How do you make a truly intimidating BBEG who literally captures everyone with his presence alone?
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How do you make a truly intimidating BBEG who literally captures everyone with his presence alone?
>BBEG
Only the gayest gays still say "big bad evil guy".
Just say villain like a non-queer.
>still seething /tg/ won't do what you say
lol
I can't believe BBEG UGH guy still posts on /tg/ after all these years.
>"this troper can't believe it!!!"
tvtropes has been the butthole of jokes since before reddit
>pretending it's just the one guy
newbie
>troper
what the frick is a "troper"?
>duck duck go's it
>An office-book formerly used in the Western Church, containing the tropes and sequences.
What?
I repeat, newbie.
>calling anyone who uses duck-duck-go a newbie
lol
Says the brainlet obese loser who still says BBEG when normal mentally well-adjusted and physically healthy people say villain.
>still seething, this many years later, his attempt to force jargon to change failed
lol
The term "BBEG" is all inclusive though:
Big Bad Evil Guy
Big Bad Evil Girl
Big Bad Evil Gay
what about BBET
Big Black Entertainment Televisions are a bit more complicated and only seasoned GMs should try to run them
"BBEG" originates from Star Trek fan zines in the 80s and referred to Q, a character who debuted late that decade
>he doesn't even know about Ugh
That's not true, and would still be gay if it was.
BBEG was coined by a user on the RPG.net forum, where they also used their own jargon like "Drow Lesbian Stripper Ninja."
Hell, Q is not even a villain, let alone the main villain.
Q is not evil though
Frick you
give it a rest loser
Fpbp
>literally captures everyone with his presence alone
>literally
>captures
Only way I can see it is with some kind of supernatural effect that leaves people paralyzed or maybe a kind of psionic that projects his charisma into tangible force. Not that hard to pull off, really, but might feel a bit bullshit depending on the setting.
I honestly had no idea what BBEG meant.
>BBEG
Become an hero
Well appearance is half of it.
But since you don't really convey that in ttrpgs, it's all personality.
Always at ease and speak little, but speak casually when they do.
Come off as amiable and friendly, but do something grisly or otherwise frightening without breaking stride or seeming emotional.
He did it, Negan did it, Luther does it, it's a really common trope in western comics.
It may seem counterintuitive to have them act so casually but in this format there is little way to hammer in aesthetic without going on and on laboriously about what he looks like or how cool he is.
And having them overexplain themselves or give speeches makes them seem like wank gabby jobbers.
Inscrutably friendly with the character dissonance of wanton brutality/cruelty.
The players never divorce the GM from the npcs entirely, so you can't just wordswordswords him into being something. So have the words be few and the descriptions clipped so that they are left to wonder, since the mind's eye is god, have him fill it. Not the ear's eye.
>But since you don't really convey that in ttrpgs,
This is literally why character art threads exist Anon, so you can do exactly that. I have thousands of images saved.
yeah a static image that the players see once or twice and a bitty version on a token in the already twice disconnected netgame
it doesnt carry the weight for the players as it does for the dm fawning over it in an open media viewer
>>BBEG
Ugh.
>tvtropes homosexualry
>meme
It predates TVTropes by like ten years.
prove it
earliest recording of it I can find on the internet is from 2001
three years before TVTropes
but not everything from earlier than that ended up on the internet
looks like it comes from people who actually played games, which explains why /tg/ finds it rage-inducing, much like how tvtropes people find people who actually enjoy media rage-inducing
chud dates from the 80s, you’d be a disingenuous homosexual to pretend it isn’t redditspeak
K
glad you agree, now frick off
nah I'm still here bro
>I claim it for reddit, thus it must be reddit speak!
frick off you reddit chud.
I've been reading it as BERG
newbie
simmer down
That doesn't even make sense.
You have to go back.
>-BERG
Checks out.
Urge to Reich intensifies
Homelander in the series is literally 100% worse than he is in the comics.
They've butchered a lot of his character, and Stillwell's.
Homelander in the comics is just crazy unhinged guy.I haven't seen the third season yet but until now it has been 100% better. For example the airplane scene. Yes, having him callously condemning an entire plane of people to death while refusing to even save the kids because they would be witness of his screw up is less entertaining than him blasting people while screaming FRICKING Black person, but it's also a lot better from a character standpoint.
