Quote from: RPGPundit;613681So what motivations do we in fact like in our villains?

RPGPundit

I like motivations that are good intentions gone wrong.

Example: Villain in one of my games was a reputable Butcher.
His town was slowly starving to death because of gnolls running unchecked in the region, pillaging the farms.

He started secretly collecting rats and any animals he could find, and made sausages.
Saving his community from hunger was of course a noble task.

When the rats ran out, he started secretly collecting very fresh human bodies for his sausages.

By the time he had the local immigrant halflings in a cage in his basement, he had crossed the line into evil, but his intentions were to save the people he cared for most from a slow horrid death by hunger.

I like a mixture of motives. Sometimes I want the good intentions gone bad as Bill describes but I also want villains who choose to do bad things for more insidious reasons. One thing I like doing is having shades of evil in an adventure. Some of my bad guys are just regular folk who make questionable choices and are in a bad place as a result. Others are guided by a deeper need to harm. The key thing for me is to mix it up. And having several shades of evil within an single adventure can be very interesting for the players to sort out.

Whatever their motives I do like villains that can be reasoned with and are not just mindlessly bent on slaughter----though psychos and killing machines do have their place.

The specifics of the immediate motives dont need to be all that grand or unusual (could be something as simple as wanting to set up a business deal with some merchants in the neighboring town). The big thing that seperates the villain is what he is willing to do to achieve that. For deeper motives, internal thoughts and personal history the players might not see, it is important for me to know what makes the character tick. It is sort of the old saying of how others see them, how they see themselves and how they truly are. It is a fine line though. You can weaken a villain's power if you slip too far from explanation to justification.

Villains that can be reasoned with to some degree are just more interesting to me than flat out killer villains.

However, a variety of villanous types would seem to be desireable.

The only type of "good intentions" villains I really like are the kind that believe that they will be bringing order to the region/kingdom/world/universe under their autocratic rule.

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