How to make a GOOD D&D Villain

thank you after ten thousand years I'm free it's time to conquer her hello Heroes you are too late I'm Antonio D'Amico this is pointy hat and welcome to tip of the Hat that's right it's the other one in this series I give d d advice about whatever I feel like I can give advice about it could be dming tips a new thing to incorporate into your game or how to make a villain in my house that's right we're talking about villains today specifically how to make a good villain for your DND campaign so first up what's a villain a villain is well a villain the character that plays the role of the bad guy in a story we've kind of gone into this before in my video about making DND Rivals for your characters go what's that please but villain is a type of antagonist an antagonist is a role in the plot they are an obstacle for The protagonists Who overcome not all antagonists are villains but villains are antagonists now before the um actually in the comments come out in full force a villain can technically not be an antagonist you could have a villain protagonist but for all intents and purposes especially the purposes of this video villains are antagonists so what's the difference well before I tell you all about it let's talk about gods for a second Gods may be all-powerful but they are not above getting bored and Mortals are never more a danger of their meddling than when they are they say that to settle disputes avoid conflict or even just to kill time Gods will play games and they'll use the living as their Pawn Heroes might believe they are the ones deciding to go into a mysterious dungeon to rid it of the evil Beast lurking within when in reality their Free Will is just the influence of an all-powerful God playing the side of the heroes conversely those that humans and other civilized races called monsters might choose to defend their home from Intruders that use the title of adventurous to do as they please in the monster's own home but the monsters are also pawns Pawns of the god that is playing against the god that controls the heroes it's a callous cruel game but it does sound fun would you like to try yourself well you don't have to be a God to do so you can do so right now because art of the genre and lazy Squire are making it possible with the legend of Keepers 5e reverse dungeon Kickstarter this is an entire 350 plus page campaign book that you can play from the perspective of their Heroes delving deep into four complete dungeons for Treasure and Glory or from the perspective of the monsters that are trying to defend those dungeons from those pesky Intruders that call themselves Heroes I think this is a sick concept and out of the genre is including in their book everything you need to make it happen there are four full dungeons like I said but also 24 playable Heroes more than 50 playable monsters and 12 boss monsters that you can fight against or embody yourself the whole book is based on the video game of the same name so you can check that out too if you want but the true Jewel here are the minis oh the minis they were sculpted by lazy Squier games and there are over a hundred of these yep over a hundred minis made specifically for Legends of the keepers but that can of course be used for any game you want and they are delivering them extremely early I'm talking one month after the kickstarter campaign ends and speaking of if all of this sounds interesting to you and the visuals have been bombarding your screen with look like something you would like to check out well go ahead and do that the kickstarter is like right now it just went like like a couple of days ago and you can find it in the description of this very video thank you so much for the sponsor okay so what's a villain well a villain is more of a character archetype a villain is a character whose evil actions directly challenge the protagonist and if this sounds overly productive to you it's time to take a step back and realize that the point of a definition is to have common ground to stand on when discussing a particular topic if we were to try to Encompass every single possible exception to this our definition would just be a villain is a character and something tells me that would not be very helpful yes a character can have a sad backstory with violins playing in the background that explains why they're doing evil things like I don't know just spitballing here they hate dogs because a dog killed their mum and yep survey shows that that's still a villain a villain can be redeemed at which point they are no longer a villain a villain can do evil things because they believe that the outcome is more important and they believe that outcome to be good all those things do not disqualify the character from being a villain cool so we know that a villain is a character who's evil dastardly Deeds are the source of the protagonist's conflict and that puts them in direct opposition to the protagonist or the protagonists when talking about d d so why would we need a villain this is on honestly a fantastic question to ask yourself because here's the kicker you don't plenty of stories specifically plenty of great DND campaigns do not have villains at all I've run several campaigns without any villains I've seen or read or played several great stories that did not have one either a campaign could be about stopping a thing from happening or ensuring that a thing does indeed happen and there's no evil character twirling their mustache behind the scenes trying to make sure the bad happens this is completely fine so what's the point of adding a villain well because of what a villain