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Villians and RP conflict


Evie

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Okay having done a bit more research it the Lore of this new world that I'm excited to RP in, I've noticed that in general story terms we have the Garleans as enemies for the most part and even have a Garleans who have switched sides, one example being the NPC Cid.

 

So there is an enemy for RP via the NPCs, but I was curious about IC villians. Are the anyone who are looking to be making their character ICly have a more villainous role? Or are most people just planning on using NPCs to full any RP story conflict?

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I have one character that would be classified with 'borderline personality disorder'. Only because of his age, really, or else they'd just call him a sociopath if he were a bit older. He's not beyond redemption, his personality and motivations are not set in stone. He's most definitely not a 'good guy' though. I'm hoping to let his interactions with other players mold his growth and see where he goes from there, but I doubt he'll ever be a model citizen.

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The Blades of Nald'thal aren't necessarily villains either, more like... Bad Guy Good Samaritans. I think people outside their organization might view them as villains however, since they don't tend to discriminate who they doll out their particular brand of justice to.

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In my case, this role is fulfilled by an alt. The primary antagonist of Ty's story is Denavial Calgar, which has been the case since I created those characters in FFXI. The problem with using a main as a villain is that you find very quickly that nobody wants to hang out with you IC because...well, you're evil. An alt allows you to have those villainous interactions without limiting your RP options.

 

As a side note, I'm seriously considering maintaining two accounts this time around so I can have Den and Ty interact directly >.> Did that a bit in FFXI and it worked well and was a LOT of fun for me - and I'd like to think others as well.

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I can't speak for everyone, but I personally choose to use NPCs rather than playing with outright villainous characters, or being one myself. Some of these NPCs are in the game and my character reacts to what they do in story quests perhaps; most are of my own creation and are handled offscreen. 

 

That isn't to say that my characters are all heroic--even Kevaraan, despite his amicable demeanor, has done questionable things. It's largely up to other players whether to see my characters as heroes or as more ambiguous individuals. I see them as neither, and my style is too individual-focused to get involved in plots or larger efforts against a "villain" character.

 

I'm sure there will be at least some people interested in playing the villain though--it's just not something I have a lot of experience in, despite seeing guilds built around that in other games.

 

Edit: I'd like to add after reading some replies that the arcanist Kevaraan assisted in the past probably has some traces of BPD or mental illness. She is important to him, and I don't plan on playing her onscreen because she isn't personable or friendly at all--and that would go nowhere. But most average people would probably agree she's less than wholesome, has sinister or selfish motivations, and that her relationship with Kevaraan is certainly not conventional and has affected him quite a bit.

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My Fiance's main alt is a bad guy so I rolled his sister and plan on playing her as a villain. I've only played a villain once before (Generally I toe the line at Anti-hero) and I'm not sure how it will go. I find villains really, really hard to do correctly. You make them too subtle and they aren't really villains, make them to overt and you got a cartoon on your hands.

 

Also Villains aren't forever. You can just be a bad guy 3 years from now without some kind of consequence. Constantly getting away with stuff would just be... wrong and weird and, at the end of the day, boring. Killing them off when their villainy is at their worst seems like the proper thing to do, but that really only works in books when you have control of every character, not just the one. You don't want to kill off the one! So then what? Jail? Redemption?

 

I'm having a bit of an issue here, but I really like playing the villain. She was fun, but ultimately ended up dead and became a Death Knight.

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The "problem" with villain characters is a very subtle one.

 

Think about any book, movie or television show. How often do villains realistically appear in favor of heroes? Maybe one or two scenes -- establishing they've got things going on and such -- but for the most part villains are effective and scary because you don't know what they've got in their hand. You don't see them and you have those moments of confrontation.

 

The difficulty comes in RP when your villains are... right down the street. Like, over there. You can visit them. Too often it's either hard to take them seriously because they're not unknowable... they're just some guys. In which case they kinda end up becoming "sort of mean rivals" rather than villains. Or they're honestly evil in which case people are kind of holding an idiot ball for how they interact. 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?

