Friday, September 1, 2023

Villain Design Analysis: Final Thoughts

Wrapping up this series with a few final thoughts:

1) As I said way back at the start of all this not all villains are created equal, and once you've gotten yours built it's worth doing some test runs to get a good idea how much damage they'll hand out from turn to turn, as well as how well they apply penalties and absorb incoming damage.  Keeping that in mind when scene building will give you a better idea of the villain's de facto impact on a situation, and in extreme cases you might even want to treat a villain as an extra element of their difficulty level for your budget, or adjust them up or down one level on the simple/moderate/difficult scale.

2) I originally suggested starting with a concept for your villain in mind before tackling the mechanical side of things, but I didn't mention that "I wonder what I can do with the abilities of this Approach/Archetype pairing?" is a perfectly legitimate concept.  You can get some real inspiration about the nature of a villain just by mashing together some abilities - especially ones that don't initially seem to work well together - and sometimes just a single standout ability is enough to form the seed of a villain writeup.  The creation process can go both ways.

3) Don't get too hung up on names and descriptive fluff, especially when it comes to Approaches and Archetypes.  For ex, Loners Archetypes supposedly don't like working with other villains, and their status die and even some abilities reflect that.  But you could easily reskin that so that you have a whole team of Loner villains who are actually drawing power from the same energy source, and grow more effective as they suffer losses and their power is shared between fewer people.  Look at the mechanical effects of abilities and see if they inspire you to do something different with your Approach/Archetype pairings.

3b) And by all means, re-name your abilities however you want.  The GM has enough mental work to deal with, and customizing your ability names will probably make it a little easier to remember which one does what at the table.  If the names sound cool and suggest the villain's style to your players all the better.

And that's all, folks.  Hopefully this rather sprawling series of posts has been of use, or at least an interesting read

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