Villains Eat Breakfast

When I think of a "villain" to insert into a game, I do not think of someone villainous.  That is to say, I don't create a melodramatic, pantomime Disneyfied stock character with a single motivation.  Monsters suit that stereotype, because the monsters themselves are built in such a way that nuance is not part of their design.  A lich is somewhat focused.  Beholders, too, are rarely Renaissance-like in their outlook.  But intelligent, humanoid villains, the sort who had a mother (at least long enough to birth them), should not be wooden of personality.  Especially because they don't have to be.

It is supposed that to make a really good villain, or a really evil one if you prefer, it is necessary to fill them up with the worst possible qualities.  Villains are ruthless, cold, sadistic, narcissistic and whatever else we can cram into this empty-souled shell.  But I don't think of villains this way.  Villains eat breakfast, and like their eggs done in a particular way.  Villains can enjoy a good joke.  Villains get tired, and feel the need to sleep comfortably, in a comfortable bed.  It's all very tropey to have villains eat the worst-tasting gruel imaginable, never laugh and prefer sleeping on a wooden plank at night, preferably made of gnarled wood, but really.  A villain is not a monster.

Villains are people who do not think they are villains.  They're quite capable of seeing their choices as reasonable, even beneficial to others.  They've witnessed how the world works and they have a clear insight as to how to make that world better.  Obviously, the villain should be in charge.  Look who is in charge now, and how badly all this is going.

Villains can be generous.  They can make friends.  They can show loyalty to their followers.  They can make a deal and keep it ~ even if it does mean, sometimes, that it is unfortunately necessary to execute a deal-breaker.  I'm saying that, for the most part, a villain can play just like an ordinary person, who happens to believe they're right and everyone else is wrong.

This works so much better in game, because it is so much harder to kill an apparently generous, charismatic, evenly-tempermented person.  It is easy to kill a psychopath who is screaming maniacally.  But if you're not sure the person even is a villain; and you're not sure he or she isn't redeemable, then the response isn't quite so clear.  If the party blunders into a lair, only to discover it's very little like the lair they discovered, because first they must walk past soup kitchens for the poor, a temple where a priest of the character's religion takes a moment to greet them, only to find that the villain is in the process of having the docks of a nearby seaside town rebuilt after a terrible storm, it is a little harder to pull out swords and scream, "Die! Die! Die!"  Even if the players have seen evidence of some unbelievably awful thing going on just five miles away.  The connection, you see, isn't as certain.

Which should give the villain just long enough to release the killer land sharks.