themselves can add to your campaign first off villains are active they drive the plot forward they have plans and needs to make those plans happen so they are agents in the story and make decisions that drive the plot forward cut his throat stop oh wait I've changed my mind just like protagonists a campaign where you have to go to the Fort temples to gather the four orbs of the elements or else the world explodes is fine but that's a very static campaign you can add a ticking clock if you want but the disruption of the stethoscope is just a threat if the heroes don't succeed it doesn't take place in the story itself a campaign villain is constantly disrupting the status quo and going against what the heroes are trying to accomplish by generally existing and going about their evil little plans and being annoying and this generates complexity and makes for a more Dynamic story and that's really exciting go figure it's also easy to forget this when you get into the macro planning of your story but villains are characters characters have motivations backstory and inner World they have wants and needs maybe they like puppies maybe they have a weird sense of fashion or they are scared of monkeys they are characters adding a villain to your campaign is adding the only NPC whose importance to the plot is on par with that of the player characters that's it that's the only NPC for which you can do that find me about this in the comments and guess what characters are extremely compelling I don't even need to list them I bet you are thinking right now of villains of stories that you found extremely compelling that burrowed into your mind like little gross worms that made home there for much of your formative years and left far more of an impression than the protagonist of those stories God no no who let him out of his prison please imagine accessing that power in your own DND game that's sick here's the thing you're running a game for people and people are deeply compelled by a dynamic story where the status quo changes and by a character that they can latch onto even if that character is directly going against their wishes and the way they latch onto them is by pure seeing hatred pure suing hatred is a strong emotion and that's something powerful you want to evoke in your players sure stopping an asteroid from ping-ponging the world to death or stopping a big lovecraftian whatever from rising from the depths is a threat that's certainly something that would be bad if it happened but the players are not going to hate the asteroid or the Cthulhu thinking that's not a thing to hate the guy summoning the asteroid or the thing from the deep however that's somebody to hate to understand to have complicated feelings for it that's the drama baby and you know that here at pointy head Industries we're all about the drama so cool we know why we would be interested in adding a villain to our DND campaign but I can already hear you asking okay hat how would you exactly go about making this villain you speak of well I love being negative so how about we first talk about what not to do the most important thing to keep in mind about this process is that the villain kind of depends on the campaign so I can see all of them sort of working depending on the campaign in question that being said I think there are definitely some things that can either go wrong easily if you're not careful are not really suited for most campaigns or don't really take advantage of having a villain in the first place so let's get into those first up I gotta introduce you all to a little concept I call the evil lamp so you might have heard about the concept of the sexy lamp basically if a female character in a story can be effectively replaced by a sexy lamp and the story remains basically the same you might have a titsy bit of a sexy lamp situation on your hand the sexy lamp test established by Kelly pseudoconic is meant to assess if the female character in question has any agency in the story as in does she actually do anything at all or is she just a storytelling device to pass around I think this can be applied weirdly enough to some villains evil apps are the sort of villains that just sit in their Castle the Evil Lair underground Cavern system whatever and just generally do absolutely nothing at all there they might shed evil like a lampshad's light like them existing might somehow make the world worse but in terms of agency rolling the story specifically characterization they could be replaced by an evil lamp and the story will remain basically the same Cersei spends much of the last seasons of my dreaded Nemesis late stage Game of Thrones TV show as an evil lamp which is made all the more annoying after seeing her be the best character in television for like three seasons Sauron certainly feels like an evil lamp in The Lord of the Rings movies where it's not even clear if he's the one issuing commands of his own armies I wouldn't quite put Scar in The Lion King as an evil lamp as he starts as a very proactive villain you know killing his brother ensuring that the successor to the throne goes on sabbatical forever but he does spend the rest of the movie after that just sitting on Pride Rock and his evil makes the land go bad The Lion King has some truly wild exceptionalist themes to it anyway you get it evil land why is that bad well you know how I said that villains are often active the evil lamp sure isn't they created a crap sack world and they have very much accomplished what they set out to do so they are just not going going to be out and about making sure that their evil Deeds bear fruit secondly most of