Double post

Quote from: weirdguy564 on July 12, 2023, 05:20:53 PM

Quote from: BadApple on July 12, 2023, 02:20:36 PM
Alien/Aliens has the best bad guy faction.  Weylan-Yutani is the perfect evil corp in part because it's pursuing it's purpose properly.  You could even argue that individual sacrifices are justified.  There's plenty of faction fractals too for internal friction.  This makes them both the perfect foil and an excellent faction to work for as PCs.

Cyberpunk 2020 does this very well too.  Arasaka is just a great organization to put into your game.

My original premise was bad guys you like to play. 

What you're describing is more like bad guys who you don't feel sympathy for. 

I agree that having bad guys you feel good about beating is great, but there are games where you can also be those bad guys as player characters.  Again, for me this are the Warhammer 40K factions, or the Coalition States from Palladium Rifts.

For me personally, grimdark fantasy/scifi isn't my usual thing. I think it's overdone. That said, I will dabble in horror and dark RPGs, and have evil PCs.

When I do play "bad guy" PCs, I like the challenge of playing PCs from highly unsympathetic viewpoints rather than edgy-but-cool ones. I don't have experience with the Rifts Coalition or Warhammer 40K, but from what I know, I'd be more interested in playing a Weylan-Yutani executive like Burke in Aliens more than playing those. For example, one of my favorite HarnMaster PCs was a priest of Agrik - who is usually considered an evil god, supporting things like human sacrifice. If I'm going to go dark, I like going deep.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on July 12, 2023, 05:20:53 PM

My original premise was bad guys you like to play. 

What you're describing is more like bad guys who you don't feel sympathy for. 

I agree that having bad guys you feel good about beating is great, but there are games where you can also be those bad guys as player characters.  Again, for me this are the Warhammer 40K factions, or the Coalition States from Palladium Rifts.

I hear you.  It's a matter of perspective.  Weylan-Yutani is a company that does a lot of things, many that make life for humans better.  In the movies, you just hate them because they use the main characters as meat for one of their projects.  I love how deep gray they are.  They produce important products but they make hard, cold decisions in doing so.  It's a lot like the modern day Johnson& Johnson.  They do enough to justify their existence and even support but they also rightfully get denounced for some of their inhuman behavior.

At what point is the individual sacrifice justified for the good it produces.  What do you make of the people that make those decisions?  Where is the line between necessary costs and being malevolent?  I love bad guys that decent people could actually defend.  It makes for juicy drama.

Fundamentally I think Chaos from Warhammer takes first spot for me, for being this sleazy quasi-transcendent manifestation of human corruption itself, created uconcioussly by billions.
You can just carve almost any possibility from it's twisted miasms to use, from Epic Demon Armies, to slow rancid moral corruption of small village, according to your whim.

All and None.

In the right hands anything can go from zero to supervillain. Or the exact opposite.

Example: WOD's factions. They are all very bland and lacking in imagination overall. Same for the PC factions really. But with a good DM any of them can sing. Or with a bad one come across as lamer than they already are. Same for Rifts, except Rifts has more nuance with some factions and none at all with other factions.
 
I think Ravenloft Domains of Dread though had hands down some of the best villains. Some unredeemabley evil and others more nuanced, and a few possible not as vile as it seems. TSR just outdid themselves with some of the writing for quite a few villains for Domains of Dread.

I think I missed this one because I don't think of it as a RPG setting.  Its a tactical tabletop wargame.  BattleTech.

Sticking to the original setting (year 3025) there isn't really a bad guy.  The game has 5 major factions with racial and cultural traits from Earth, but none of them are inherently bad or good.  They have all done shady stuff that is immoral, but mostly they're OK.

1.  Draconis Combine.  They're honorable Japanese, with a large Scandinavian population on one border.  However, their also very strict, and have committed one of the worst atrocities in that fiction, the Kentares massacre. 

2.  Federated Suns.  Very nationalistic and the largest nation with the largest army.  However, they break peace treaties every third weekend.  You can't trust them.

3.  Capellan Confederation.  Half of their hereditary leaders are certifiably insane and need medication, run secret police, but they're survivors and can pull off some wins when they need to, usually because of their excellent spy networks that put everyone else to shame.

4.  Free Worlds league.  It is argued that the main enemy of the Free Worlds League fights are other members of the Free Worlds League.  Civil Wars are just what they do.  Until somebody else comes to visit, then watch out for a unified front.  They also have Solaris VII, the gladiator planet that everybody loves, and they're good at building things.

5.  Lyran Commonwealth.  They're the richest and best equipped army of the big five.  However, they let rich people buy their military ranks, and  you don't get what you paid for.  You get amatuers who snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Now, I'm not sure this actually qualifies for my own question.  I was originally looking at games that had bad guys, but bad guys that looked OK to play as them.  This setting doesn't really have a clear badguy, and that is attractive.  You can play it anyway you want.