We get actual pathos from him in season 3
Glad to hear it. I have heard only good things about season 3 so I can't wait to see it. Homelander was good but not amazing in season 1 and 2, so happy to know they are building on his character.
Homelander gets a lot in Season 3, though some of it is a bit mishandled.
Every other character feels like they fell into a basket of generic TV show tropes though, even to the point that more than half of the season is just treading water.
It has gone from
Season 1 being a good show
To Season 2 being a decent show
To Season 3 being good for a TV show.
So if you like TV series it's still solid, but if you're one of the people who cares not for the format it's getting worse.
>Every other character feels like they fell into a basket of generic TV show tropes though, even to the point that more than half of the season is just treading water.
Thank fricking god it wasn't just me. It was still a good watch, but half the time it just felt incredibly fricking generic, and everything you thought would happen did.
>season 3
>I have heard only good things about season 3 so I can't wait to see it
it was okay, the final battle was shit though and arguably ruins every character except Soldier Boy
>Final Battle of Season 3
>Turns out Frenchie and Kimiko don't really care that much about toppling vought
>Turns out MM's criticisms of Butcher willing to sacrifice everyone for his own goals were completely full of shit
>Turns out Butcher is no longer the "accomplish the task at any cost" character
>Starlight actually gets power from electricity, which maybe I'm misremembering but I thought her powers had an EMP effect but didn't care how much power was around
>Hughie is still Hughie but his character arc concluded over a season ago
>Homelander keeps flipflopping because apparently the showrunner is George Lucas during the prequel trilogy era
>The ending might as well have been a marvel movie
It was actually disgusting how bad that last episode was.
I have to admit I was pretty pissed off when Maeve somehow survives getting nuked by Soldier Boy and then falling like thirty stories after losing her powers.
That not only pissed me off but caused my to wonder even more
>Soldier Boy is established to depower and BBQ people
>Kimiko survived, showing that either it has to be a sustained amount of damage to kill, or there's a certain toughness threshold that leads you to surviving his blast
>Herogasm had not only considerable amounts of survivors, but showed that The Deep who was in the building when it happened, wasn't even depowered, suggesting that the AoE of Soldier Boy's blast isn't very big given how much of the place he beamed
>Butcher and MM were also on the upper floor and caught in the damage the blast caused but not the blast itself and were fine
>Butcher being aware of ALL of this still freaks out that the blast might kill Ryan, despite the fact he has no reason to believe that Soldier Boy would even aim at a little kid, and also has reason to believe Homelander/Ryan could easily survive it
And then at the end we get
>Even Maeve can survive a full strength blast at point blank range
It completely deflates Butcher as a character, and the only thing I can think of is them saying the Temp V had fricked his brain to the point that he couldn't think about the obvious.
I don't mind that they gave Maeve a happy ending, but you're right that it does make her and Butcher look even dumber for not letting Soldier Boy blast Homelander and Ryan. Based on what we've seen of his power, they would have both survived but lost their superpowers, which is the best possible outcome for the kid.
The worst part for me was the 'reunion' scene where they all act like Victoria Neuman is a bigger threat to anything than Homelander is.
She is though, the sheen of HL's supposed invulnerability has worn off and now that they know he could be beaten with some work he's ultimately just a guy who could kill people if he's upset (which is true of all guys) while Vicky would have access to the levers of power in the greatest nation in the world
HL just did the "I could kill someone in NYC and be applauded" literally. He's still far more dangerous for at least the next 8 months in setting and likely far longer unless the VN party has a super majority in Congress
>not realizing that Soldier Boy's De-Powering Powers are the fix to all homelander problems
See, this is an example of something I'm thinking about calling "Resolution" (as in, screen ppsi), how sharp the script is allowed to be, or the degree to which things happen because the story demands it (conflict ball, idiot ball). Something like a Cohen Brothers film is very high-resolution. I suppose absurdist comedies or cartoons are places where you're allowed to have low-resolution writing.
But now most of the time I can't tell if the characters are acting stupid because they're meant to be stupid, or because the writers are stupid, or because the writers were lazy and think the viewers are stupid.