these guys can easily end up feeling like non-characters I feel like you can really really feel this with Sauron yes once again I understand that Sauron was way more of a character in The silmarillion I am not talking about that I'm talking about the movies no whatever that thing was during The Hobbit movies sure doesn't count many of these guys end up feeling like forces of nature rather than characters in their own right we're one step above asteroid that destroys the dinosaurs as a villain here once again this is fine I like all examples I named above the reason why I caution against this is that if you felt like you wanted to add a villain to your campaign this is a great way to not reap any of the benefits of that rhyme of the frost made it had its own evil lamp I don't really want to get into detail since you know spoilers but she's not particularly compelling which is fine she was meant to be an evil lamp but still if you're putting a villain in your campaign and you go for this you are basically for going 90 of what makes villains interesting they won't feel like a character and they won't move the plot forward themselves and break the status quo by being a dynamic part of the story it's fine do this if you really really want to concentrate on the world itself rather than any characters but you still want a big dumb bombastic boss fight at the end okay so that's evil lamps secondly a thing to avoid is having the wrong scale ability for your campaign this is harder to mess up but I have seen it and oh God does it get bad contrary to your first instinct go too big in villainy and your villain just ends up feeling like a caricature if your villain spends their evening starving orphans and making widows cry and destroying ecosystems and raising villages to the ground and then destroying the world as we know it before having dinner I can guarantee you your players will mentally check out of that mess very fast the villain might be theoretically scary in that they are very powerful but your players will absolutely call your bluff on this because you will never unleash this god of death and destruction on them until they have at least a bit of a chance of either escaping or killing it so you have written yourself into a corner this guy literally cannot show up to turbine your players and the villain ends up feeling unrealistic too evil to feel real conversely go too small and your players are about to outgrow them or just never actually feel threatened by them you gotta find a sweet spot for the magnitude of your campaign let's get an example of this Cruella Deville no not that one the good one yeah that's the stuff if we examine our skill of villainy as a whole Cruella Falls somewhat towards the bottom yes she's not nice she has some creative ideas as to what to do with puppies which is akin to murder in my book but we are not talking world ending threat here not even close so why does she feel like such a good villain then well because her level of villainy fits the scale of the film 101 Dalmatians is a story about some very fertile dogs and their struggles with being born British that's a small scale the film needed a villain lower in the villainy scale to fit its story Rasputin in Anastasia is a great example of a villain whose level of villainy does not fit the story in the slightest Anastasia is not nearly as good as you remember it sorry keeping your level of villainy according to the story you're making at the table might be making your villain grow in power along with the players or have the Blood start as powerful but somehow unable to do all that they want to do until they gather all the chaos emeralds or whatever or hell maybe do start off small have the players defeat what they thought was the villain and have them find out that they were just the second in command to a much more dangerous actual villain that's a really good way to keep interest high in very long campaigns Maleficent in the original Kingdom Hearts is very much playing this role and it works until you know Kingdom Hearts does this and finally since we're on the Disney train we gotta talk about Quest villains since Frozen did this we're seeing a trend and it sure is getting stale twist villains as their name implies are villains that are not telegraphed to be villainous from the start the fact that they are the villain is a big reveal they are very invoked right now Disney refuses to do anything but this selfishly depriving us of villain songs and cool character designs as to how this pertains to DND twins villains are not inherently a bad idea but I feel like if you're just now thinking about adding a villain to your campaign or you tried before and it didn't work maybe don't go for this one I've tried these in d d and they are okay with campaigns focused on a mystery who is behind the X turns out that guy was I've been thinking of making a whole video about how to write mysteries in d d because I truly feel it's one of the things that is the easiest to mess up so sound off in the comments if you feel like you want that but here's some advice as it pertains to villains in order for the reveal of the twist villain to feel satisfying you need to Telegraph it you need to make it possible for your players to guess who the person behind the x is if you don't then the reveal will absolutely a hundred percent of the time fall completely flat the whole point of the twist villain is the big payoff at the end of that reveal that moment where your players start to tie all the loose threads together after you reveal who the villain is and every piece of the puzzle falls into place if you haven't