelling, and making the villain be defeated by the authorities off-screen is kind of...well, not particularly exciting.
Whatever you do, though, you have to keep OOC communication with the villain. Know that they are planning, and discuss the conclusions of the engagements (be them physical or magical battles, or a battle of wits) to settle if the events that took place would call the attention of the NPC authorities and, if that is so, how each participant (including these off-screen authorities) will react and change the plot.
But all of those plot contrivances have consequences.
In a "normal" situation you can't usually tell or get help because the villain isn't a PC that is around a lot. So, again SIDE characters who are villains for stories, etc? That's fine and doesn't qualify for this -- this is for main character or persistent groups which are villain themed.
If for some reason the authorities don't work as a solution in a story... due to incompetence, not believing the PC, etc. That's now established in that story. That means in all further stories the authorities are incompetent. If I start to tell another story with my character I can't realistically say the investigators can help me and if someone else who's been interacting with this group is expecting my PC to go to the authorities? It's... almost never going to happen. If I'm watching a story between X and Y and X is very obviously letting a villain Y go about their way? My character is not going to trust X to know what they're doing upon seeing that unfold.
Now, of course, there's exceptions. Maybe your character X of course happens in stories -- maybe the villain is your dad (my story actually!), or maybe your villain knows things about you, but, that's a SPECIFIC situation. Villain guilds and organizations tend to make said nefarious characters first so they're not really built in with that sort of thing.
Maybe the villain is smart and knows where to strike has a corollary: the opposing PC is requested to not react to certain things in this story. Again, that's fine if the thing is all worked out and this isn't a villain who's around very much so again the option to just go around the corner, knock on their door and ask about their villainy isn't realistic... but, the problem with a LOT of PC villains is that they kind of require... well... railroading. Which is fine if you've signed up for it -- no one minds travelling a railroad if the scenery is nice.... but as someone who's been that player of "No, you can't do that... or that.... or that! Just wait until I'm done as a villain and watch how much horror I can cause!"
It's all your style of play, of course, but villiainy is something that has more consequences than a lot of people realize. How and what happens goes BEYOND play. I've seen people be upset that THE DAY AFTER the guild ran a storyline wherien someone was tortured the character tortured was sullen, surly and withdrawn instead of participatory in a guild event to introduce and meet new people because "The day wasn't supposed to be about them". I've seen people frustrated because they wanted their plot to go in one direction to resolve unaware they had literally TAUGHT the people in their plot that this method wouldn't work because it failed two times before and now everyone was frustrated. It's just... a very careful thing is all.