Quote from: tenbones on February 14, 2023, 02:06:04 PM

Quote from: weirdguy564 on February 14, 2023, 10:25:54 AM
For me the answer to best bad guys are ones you want to play.  That is not a criteria, but it's the one I'm going to start with. 

Rifts Coalition.  They have the coolest gear and the biggest support structure for a human faction.  Same goes for Star Wars Empire.

But... are they bad guys?

 

My favorite bad guys are the ones who unquestionably do bad things, but with a virtuous or at least understandable goal.  Dr. Doom is deeply devoted to the wellbeing of his nation of Latveria.  Dr. Freeze is trying to find a cure for his wife's fatal illness.  Magneto lost his wife to the Holocaust and is adamant that mutants will not suffer the same fate.  I find these villains a lot more believable and compelling than the caricature-esque ones that fill most literature.  And the stories are more interesting when the good guys can on occasion negotiate with or find common cause with the bad guys.  And at some points they make you wonder if they're really bad guys.

Ironically - Doom, and Magneto *are* Social Justice Warriors in the truest sense. And they've villains.

This is both my example of how SJW-themed content *can* and *has* been done well. The problem is that SJWs in real life don't see themselves via their beliefs and methods as villains... which is why our entertainment these days is shit.

What does Magneto's Mutant Utopia *look* like? Well it's a rock floating around in space where everyone is under his totalitarian authoritarian rule. Same with Doom. Both are awesome characters for that very reason. They are the *monsters* they've been fighting against.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on July 12, 2023, 05:20:53 PMMy original premise was bad guys you like to play.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godlike_(role-playing_game)

 

Quote from: honeydipperdavid on February 16, 2023, 12:18:49 AM
The computer in paranoia.  Nothing is as evil, malicious, random and paranoid as that computer.  It did have one redeeming characteristic, communism was the death penalty.

Big fan of Year of the Phoenix then?

Quote from: tenbones on August 17, 2023, 04:29:14 AM
Ironically - Doom, and Magneto *are* Social Justice Warriors in the truest sense. And they've villains.

This is both my example of how SJW-themed content *can* and *has* been done well. The problem is that SJWs in real life don't see themselves via their beliefs and methods as villains... which is why our entertainment these days is shit.

What does Magneto's Mutant Utopia *look* like? Well it's a rock floating around in space where everyone is under his totalitarian authoritarian rule. Same with Doom. Both are awesome characters for that very reason. They are the *monsters* they've been fighting against.

Magneto barely knows that he wants other than mutants first and everyone else last. Not helped that alot of his followers are nutcases in it for the power.

Doom is, when in the hands of a competent writer who knows the character, not really all that totalitarial. He is very even handed in Latveria and one of the few times he actually win and took over the world he really did try to bring world peace and prosperity. But found managing everything was a chore and let some heroes undo it. On the hands of bad writers hes worse than Hitler and Stalin combined.

Quote from: tenbones on August 17, 2023, 04:29:14 AM
Ironically - Doom, and Magneto *are* Social Justice Warriors in the truest sense. And they've villains.

This is both my example of how SJW-themed content *can* and *has* been done well. The problem is that SJWs in real life don't see themselves via their beliefs and methods as villains... which is why our entertainment these days is shit.

What does Magneto's Mutant Utopia *look* like? Well it's a rock floating around in space where everyone is under his totalitarian authoritarian rule. Same with Doom. Both are awesome characters for that very reason. They are the *monsters* they've been fighting against.

As someone who un-ironically idolizes DOCTOR DOOM, you missed the part where Doom is right and SJWs are wrong. Doom is not self-serving, he just happens to be the best possible choice for prosperity and peace. Who the fuck wrote this, some Reed Richards marketing drone?

Quote from: Brad on August 18, 2023, 11:44:03 PM

Quote from: tenbones on August 17, 2023, 04:29:14 AM
Ironically - Doom, and Magneto *are* Social Justice Warriors in the truest sense. And they've villains.

This is both my example of how SJW-themed content *can* and *has* been done well. The problem is that SJWs in real life don't see themselves via their beliefs and methods as villains... which is why our entertainment these days is shit.

What does Magneto's Mutant Utopia *look* like? Well it's a rock floating around in space where everyone is under his totalitarian authoritarian rule. Same with Doom. Both are awesome characters for that very reason. They are the *monsters* they've been fighting against.

As someone who un-ironically idolizes DOCTOR DOOM, you missed the part where Doom is right and SJWs are wrong. Doom is not self-serving, he just happens to be the best possible choice for prosperity and peace. Who the fuck wrote this, some Reed Richards marketing drone?

(My time has come)

Ahem.

"RRRRRRRRIIIIIIIIICCCCCCCCCCCCHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRDDDDDDDDDDDDSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!"

A big problem with super villains, is because they're paranoid and power hungry, as soon as they took power they'd kill and exile all supers of middling to high power, and work to stop new ones being born.

Then the next Alien Invasion or cosmic event would destroy the Earth.

So any villain 'winning' would be utterly pyric.