It's just drama for the sake of drama, because otherwise if the characters made the right choice and actually acted in their best interest/did the obvious smart thing, the show would be fricking over. Which means instead of coming up with a plot that doesn't have the potential to end earlier than they want it to, they just have the characters do whatever it takes to make things last longer, even if it doesn't make sense.
I'm gonna take the writers are lazy for $20, but there's a good chance they think making all the characters waffle on something that feels pretty black and white at this point (kill fricking Homelander so we can all get on with our lives without the literal threat of tyranny) to be interesting character growth.
>because the writers are stupid, or because the writers were lazy and think the viewers are stupid.
Usually it's a combination of those two.
Lost established that as long as you have a strong first season, everything else just needs to drag out the drama and have the occasional reveal/weirdness to keep people talking about it so you can keep the money coming in.
As a result it encourages lazy writing that assumes the audience is stupid, but even when they do try to be clever usually it's with the least research possible, such as MM's OCD.
How much damage has LOST done to television?
Here's my rule for streaming-era shows:
The first season is written by humans
The second season is written by interns
the third season is written by an AI
Lost pretty much redefinied how you are making a TV series. It's actually way, way, waaaay better nowdays, because in the direct aftermath of Lost's first two seasons, we had an entire EXPLOSION of "mystery box" series, where you had this entire big-ass mystery build up in first 1d3 episodes and adding new and new separate puzzles each episode, answering about 1 question to 10 new made...
... and then of course never reveal what it was all about, because it got cancelled after 1st or at best 2nd season, while also NEVER planning ahead what it was even supposed to be, since why bother, viewers will scoop it out
But a list of things Lost introduced or showed that can be used
>"Mystery box" approach
>Mid-season finales
>Extensive flashbacks as source of easy and cheap drama
>Killing characters left and right for easy and cheap drama
>Filler episodes build entirely out of cheap drama to paddle out the season with requested number of episodes
>Said fillers being set in a row, something that was absolutely haram before
>Zero planning ahead in an unprecedented ever before level, despite telling a continuous, non-episodic story
>Allowing writing team to change between seasons or even during a season
>Teaching executives that if the professional writers go on a strike, you can replace them with literally whoever you want and nobody will mind
Pretty much everything bad with modern TV series started with Lost, but before anyone realised, it was waaaay too late.
>Lost pretty much redefinied how you are making a TV series. It's actually way, way, waaaay better nowdays, because in the direct aftermath of Lost's first two seasons, we had an entire EXPLOSION of "mystery box" series, where you had this entire big-ass mystery build up in first 1d3 episodes and adding new and new separate puzzles each episode, answering about 1 question to 10 new made...
A little bit pre-Lost in the UK we had Spooks (released in the US as MI-5 cause apparently it's racist or someshit).
Was a little bit better at actually completing plotlines than lost but had similar choices (which sort of worked given the technothriller setting). The Early to Mid 2000s were full of that sort of shit though.
>Starlight actually gets power from electricity, which maybe I'm misremembering but I thought her powers had an EMP effect but didn't care how much power was around
You've misremembered it, she always had this weakness to her power all the way back in season 1 and lack of electricity in easy to tap way means she's just a chick that punches hard
Other than that, agreed on every single fricking point. I knew the finale will be a shitshow after learning they renewed the series for season 4, but this was beyond awful.
>lack of electricity in easy to tap way means she's just a chick that punches hard
That's not fair. She can also get punched really hard.
Honestly I think The Boys is one of the few examples of an adaptation being better than the source material.
Yeah the comics were entertaining but most of the characters were pretty shallow at best and the jokes got a bit repetitive
Consider that Garth Ennis HATES superheroes BECAUSE he views them as boring, shallow, and moronic (yet writes Superman, of all heroes, well and respect Superman because Superman does not under estimate humans) and you see why that is. Guy has a fuming hatred of Wolverine in particular but likes and writes Punisher wonderfully.
Ennis comics, by and large, are a complete fricking mess but when viewed as the X-rated Michael Bay of Comic Books, you get a better sense of his style. Sure, it's dumb as hell, crude, unnecessarily vulgar and over-the-top, but you will be entertained (or vomit in the case of Crossed).
>X-rated Michael Bay of Comic Books
Checks out.