 

Like Kev says, obviously, I don't think people should be forced to just play nice. Koren is an egomaniac with enough personal issues that she might be asked to pilot an EVA, but villain is a very delicate line to balance how you play.

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In addition to roleplaying within the framework of the CRA, I'll have two characters who are... less than good people. I haven't really got a lot of details worked out for either of them just yet, but Sah'ot (my Keeper) was an over-zealous poacher in the Shroud who over the years has turned her resentment towards Gridanians into a full-fledged hatred of Eorzean societies on a whole. 

 

Naunet (highlander hyur) was a soldier within the Garlean Empire who actively volunteered to conscript when her home of Ala Mhigo fell. She's killed a lot of people over the years, willingly, and is not a generally nice person too boot; in fact, she deserted the Empire's forces in the chaos following the Calamity not because she experienced some moral turn-around, but because of a personal failing that I have yet to decide upon. She's spent the past five years on the run and hiding from the military she used to serve so viciously. That she's adopted some more positive tendencies - particularly, directing her proclivity for violence towards helping people more often than it goes towards hurting them - is more a result of her need to blend in than anything. Though perhaps she's getting a bit used to this new persona.

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I'm excited that there are going to be quite a few people playing antagonists. I'm considering making an alt who is villainous/antagonist something along those line. I just was unsure how it was going to work since there is really only one faction in this game, versus multiple factions like other games.

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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.

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I'm excited that there are going to be quite a few people playing antagonists. I'm considering making an alt who is villainous/antagonist something along those line. I just was unsure how it was going to work since there is really only one faction in this game, versus multiple factions like other games.

 

The main difficulty with playing a villainous character (truly villainous, not just morally ambiguous or antiheroic) is a matter of etiquette. If your primary character is a villain, they almost have to be attached to a certain storyline or guild to get proper play. For example, if I'm playing a mafioso character and show up with a few brutes at the Corvus Cinis barbeque during the open beta demanding protection money or tribute because they're on my turf, that's a rude way of ruining other peoples' game. Proper etiquette requires that you work those sorts of things out beforehand with the person coordinating the event (maybe not the final outcome, but at least the notion that the barbeque is going to get strong armed). If you just show up out of the blue and try to force dark RP on someone else's event or character, they're likely to either start an out-of-character argument or completely ignore you.

 

Also, what makes villains truly villainous is that they are larger than life. Their screen time is generally less with less characterization, and their traits, particularly morality traits and resources, are exaggerated for effect. In terms of player characters, this will often be perceived as god-moding.

 

Personally, I'd like to play a dark character, but it would be an antagonist alt attached to a storyline, not what I would generally consider "my character." Unless the character gets redeemed, but even then I find redemption to be a fantastic point at which to retire a character.

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If your primary character is a villain, they almost have to be attached to a certain storyline or guild to get proper play.

 

*snip*

 

Also, what makes villains truly villainous is that they are larger than life.  Their screen time is generally less with less characterization, and their traits, particularly morality traits and resources, are exaggerated for effect.  In terms of player characters, this will often be perceived as god-moding.

 

Personally, I'd like to play a dark character, but it would be an antagonist alt attached to a storyline, not what I would generally consider "my character."  Unless the character gets redeemed, but even then I find redemption to be a fantastic point at which to retire a character.

 

Yeah, for actual villains - as in, antagonists meant specifically to set themselves again certain people - I generally relegate the task to alts devoted to telling a particular story. Without a solid storyline, the would-be "villain" character becomes nothing more than some petty chaos-starter with no discernible motivation, which isn't really fun for roleplay. I also tend to not pull these kinds of characters out for RP with just anyone, because roleplaying a dynamic plot like that requires a lot of give and take on both sides, which is never a sure thing if you just go looking for random people in a crowd. It requires planning and sacrifice on both sides (sometimes the fun kind of sacrifice!). I'm most proud of Twin and I's creation in our over-arching TERA plot, but that nightmarish character would never work as an everyone's-villain.

 

Oh, and I'll just put this out there: If a "villain" ever in the course of roleplay pulls out "bombs", I will proceed to laugh out loud and then just slap you. Freaking bombs. They need to be banned!

