Villain motivations: Heroism
A good villain is one of the pillars of a campaign. Without a strong one, your game can collapse under the weight of a failing metaphor. Unlike my strained metaphors, an antagonist needs to make sense, and you need the players to buy it. If they understand the villain, you add a dimension to your game.
Everyone is the hero of their own story, and that can include the Big Bad of your game. There are some easy examples that players are probably familiar with. In Marvel’s Black Panther, the Killmonger’s goal was to address systemic worldwide racial injustice. That’s a truly noble goal. Most people could get behind him… If not for his plan; distributing weapons to embedded spies for the purpose of a violent world-wide war.
In Avengers, Thanos had a noble goal, too. In a (theoretically) resource-starved galaxy, he wanted to address need and the destruction that comes from people who don’t have enough. Again, a nice idea, if only his plan wasn’t to just kill half of all living people so they would use fewer resources. I mean, that plan is riddled with problems anyway, but no one can argue that heroes need to stop him.
It’s about the ends versus means. A villain with a noble goal that uses terrible methods to achieve it is understandable, even sympathetic, like Killmonger. You might even be able to get your player characters debating whether or not the villain is right. Does the establishment need to be torn down in order to build something better? Or can it be saved? How many people have to die for a new future?
In extreme cases, the PCs might even join the antagonist! It also gives you a unique option — what if the characters confront the villain, appealing to their noble purpose, and they talk the villain down? Instead of a boss fight, you might be able to engineer a dramatic debate, with the city / world / universe at stake! You can even still punch it up with something like “But I’ve already triggered the Armageddon device, and I saw to it that there’s no way to disarm it. Unless… We’ll have to work together…!”
Heroics might take a little more thought than something like greed; you want a goal that a hero might pursue and then give them the worst means of achieving it you can think of. But some of the best examples of this kind of villain — according to box office gross — aren’t terribly complex, yet they resonated with audiences and it made them memorable. Your villains can be memorable, too.