I dunno, one of the things I liked was Homelander being an everyday self-serving sociopath before being gaslit into unhingement. The least stable about him otherwise would have been daddy issues and since that slimy frick was even more self-interested that'd probably be a "good" influence overall in terms of acting sane.
I've always thought of him as a 'good ideas executed extremely badly' kind of author.
Admittedly I haven't read a whole lot of Ennis, but from what I have read it feels like he has a lot of ideas and can't really tell good ones apart from the bad ones, and also can't tell when he's going overboard and ruining his own ideas. He seems like the kind of guy who really needs someone to keep him in check and to shoot down his shittier ideas.
From his works I've read (which are quite a few) I'd say your bang on the money. Guy's a fountain if ideas both good and bad and doesn't know when he's worn out a joke.
I still think only the first season of The Boys was good, regardless of what happens in the comics; its carried by it's concept and the characters as characters, and as portrayed by the actors. Worldbuilding and consistency took a nosedive, and everything since then has been a waste of time.
Season 3 had a few good bits, but the final episode was insultingly anti-climatic.
I'm also just sick to fricking death of the #CurrentYear signalling, and having to throw in all the bad guys being racist. I wouldn't mind it so much if there was more even-handedness; they really couldn't throw in a sanctimonious fake-male-feminist supe?
The racism isn't #current year, it's Ennis having a raging hatred of the American conservative in general, the original books make the Vought as NeoCons linkage very clear.
Also the best thing he ever wrote was .303 and that blames Dubya for 9/11, these are two separate things but it makes his pov pretty clear.
He's a bit more than "just an unhinged guy"
They significantly depowered him which drastically changes his character interactions especially with Stillwell.
>They significantly depowered him which drastically changes his character interactions especially with Stillwell
It feels more like they just amped everyone up (except Noir obviously). The damage he and Maeve did to each other and their surroundings during the final battle at the tower was consistent wih the damage done in the fight between him and Noir in the book- i.e. damage to each other but superficial environmental damage.
Noir was butchered worse.
they just made noir an actual character.
Which is precisely counter to his role in the comics.
Noir should never be a character - he's a tool.
i like that they do their own thing. I read the comic 3-4 times and would rather get a new story.
"Presence" is a very hard thing to describe if you don't have it yourself but if you want your players to see your "BBEG" similar to Homelander, have them go up against some kind of a boss that kicks their asses but for some reason let's them live them have them witness the BBEG squashing him like a bug for some other reason. Its a little bit of a cliche but that's because it's such an easy effective storytelling method.
Homelander is a moronic superman. Instead of kryptonite he has many dysfunctions including a need for affection (since he was raised like a lab rat) and together with being a corporate asset with an entirely fabricated biography which he has to maintain it's a major weakness that's used against him by other characters.
Work backwards from what you want your players to experience as they work to overcome your antagonist.
Give them some hook that ties into that emotion, if you want your players to fear this guy then spend the time demonstrating that they should be afraid.
Then you make a character with genuine power and capability, and then find a good reason for said character to be opposed by your players.
Never call it a BBEG unless you want everyone to expect the final boss from a video game.
No
Well how about you just copy a big bad from your favourite TV show except they're even stronger x1000.
Just do what the adventure book says genius.
Do you also keep a copy of "How to take a dump and wipe your arse; 3rd edition" in your bathroom?
the instructions are on the paper, moron
Build such a myth around the character that when they actually make an appearance everyone is soo convinced that they're this massive character that they're in awe.
by capturing everyone with your own presence
Test
Pic related.
Air of mystery, make him make an impression on people when he's seen.
Oh look, he made this thread again. Does this series has some weird release schedule that you're always making those threads Wednesday or Thursday?
If you really want to know?
Look up James Spader and the stuff he has been in. A lot of it is crap TV shows, and he never really got the big kind of roles his acting talent deserved because he doesn't have the look for it, but the dude knows how to captivate people with his presence and delivery.
If I remember right, they said that was an issue on the Age of Ultron set, since very few of the actors Marvel has are used to working with someone of his caliber they kept staring at Spader instead of at the prop that said where Ultron's face would be.
>because he doesn't have the look for it,
Except he had the perfect looks for it back in the 90s. The reason why his career went nowhere was because he quite literally chose to do so, always picking the contracts that didn't conflict with his life and always picking only one at a time.
