Villain motivations: They’re just evil
We’ve been talking about what makes a villain tick for a while now. If the players don’t understand why your villain does what they do, the players may not engage or invest in your villain and it can even leave everyone confused as to what’s going on. It’s hard to hate a villain and be passionate about stopping them when you’re not really sure what sort of dastardly plan you’re even trying to halt. So giving your villain a plausible motivation can make all the difference.
Motives don’t need to be complicated or difficult, though. You only need enough to make the antagonist believable. Don’t over-complicate it; keep it simple and easy to convey. And if you can make your villain understandable, it’s easy to get the players hooked on them. Hooked on defeating them.
And it can be as simple as they’re evil. Yep, that basic. It just takes a little buildup.
Some villains are just bad to the bone: the Dark Side, the devil or demons. Maybe it’s just the nature of this villain to be evil. They might be a foul being from beyond the stars, or from the depths of hell, and that makes them just bad. (For a sympathetic devil / Lucifer, we’ll talk about heroic villains in another post.) All the characters and their players need to know is why their enemy is evil.
Now, some players might not even need convincing. If your villain is a demon, they may just take it as read that they’re bad and need to be fought — and that’s fine! That’s less work for you. I’ve run a lot of games that begin simply with “So, there’s this demon.” Then I just dressed it up with likable and hateable NPCs (because that’s my specialty) so that they didn’t notice how incredibly simple my villain really was. And it works really well.
And remember that good versus evil is pure hero’s journey stuff. Those archetypes and story beats hit us in some primal place that enthralls and moves us. Evil by nature doesn’t need to be cheesy. Is Emperor Palpatine goofy? Okay, maybe there’s some scenery chewing, but no one ever asks why he wants to destroy the Jedi and rule the galaxy — that’s just what evil does.
Make sure your table knows that the villain is simply evil by nature, something they can believe is evil, that can’t be negotiated with or reasoned with, something that deserves no sympathy, and there’ll be no questions about your villain. They’ll be all over killing them with fireballs, swords and chair legs.
Motivate your villain, and that motivates your player characters. It doesn’t even have to be hard. Evil must be stopped.