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Personally, I like my villains to be backed by players, as long as everyone knows the ground rules and can follow ICA = ICC.

 

One approach, albeit one that has its own issues, is to have the same group (or very nearly the same group) of players play their own villainous nemeses. We did this for a bit back on CoH, where the Nemesis Council was locked in a struggle with the New Porter Institute. Almost everyone in one group played an alt in the other, and both sides schemed against the other in plotlines. No one wanted to destroy anyone else's character because, of course, that would lead to massive IC Consequences, so it was a lot of tit-for-tat villainy and heroic thwartings thereof. It was fun while it lasted; what killed it was the SGs growing with people who didn't want to participate. I've seen this arc work (while it lasts, anyway; the success of the guild concepts independently usually spells its demise) in EQ and EQ2 as well.

 

You can do a similar thing with allied guilds, though it seems eventually either everyone tires of the PvP or someone takes things too far (killing another PC) and there's no way to enforce IC consequences.

 

All that said, though, if someone or someones were going to be a group of magical terrorists and looking for a group of mages to heroically oppose them in a long-term game of cat and mouse, we should talk. :)

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As for bombs, that's a pretty nasty thing. Sometimes it's hard to tell who the villain is until they blow you up. This apparently happened to the RPG club at UCI. I don't play in their LARP, but one year a player saved up all his influence for the final game of the year and used it to firebomb the LARP, killing half the player characters. By the rules, it was legal, and he moved away before the next fall leaving lots of people angry and nearly killing the LARP (which has died at least once before to be resurrected with a new system/setting a few years later).

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As for bombs, that's a pretty nasty thing.

 

The things with bombs is they're generally used as a cheap and easy way to "attack" or otherwise cause disruption. There's rarely any actual description of the bomb itself - its yield, what type, how it's triggered, etc - and comes paired with such scintillating descriptions as "Shadow Lord pulls a bomb from his coat and throws it into the crowd."

 

Okay... Good for you, Shadow Lord!

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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.

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I'll be trying to put together a PC Villain for the most part, though he won't be overtly as such. Lawful Evil, in such a way that manipulation will be the core of his capabilities. However, one the most difficult things to get over as a "villain" in roleplaying is that nobody wants their sense of agency interrupted by another player. Force tends to be hated, and that makes it really difficult to do anything truly "evil".

 

As far as playing "yeah, that's evil" cards, it'll be rare and fully discussed with the people I'm involved with.

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Playing an evil can be difficult. Though I've experience some really good Villian/Evil RP in other games. I'm generally an anything goes type of RPer so that can lead to some really crazy, interesting, and in depth villainy when you can find someone who's willing to allow almost anything to happen to their characters.

 

One of the good things with the game I play now is that you can buy character renaming. This is nice because it opens up character death, because instead of having to role a new character should an old one die in RP, you can just pay a little for a rename and voila, you can use your already leveled character and give it a completely new backstory. You can even go so far as to use the barbershop in order to modify the characters look too.

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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.

 

Only if you want to. You could play it as that, in the new story (or, heck, even during the course of the same history), the authorities changed somewhat. To give a very silly but obvious example: the sheriff in town was changed and the one in charge now is competent. It's something you have to decide OOCly with the 'full-time' villain, though. Unless you want to make the authorities into alts, in which case you have to talk with the villain anyway to let him know that there'll be a group of semi-competent NPCs helping the good guys.

 

(...) My character is not going to trust X to know what they're doing upon seeing that unfold.

 

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!"

 

I'm not sure what you mean with knocking on their door and asking about their villainy. I guess you are refering how I said you have to ask the villain player about it. You do that in Out-Of-Character mode: you ask the player, not the character. Communication is important in this cases, so you have to go OOC when discussing details about the plot or planning the story. Otherwise, crap will happen.

 

About the railroading and the corollary: You are assuming villains have to railroad to work properly. I have the feeling the villains you have roleplayed with were just terrible. Which is, I admit, a problem I have run with full-time villainous groups. But in those cases, you just discuss the railroading (OOCly, of course), hoping they'll get better...or you just drop the storyline, if you are sufficiently fed off and you don't think there's any chance of salvaging it.