And given that basically entire Marvel movies cast is made from either action movie guys OR literally pretty faces for marketing, it's not that hard to impress on them. We are WAAAY past the era of actors that actually finished an acting school or even a weekend course. It's just faces now.
Homelander has zero presence, his only thing is being a mentally unstable psychopath with enough power to kill anything within and outside of sight. He forces people to be on edge, but he has no charisma.
He has charisma when he's (knowingly) on camera. It's actually pretty cool how different he comes across when we look at the in-universe footage of him versus how he comes across even when we the actual audience see him being filmed.
That dude who plays him is pretty small which I don't like but he makes up for it in how well he plays looking great from a distance.
>truly intimidating BBEG
Pic unrelated then?
I'm not sure how he pulled it off exactly but somehow despite being a small a pretty unassuming looking guy I was always impressed with the sense of subtle menace this guy could pull off
Is that the glowBlack person from B5?
One of them.
Bester, the mind-gangstalker.
More or less, guy can get you for literal thought crimes
>How do you make a truly intimidating BBEG who literally captures everyone with his presence alone?
Have him wander into small businesses and make vague threats with a slight accent
This guy has the exact same hairstyle and presence as another guy from a different movie that I've never been able to find after watching it the first time. He kidnapped a girl and was driving her somewhere to kill her because he wanted to know if he was capable of doing something evil.
I will find this movie for you anon
Thanks anon
Intimidation is to threaten. That requires 1. power, and 2. that others believe you are willing to use that power against them. Initially, you can pull that off through charisma, but as time goes by you need to PROVE to others that you have power and will use it.
Presence is something else, it's about social/intellectual influence. It's about being someone who says and does things of consequence. When you speak, people must believe that you mean what you say, that what you say addresses something consequential, and that your words are worth heeding. When you open your mouth, if people can't or won't ignore you due to your words rather than your volume, then you have presence.
I'll assume you mean captivates - holds people's attention.
The easiest but lamest way is to just describe NPCs acting like he's the most important guy in the room and say that PCs find themselves drawn to him and distracted from other things.
A harder way is to actually act like someone with that sort of presence. Stand up straight, move with confidence, make eye contact when speaking to someone, and talk like everyone loves to hear you speak. This may require some practice, and is very heavy RP-focused.
You are probably going to want something between these two extremes.
Keep people's attention on the guy even when he's not doing anything particularly interesting - he's just a guy who is interesting, even when he's doing normal shit and maybe he does it in a cool but non-mysterious way. But don't overdo it.
Think about the difference between someone making a speech or giving a lecture who presents the subject in a way that makes you interested, even if you don't care vs makes you not care, even if you did previously. You want such a character to be the first type.
>what is steel compared to the hand that holds it
Ask some stone age tribesman that after a fricker wielding steel weapons and wearing steel armour fricks his shit up.
I wouldn't say intimidating but the CEO dude is far more evil than Homelander who, as he put it, didn't do anything that anyone with powers couldn't have done themselves.
The CEO dude walked out of the whole thing untouched, ruined a number of people's lives in the process and goes on to try the whole thing again and people sit there jaws agap that a super-human frick boy shoved his dick in the head of the president.
This mindset doesnt always work. I've found that certain players the more you try to have an intimidating villain the more wienery and persnickering they get.
They need a personal relationship with the villain in order to gain fear and hate. We often make fun of edgelords but a villain that does things like torture, maiming etc to those a player likes or holds dear and specializes in escaping is a good alternative.
Movies are a bad example, because of all the tricks of light, camera zoom and pan, cuts, sounds etc. employed.
I would say they need to be a threat. If they just keep showing up, getting thwarted and running off saying "I'll get you next time", they become a joke. Enough power or socail ties to where they can't be attacked directly. Consequences for going against their desires. Motives that feel like they are progressing towards beyond "lmao thanks for gathering the crystals while I sat on my ass"
you don't
it's a ttrpg not a movie, you'd know this if you played games
See "Randall Flagg" from The stand
Just do what they did with Homelander if you like him so much.
Make him ridiculously, overwhelmingly powerful to the point that fighting him is impossible. But make him unhinged. Make him unstable. Make everyone wonder when he's going to snap.
