Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Your Villain is Suck




The Problem:  Lack of Relationship



First-Person Techniques



To avenge Aleena, Bargle must die










  1. BTW, in GDK, Aleena's UNCLE was the patriarch, not father. ;-)

    I totally agree about letting the villain get killed. I've said "this is not a novel" many times to gamers about such issues. Good advice overall!

  2. Well done!

    Some serious villainy restoration is needed in the classics!

  3. I tend to think Gary knew what he was doing, so just because the keyed adventure module appears to have those villains glued to a certain room, he actually would have ran the adventures dynamically with the requisite foreshadowing. There's a natural gap between how a module is written and keyed, and how it's presented at the table when the DM brings it to life. Played straight up, though, and those villains die like chumps.

  4. Yeah, one of my big regrets about my OSRIC Karemikos game ending so quickly was that my players never got to meet Bargle -or Aleena. Felt like I'd cheated them out of an important moment in the games development.

    As for Lareth, well, there is a link on my blog to a campaign journal called Kicking It Old School (written by the GM) and another called Being Kicked Old School (written by a player in the same game). Their Lareth took on a much more active roll in tormenting the players before they reached his lair. In THAT campaign, the fight was something very personal.

  5. Yes. This is exactly the way that I think of this. The idea that a Referee can decide that there will be a confrontation between the players and a mastermind is, in my opinion, a mistaken one.

  6. Thanks for this one, Beedo, it's helped me get some things straight in my head.

    "There needs to be a degree of knowledge, familiarity, and relationship between the players and the villain."

    This is exactly the kind of thing I mean by "story." Not pre-determined plot, but using story elements to give the action a personal meaning for the players and the characters beyond XP and tactical thinking exercises.

    Where I came to the idea that old school was anti-story (aside from disagreements about what the word means) was the way story was presented in the old modules. A couple off items of box-text, and a boss monster in the last room. Unless played dynamically, the boss is just another all-but-faceless monster, and the adventure is about nothing more than loot.

    This is how we played adventures, back when I was playing 1e, in my teens. I can see how I got to some of my misconceptions.