telegraphed this at all your players will just meet that reveal without resounding okay and let me tell you that sure is not fun to go through for neither you nor them but of course if you do that and you have some true crime addicts as your players they might just actually guess who the villain is before you intend to reveal them and then you just have to sit there hearing them explain to the rest of the group why they think that X is the bad guy knowing that they are right and then what the knowledge that you were thanking all of it in a ruined reveal is just sitting there lingering over the table like an uncomfortable fart and the magic of the reveal why not totally ruined is replaced by smuckness get ready for some I knew it I guessed it called it not fun plus guessing this sort of thing in that two hour film hits very different than guessing this in a campaign that has to go for like eight more four hour sessions basically if you choose a Twist villain you are giving up all the emotional catharsis that your players would feel by having a clearly established villain that they can spend the whole campaign hating in exchange for the promise of a big reveal that could go very wrong very easily thread carefully I would honestly steer clear of twis villains except for small arcs if you really want to do this run a murder mystery Adventure while in the context of a long-running campaign to scratch that itch and maybe wait for my video on that but okay we have gone through what not to do when making villains so I think we're ready for the medium potatoes how exactly do we go about making them let's go so if we review what I said before we can very easily make a sort of Baseline checklist that this villain could hit to work in a DND campaign to its full potential one the villain must be active you want your villain to be an important player in the story someone that is constantly making moves to advance their goals this does not mean you don't get to start your campaign set in a world where the villain runs everything and is a source of all evil or whatever look at straw but Olivia is a hellhole of his own creation but he's actively looking for something if you know you know having an active villain means that the campaign becomes sort of a dialogue and the status quo changes constantly did you set up a thing where if the player finds the four Chaos Emeralds they can stop the villain have the villain find the first one have the players find the first one and then have the villain send someone after them to get it back this is what you can access by having an active villain an NPC that is trying their hardest to oppose the players and a story that evolves and keeps them on their toes that's an active villain number two the villain must be present a good way to avoid the evil lamp is for your players to meet the villain have their presence not just felt but you know be there physically have your players interact with your villain have the consequences of their actions clear for the party to see some of the coolest villains in fiction literally hang out with the party you can find many excuses to do this maybe the villain is this nihilistic monster that is secretly hoping the party may actually pose a challenge to their God to your powers and is content to let them grow in powers of the fight between the two might awaken something in them I don't know you obviously don't have to go for something exactly like this but having the presence of the villain as a through line in your campaign will reap great results once again Strat is not just a spooky guy that stays in a castle the players are literally meant to meet him several times during the campaign the villain doesn't have to show up constantly but their minions can't show up the right-hand men can come up to stop the party's plans we're trying to avoid having them parked in their Castle sitting wide so the party can completely forget about them so have them be present number three the villain must be personal this one is the trickiest but it's also the one with the most payoff you know the corny movie line now it's personal we want that if the players show up somewhere and the villain has [ __ ] up a bunch of stuff for friendly NPCs that's sad and all whatever the players will most likely help them if they are not you know but people to play D D with but there's no personal pull to do so nothing is in it for them other than the vague it's the right thing to do and like fake money the way to avoid this is of course to personally connect your villains to your players there are like a thousand ways to do this and none of them are necessarily good or bad or even mutually exclusive so let's go over some of them my personal favorite and the one that reaps the greatest results in my book is digging through the 25 pages of backstory your players gave you and ask yourself where's the hook here that I can connect back to my villain now let me be clear you don't have to make absolutely everything about your player's backstory is connected to a single villain there's no better way to make something feel forced than doing this a good way to mix it up is to give the villain its own little squad or second in commands or at least given what is often referred to as a dragon no not one of those well I guess they could be one of those well whatever that's not the point a dragon is the word for a villain second in command think Darth Vader for papapoutine spoilers for a movie from the 70s that has absolutely entered the public Consciousness to the point where the spoiler is a boomer meme at this point I guess Luke's backstory is not particularly