 

I'm, however, a bit unsure of what you mean by railroading. I know the technical roleplayer term: it's when the Dungeon Master forces the players to follow a very narrow path to move forward in the plot. I'm unsure of what you mean, though, because, for what you said, it seems to me you are calling 'railroading' to certain story details that are there to make the villain work as such. For example, in the example of the necromancer, that he's avoiding guarded graveyards. This isn't railroading: it's the character reacting. What would be railroading would be if he told you 'you can't put a guard there', or him going 'I still managed to dig out another body!'. Though the second is more godmodding than railroading.

 

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.

 

This is all stuff you have to solve OOCly. Nobody's a telepath on the internet. We cannot fully communicate with our fellow roleplayers purely by in-character means. That's just asking situations like the ones you have described to happen.

You have to drop character for a moment and whisper them, form a party and discuss things in chat, use private messages or a forum. Whatever. But communication is the key. Otherwise, things will start falling apart and nobody will be able to hold the thing together.

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Has Square Enix said anything about renaming, race changing, or appearance changing?  I know I've seen something about character transferring becoming available in a few months, but not sure if any of these others have been mentioned.

 

I'm not sure honestly about that. I know there's been talk about a barber shop, but that maybe limited appearance changes. So it may not be something that can happen right off the bat. But from what I understand Square Enix seems really good about putting in things into the game that the players request. So maybe it's something that could be suggested for later patches. If the company is as willing to listen to its subscriber base as I've heard, it's simply another thing that makes this game so appealing.

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I have personally played characters who probably could be seen as villains since I first started RPing, which technically was not that long ago. I think the trick is to not make them over the top. I feel like I did a great job in GW2 as I made my character a lovable villain. She had enemies, but also a good chunk of friends, even though the only reason she made friends was to use them when she needed. She did things because she loved chaos and though she had huge plans, some that were definitely not ever achievable (such as destroying all of a particular race in the world), but she kept busy by destroying the bond between allies, friends, and just causing trouble in general.

 

Most of the time it was not her direct actions that did this, but hiring people to do things which allowed her to stay mostly behind the scenes. This made it easier for other people to take the fall if they were ever caught. Of course it did not always go as planned so I made her a bit of a comical character as well as to give her an escape route when her plans didn't go as well...planned. To sum it up, she was an awful person, but she was still human and had emotions just like anyone else would. I personally have not found a way to port her over to FF, but hopefully I will be able to figure that out one day. 

 

I guess what I am trying to say that is that its definitely possible to have a main as a villain. I think most people may think that a villain has to show no emotions or never sometimes feel remorseful for some of their actions, but that does not necessarily have to be true. Magneto from the X-Men has been mostly portrayed as a villain, but really he is just trying to save himself and others like him from being annihilated by following a more militant "kill or be killed" logic. Sephiroth is another good villain. He was a pretty stand up guy then he found out all this stuff and lost it. I think a good villain can have emotions, they have probably loved and lost just like we all have, they have just choose a very negative way of living their lives.

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I feel that player controlled (PC) villains do a far better job than NPC villains. The NPC villain is there for the main story or side story but they end up locked into the same pattern.

 

A PC villain can do what he or she wishes and create any event they wish to. PC characters are also capable of changing emotional states. There is no harm in a character whom normally is good has a sudden change of character reacting to an event in a very emotional way. Suddenly they went from being a hero to now wanting revenge for that moment and perhaps might even turn on their own friends in blind rage.

 

While this doesn't constitute a solid villain, it adds drama and a sudden threat. Having a main for a Villain will require some very strong dedication and understanding that you might not be well liked. However the Rp community should also be reasonable and understand when said person is in the Duty Finder (queuing for dungeons) odds are they are going in there to level up / get gear and not be villainous.

 

RP is also very random. You can be heading in one direction and then suddenly something else happens and things change. Okay the plot suddenly took a detour, go with it. Communication is key but also spontaneity can also end up in quite a lot of fun, especially with villainous actions.

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