Post
by Scurvy Cur » Tue Nov 17, 2020 6:09 am
Having done my share of villaining, my own input.
As several other people have mentioned, you've got to bank on eventually losing pvp. The longer and more prominently you're a villain, the greater is the likelihood that someone will decide to make a name for their character by popping yours or someone will decide to round up the whole damn gang to kill you.
The other thing is to remember that, ultimately, your ability to play a villain ultimately hinges on how much your opponents enjoy fighting/conflict roleplay that involves you. So a lot of my specific dos and don'ts boil down to "don't do things that make your IC opposition OOCly upset to be fighting you". The moment you do, you're probably going to start getting the speedbump treatment from anyone that can win pvp against you, and then you're either going to die a lot or start resorting to unfun OOC strategies like "I guess every waking moment is spent in my locked guildhouse except when I can get enough of my friends online to go fight".
Things Fun Villains Do
1) Be respectful, IC and OOC. Even if you know that your opponent is not a mechanically credible threat, behave as though they are. Treat them like you're fighting them because it's important to your character to fight them. Give them some weight, even if they're losing. Never treat your adversaries like a speedbump, the butt of a joke, or anything else otherwise worthy of nothing but scorn. Of the bunch, I think this simple point is the most important. The moment you start taking a narrative dump on your opponents, they're going to feel justified in doing the same to you. Don't gloat.
2) Be narratively and mechanically available. By narrative availability, I mean that you need to be part of the server that people see, hear, and roleplay with to some extent. You need to interact with the outside world. You need to go mingle with the playerbase, because ultimately you're playing for your impact on the playerbase.
Mechanical availability means that your RP, or at least a significant portion of it, needs to happen somewhere that people who aren't in your inner circle can plausibly, physically reach you. You need to make a response, a counterattack, etc. something that reasonable people can accomplish. This means no hiding in your unassailable guild hall, no logging on only when you can assemble a squad of 8+ people to back you up, no doing all your meetings in the Shadowvar post. You need to take some risks. If you don't, people are going to be justifiably upset with how hard you've gamified the system. And every single victory you win will be treated as that much less significant.
If you're not narratively available, it's hard for other people to be invested in your story.
If you're not mechanically available, your opponents will feel like they're not being given a fair shot at roleplaying with you.
If you ever find yourself in a spot where you've completely denied the other side a chance to strike at you, you've failed to be a fun villain.
If you're NEVER online alone, never do things alone, never interact with the module alone, you're probably not in good shape either.
Yes this means you might get attacked/lose a fight/get killed. That's good. It means you're playing the game like a normal human being, and the people you oppose will appreciate it.
3) Be enjoyable to lose to. A lot of this is being OOCly considerate to defeated opponents; there's nothing that makes someone unwilling to work with you in any fashion quite as fast as beating them and then being rude, disrespectful, and boastful about it. Yes, it might be entirely IC to do so, but you should avoid the heck out of it because it will make people OOCly furious with you. There is nothing that kills your career as a villain quite as dead as becoming so loathed that nobody wants to give you any more than a oneline sendoff when you're doing evil things.
That said, I should probably add a quick word here. I don't mean that you can't ever shove someone face-first into the trash. The nature of RP is such that, sometimes, you're probably going to have to do this. Save it for a response, though. If you're acting in a proactive fashion in any conflict (i.e. you are, narratively, the first mover) then you need to start out enjoyable. If someone else starts acting like a shitbird, you can play a little nastier. But don't be the first party in a conflict to go nasty. The villain usually has the initiative. Use it to set a positive tone.
It also does not mean that you should dress up your villain RP in silly, goofy memes to add a false lighthearted sense to it. Roleplaying that you're offering your torture victim freshly baked cookies does not make you fun to lose to, it just cheapens the story you're trying to write.
4) Respect your losses, be courteous in defeat. If someone beats your Snuggybear raw, consider giving it a little weight. Treat them with wary respect next time you run into them. Show some reluctance to cross them directly. Go buy some help to deal with the opponent for you.