connected to poutine but rather to Vader Leia is the one more intrinsically connected to Palpatine and she's even connected to Vader by you know blood and had is there as you can see giving a villain a second in command or several gives you additional threats to pull and makes it easier to tie your players motivations and backstories to the villain in question another great way to do this I do this all the time is to straight up tell your players what the setting is who the villain is and let them figure out how they are connected to that villain in character creation I feel like people often forget about this option I personally love it I guess some might find this too restraining whatever I disagree but everyone is different the traditional way of tying your players to the villain is for the villain to show up towards the beginning of the campaign and just off a player and I hate this don't do this get some help in fact as a general rule never ever show up to a session with the explicit intent to kill a player character no matter how much you think the story would benefit from it you are not writing a book you are not writing anything period you are sitting down with your friends to create a story together the PCS are not your characters to Puppeteer around you are giving them a framework from which to make their own decisions about their characters the only way I can see this actually working is by talking with a player and offering their character death as a possibility and them agreeing a slightly nicer way to do this as to have the big bad evil guy show up and almost kill them but deciding not to do so at the last second all in all I think that tying the elements of the PC's backstory to the villain and their other links or presenting the players with the setting and the villain from the point of character creation is the better way to go about this or maybe some of you in the comments have a different way to go about the goal is to say make the players feel personally motivated to defeat the villain Okay so we've gone through why including a villain might be a good idea for your campaign we've gone through what we shouldn't do when making a DND villain and we've gone through what we should do but talk is cheap and my videos are very long so how about we make a villain okay so I know I've just said a whole bunch of times that your villain should fit your campaign so what campaign are we making a villain for let's say that for this exercise I may making a long-term campaign with plenty of political Intrigue just a whole bunch of big macro politics that the players have to keep in mind when making decisions because I like that and not yours okay instantly my mind goes to the villain being the leader of a great political power but this is the indeed so we have to put some spooky magic [ __ ] happening with that I also want to show that a villain can have a reason for the villainy while still being very much a villain so let's add that to the mix okay we have our starting point let's go make a villain [Music] the country of navaria was always surrounded by Titans compared to all of its neighbors nevaria was smaller poorer and with basically no military might to speak of most of ourans belong to Clans with wildly different cultures among whom the Wisconsin infighting for land and resources some ending in all-out war this kept the country separated the only unifying threat being the navaran royal family an institution to which all Clan leaders were supposed to answer to but the navaron King was the leader of the country only in name he was kind merciful and weak and the clan leaders challenged or ignore them without repercussion the queen who married the king to help her father one of the clan leaders Guru to resent her husband and his incompetence and so she raised her son the prince to be the perfect heir to the throne the prince was made to travel to neighboring countries as soon as he was able to talk visiting different royal families and heads of state he was sent to the best foreign schools squired for famous Knights and learned everything he could ever learn to be a better King than his father the queen made sure that he had understood the precarious state of Nevada how all their neighbors were stronger fiercer and had better leaders the children of other states laughed at the state of the prince's Homeland or felt pity for him because of where he came from or made jokes about his father the prince grew up simultaneously hating his country and wishing nothing more than to change it to make navaria a nation that could stand among all others with pride nobody other than the queen knows exactly what happened during his stay abroad but the prince would stay late at night looking for odd books that talked about forbidden Arcane rituals some say that one of those late nights he made contact with something something outside of this realm although nobody has ever been able to prove that such a thing ever happened the prince came back to nevaria a grown man change in some way that was hard to a certain but plain to see he immediately proposed his father of the throw and got to work making his own vision of navaria a reality through whatever means necessary with the help of his mother's Clan and the royal family he squashed the second largest clan in navaria and forced the others to bend the knee to him the Gladiators that refuse were unceremoniously put to the sword next he set out to wipe every difference between the former Clans the prince dreamed of a unified navaran cultural identity and so he erased every tradition every religion every language every difference