Playing 5e in 2022 eh? Looks like you're going to have to invest thousands in acting lessons.
The only thing us common untalented folk can do is describe all the NPCs reacting to him the way you want. Players will always Joss Whedon the frick out of any intimidating foe or tense situation anyway so don't put too much effort into it.
>Capeshit, but with SUBVERTED EXPECTATIONS
This entire genre needs to die off again, but this time for good.
Subverting expectations can go, but superpowered people who're not that heroic can stay. It's not really subverting anyone's expectations at this point, and there's nothing wrong with it as a premise.
Subverting expectations/traditions is like any other literary tool, it can be done well, it can be done poorly and it can be overused.
Sure, but my point was mostly just that I rather like supers who aren't exactly heroes, I'd consider it its own subgenre at this point, and I hope it's here to stay.
Of course the cartoon doesn't have to go this way, but I would like to see the Invincible show keep with the comic, where as time goes on we see more supers just in regular life because in a world where supers have been around for a while and keep occurring through all sorts of means, of course there would be loads who are just regular every day people. And of course when Mark goes to space we see a lot of beings who would be supers on earth just being regular folk who have to deal with regular problems that occur and are amplified when your state is at war with another.
That said, I expect the cartoon the veer off course hard because there's no way they keep the Viltrumite plot as it is in the comic and I have no fricking idea what they'll do with Angstrom Levy
Edgy capeshit will live on as long as regular capeshit remains popular
Prince Argrath form the Runequest canon is great example
I know it's capeshit, but I actually think Thanos' proper introduction in the MCU was pretty well done. You had this dude who had been built up for ages and when he finally showed up he was introduced by beating the Hulk into a pulp with comparable strength but actual technique, immediately got what he wanted and killed off a fan favorite character. It was pretty effective at establishing him as a convincing BBEG. Maybe I just like "master of all" type villains.
I think of the idea behind them as "Oh shit, the universe isn't actually obligated to throw level-appropriate challenges at me."
By getting buy-in from the players from the very beginning. The players have to agree that you're going to take the game seriously, and don't mess around and crack jokes, or you won't succeed regardless of what you do.
This does not mean "no fun allowed", it just means you've all agreed on what kind of fun you want to have.
Infuriate the players and don't pull your punches in combat. If you kill a PC describe in gorry detail how they die end the session there with the BBG moonwalking and dabing. Tell the PCs nothing. Have a preplanned scripted event bringing the dead player/s next session with permanent level drain. This is what I did and Oh boy... my PC became The Boys to the vilans faction. They ended up skinning him alive and rolling him in salt in 10 sessions. I have never seen such players hatred for a BBG in all my 10 years of GMing.
authorial/gm fiat. next question.
There's only one question in the thread you idiot
yes, and it has been answered. so this thread is done, and dusted. too bad you are so stupid. but at least you can count to one and stop.
Give the players a animal campanion act like they weren't supposed to have it. Let them name it give it personality make them laugh with it and even be a little helpful. From there he's now a time bomb the moment you wanna crush your players just have the villian kill their pet to prove a point. I'd recommend doing this around maybe the second or third visit from the villian so maybe it actaully catches them by surprise
For one villain in a game i’m running right now I use NPC reactions. Basically he’s a demon who’s gimmick is that he brings out base impulses in people. One word from him sends crowds into a riot and makes everyone who isn’t a PC into a jackass. People who can’t fight against it are basically sheep who do whatever he says. He can also solo any individual enemy, and if you fight him he’ll have a bunch of disposable normal humans trying to mob you.
Just gotta have a sexy voice bro, no homo. Also helps if you're a good writer.
Make him morally correct for the most common laymans morality
Build him up for most of the game and don’t throw your punches when he does show up have him nearly beat all the PCs to all bloody pulp and keep him as a consistent danger for the remainder of the session
>How do you make a truly intimidating BBEG who literally captures everyone with his presence alone?
Permanent emanation: area effect mass hold person spell.
ez.
>his presence alone
The guy in your pic tear people apart and shoot lasers out of his eyes every couple of scenes to be intidimating
10 wiggle dice in apperance with the daze extra and multiple radius extras.