5) Related to 3, resist the urge to write off your defeats as "too cheap to count". If you ever find yourself saying something like "I normally respect my pvp deaths, but I didn't get very much RP", take a moment to think, and be excruciatingly honest. Is that really true? Is there a good narrative reason you might have gotten smacked? Did it advance the story? Did you REALLY throw as many grenades as you possibly could?. Or are you mad you lost and trying to justify? If there's even a shred of sentiment that feels like "I wouldn't have lost if the other side hadn't [insert thing you're upset about here]" then you need to take a step back and probably eat the consequences anyway.
6) Fight even when victory looks uncertain. Tough fights generate good narrative. Win or lose, you've added something worthwhile to the narrative of whatever conflict you're driving. The same can't be said for villains who only stick around for the sure wins.
Things Fun Villains Don't
1) OOC raises with no further narrative purpose. I see a lot less of this these days, thankfully, but it used to be a hallmark of Arelith Villains trying to "be nice". OOC raises are a trap, pure and simple. Arelith has seen a number of really awful villains who justified some frankly atrocious behavior (trawling lowbie zones for indiscriminate kills, inconsiderate and hairtrigger pvp engagements, etc.) with the excuse of "but I raise my victims every time". This misses the whole point. If your interaction was not of high enough quality to be enjoyable, the OOC raise doesn't save it.
2) Sacrifice RP. Another trap. It might feel to you like sacrificing your PVP victims is a way to give them some roleplay after the fact, but you've boxed yourself (and them!) into a corner. Ultimately, you're going to kill them another time or emote doing so, usually after some ritualistic ego stroking bs, so you're in a corner. You're also using your opponent as a prop for the aforementioned stroking of ego (and other things), which is inconsiderate af. Finally, you're leaving your opponent with roleplay that takes on the form of "I got sacrificed to Bane last week. But I got better". This accomplishes nothing that wouldn't have happened absent the sacrifice. How much they roleplay an injury, the debilitation, etc. is up to them in either event.
Caveat: I've seen sacrifice RP done well once. And that was because it was done strictly to allow for a rescue of the victims. The "sacrificers" set up a ritual, drew it out to buy time for the rescue party to show up, and then bailed when the good guys showed up to allow them to rescue the would-be victims. That was fine.
Suggestion: if your only aim in a sacrifice RP setup is to obtain a prop to use in a ritual, then just let your victims respawn.
3) Torture. See above about using another player as a prop. Even if you keep it PG-13, it's still not gonna contribute much.
3) Griefing. It really should be obvious, but try to let your "score" be settled after you've had the fight to settle it. This means one fight per transgression, no more, as a general rule of thumb. A guy breaks into guildhouse and emotes leaving a bag of feces outside your door (real example, thanks Arelith), go ahead and flay him for it. Once.
4) Exorbitant ransoms. Ransoms may seem well and good, but try to be creative about it. Make the amount of gold a mere token, and make the ransom about encouraging someone else to swallow their pride and be a good loser, or give some other non-monetary, RP-themed concession. Remember that not every opponent you have will be wealthy. If you're ever in a position where roleplaying with you starts regularly coming with a six (or sometimes seven) figure price tag, then I'd strongly reconsider your approach, because that big a setback can sour even the best of roleplay (see above comments about being enjoyable to lose to). At least for my part, any time an interaction with a villain starts coming with a rapidly ballooning pricetag, the urge to just unga bunga my way through the rest of the conflict rises, and more than one villain in the distressingly long time I've been here has moved themselves from the "Stop to RP with this guy" category to the "Idk, I guess I'll just smack him and see what happens" category by being too expensive to roleplay interactively with.
5) Skull trophy RP. Just don't. "Eheheh, I still have ur skull" is not compelling narrative. It's not good roleplay. It doesn't make you seem any more menacing. So do yourself and everyone around you a favor: take those player skulls and slide them sensually deep into the nearest trashcan.