between the different people of navaria you would think that face with a tyranny the people of navaria would rise against their new Tyrant Prince but the prince ensured that they couldn't right as he rose to power something Rose alongside him a new plague unlike anything seen before monsters that could not be defeated by conventional means and all those that fell to them were turned into those same monsters in return navarons called these monsters Angels because of their Celestial appearance nobody knew how to stop them nobody except for the prince and his forces the prince said that a new God spoke to him and gave him the power to destroy these monsters only a unified of Arya United under the princess banner and the new religion to this mysterious God represented by the prince himself could withstand the attacks of these angels most of the people of levaria readily accepted the new rule and those that didn't were cast aside the walls of the new cities where they would fall to the angels and join their forces before long the face of the country had changed completely navaria went from a home to diverse practices languages cultures rulers and people to a homogenous whole unified under one Banner one religion and one ruler many embraced this new navaria While others worked in the shadows to keep the old ways alive and fight against the despotic rule of the prince but the prince's Ambitions don't end at the borders of his country the threat of these angels that suspiciously arose as he did is now extending from navaria to neighboring countries and the prince is ready to help his neighbors fight this new threat if they bend the knee to the nevarian crown that's cool I think Imagine The Campaign you can play with that villain it doesn't take a genius to see that the princess Behind These Angels were at least connected to them how did he manage that what are they what are the Angels how are the old Clan leaders taking to this new rule did some join the resistance imagine how easy it would be to tie the PCS to this Villa to get that personal connection to the prince a PC could be an old clan leader trying to defeat The Prince and preserve their culture from being completely wiped out by the new rule or the daughter of an old clan leader that was said to inherit the title of leader of her clan all those would lead to Great sources of personal conflict directly tied to the villain you also get plenty of fun mysteries for your players to solve like what exactly are the Angels and what is their connection to the prince the prince is clearly an active villain so you could keep your campaign to navaria and have it be about the nevarian resistance or it could start that way and then evolve to involve the neighboring countries and how they deal with the angel threat of course the prince as a villain has been specifically made to fit a political Intrigue focused campaign but I hope you can see how I use the principles outlined in this video to make this guy so you can go about making your own villain that fits your campaign or Hell use this one as a springboard I don't care I literally do these so you all use them it's just a shame that all this info is just in video for you don't have like a nice little dot with everything condensed there so you can use it in your desively DM schemes except you do because I made it and it's in the description of this very video for completely free so go out there practice your best maniacal laugh and curb stomp your players in your fresh new disconcertainty sexy villain and that's it that's the villain video you did it you made it to the end congrats tip of the ad is always an undertaking writing wise and they take like 10 times longer to write so I hope you like this one of course I love villains I love Disney villains specifically so that's what was on the list since I started this series I do think they add a whole lot to your story if you do them right but I also think they're easy to mess up so I hope this helps if it does let me know also soon enough it's gonna be like one year since we started all of this one year since the channel came to be somehow we're still not even one year old we're still babies if you want to contribute to raise this baby and to the baby shower show the channel to your friend to your mom to your dad to your gas station clerk so thank you everybody that has shared the videos and stuff still working on that 100K special I I can assure you it's coming it's just taking a long time because I wanted to make it good let's hope I don't get to 200 before that I don't think I will but that would be funny alright make sure to wash any fruits and vegetables before eating them my mom keeps telling me a girl died from eating strawberries without washing them it's like one of those things that moms say that just like imprints into your brain forever and now you always think about it okay I'm leaving bye love you mwah I love you all you're beautiful and never forget that everyone is a princess

Channel: Pointy Hat

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Keywords: DnD, D&D, DnD with a twist, 5e, TTRPG, How to, Illustration, Dungeons and Dragons, D&D with a twist, d&d battle music, pointy hat, animation, rant, hat, homebrew, trailer, D&D trailer, OneD&D, one d&d, onednd, OGL, SRD, Wizards, wizards of the coast, WotC, WOC, OGL drama, bard, bard lich, dnd, interview, D&D villains, DnD villains, how to make a villain, how to create villains, villain, villains, BBEG, Big Bad Evil, Big Bad Evil Guy, Campaign Villain

Id: 2GP04EzrD9Q

Length: 27min 36sec (1656 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 24 2023