On Wed, 12 Oct 2011, Onno Meyer wrote:
* He was a significant threat to Europe. W:WW explains why
he had little chance of ultimate victory, but he got
within shouting distance of one before he ran out of
steam.
Compare Jean Kambanda -- and if you have to google him
first, I just made my point ...
I somewhat disagree here. For RPG villians, in my experience small is
beautifull.
With a large threat, either you need explainations why the pcs are not
just a little part in the effort to remove it. Either you run into the
problem you have outlined for the virus, or the pcs need to have
exceptional superpowers. And with that, you can have a hard time to come
up with minor adventures, that they can't walk through with their
superpowers, without either cryptoniting them, or without the inflationary
use of superpowers on adversaries for single adventures. (Simon R Green
books are often examples of the last option)
And after the pcs have won, if you want to make a sequel, either you get
to inflationary super threats, or everything that comes afterwards seems
anticlimatic.
If the pcs mission is just to save one godforsaken hole from the nearby
bandits, it is much more believable that only the pcs care, or that they
are all that the proper authorities can spare for that particualr problem.
And it is often quite simple to come up with plots to keep playing in that
campain, after the mission is accomplished, be it because it ended
reguolarily, because the pcs had unexplected good tactics, or because the
GM felt, that victory should come earlier, for reasons of player morale.
And an other point about villian design:
In my experience the most hated villians are thoose, that managed to get
the trust of the pcs before, or thoose that brought the pcs into an
embarassing situation. Obviously you can combine thoose.
So the perfect arch nemesis, would be a conman, who started as ally of the
pcs and made them look stupid, during the course of the campain.
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