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. 

In practice we only ever ran one "bad guy" campaign as Zentraedi officers vs the Invid aliens.  This was pre-Macross, so it was a full military campaign.  That got old pretty quick, so it was a short campaign.

Of those three candidates I will say Coalition States circa 101 P.A. calendar.

I guess the best "bad guys" for a RPG must be old World of Darkness (oWoD) organizations. Well, perhaps not Pentex; but in general, the bad guys in Mage: the Ascension (i.e. the Technocrats) were almost more reasonable than the Traditions themselves. The Camarilla and the Sabbat were practically equally evil for different reasons — although that in the long-running Vampire campaign I played with my friends in the '90s with a rotating Storyteller, the PCs generally acted like some kind of political police for the Prince of the city, and the typical adventure had him pointing the party to some group that he wanted eliminated and the party proceeding with that elimination.

Quote from: Wtrmute on February 14, 2023, 12:47:31 PM
I guess the best "bad guys" for a RPG must be old World of Darkness (oWoD) organizations.

I'm going to second this.  Every one of those was meant to be playable by truly dark tables.  The technocracy eventually even got meaningful support as players, as some of them could be meaningful opposition to some of the truly evil elements of WoD, and they had interesting powers that would be helpful against powerful vampires, etc.

But like, every book they came out with had compelling villains.  To me the worst were actually the mages that had inverted their ascension, as there was no evil they could not do at any time, but they would always have some reason for it.  I couldn't imagnie a table actually having something that evil, but man as a villain set they were great.  The mirrored Garou were also darkly interesting.

I think world of darkness villains generally fell into two camps- those that were somehow in favor of a status quo for a bad reason, and those who were actively trying to end the world.  The first camp were always extremely interesting, the second were standard bad guys, but the writers knew that and did their best to provide a unique take, and they almost always succeeded.

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?

 

Now that there's a GI Joe rpg, I'll go with Cobra.

I once heard them described as a cross between the Taliban and Amway, which tickles me no end and provides some interesting possibilities

I vote In Nomine SJG. It takes Word concepts to their realist conclusion & allows enough campaign ambiguity to cast those words into twisted excesses. Further, you got Lucifer, probably THE most alluring and variable culmination of villainy Occidental society has created in the last few millennia. To create a supporting cast of villainy that are literal embodiments of themes, from either heaven or hell, and it simply cannot be topped for me. 

I mean FREEDOM is a Demonic Princess, Lilith.  PURITY went on a genocidal ethereal crusade and got pardoned AND punished by promotion to the higher heavens. JUDGMENT & GAME play as mutually hated Internal Affairs agents. These are things that makes tradition & modernity clutch their pearls. AND it was done with more seriousness and ambiguity IMHO than the French source INS/MV. 

So I really like Chaos from warhammer 40k or even fantasy. The reason despite them being cartoonishly evil is actually how insidious and persistent they are. Once exposed to chaos the thought grows like a seed implanted in your mind taking hold and it always starts with small or innocuous things like overindulging, or a bout of satisfying anger foreve pushing you towards more extreme violations of order. It's subversive, co opting and eventually replacing things in your life with its own twisted distortions of the symbols and rituals that are in your day to day.

Once it has fully taken hold it's also near impossible to truly root out and once a planet has fallen to chaos it even adopts new laws of reality making it impossible to excise. The only solution has been to aggressively stamp out all traces of it even condemning entire worlds to oblivion because once chaos reaches a critical tipping point, not even total obliteration can remove the stain from reality.

I'm probably not doing justice but when I look at chaos I see the modern day woke mind virus  that mirrors the behavior of those who have fallen to chaos. Right down to the behavior of a society that has fallen. The alphabets degeneracy in the pride parades as heralds of slaanesh, BLM, antifa and rioters hate peddling fucks as mindless khornates, the "gain of function" labs and Pfizer, as well as the living filth that is San Fran firmly under the banner of nurgle. The politicians, race grifters, and mega corps all in the webs of tzeench

And Slanesh throws the best parties.

Too bad I play Vampire Counts, or would if I could stomach GW shenanigans, which I don't.  That's why I would prefer to go One Page Rules army of Ossified Dead.  No fanged pompadours to be found.  Only "real" undead like a Herald of Death skeleton who hates their former vampire masters.

Oh, and I still have a soft spot for Evil Empires with a legit goal like the Rifts Coalition States.   They just want to return Earth back to the way it was.  And that's done by shooting all the weird stuff. 

Any Marvel game has a decent crop with guys like Doctor Doom, Thanos, and The Absorbing Man.

Anything where the "humans are the true monsters, you guys!"

Warm up the gunner seat on the dropship, daddy's home!

"Any Xenos that runs is an enemy combatant. Any Xenos that doesn't run is a well disciplined enemy combatant!"

Had to ponder for a moment.



I like lots of bad guys, The Coalition, Drow pre-Salvatore, the Slave Lords from the A1-4 series, and especially the Dragon of Tyr, but the Horrors from Earthdawn are the kind of baddies where you're happy to just not be noticed by them...

Skaven from Warhammer Fantasy.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on February 14, 2023, 10:25:54 AMRifts Coalition.  They have the coolest gear and the biggest support structure for a human faction. Coalition States circa 101 P.A. calendar.

For an original setting, I have to agree that the Coalition States of America are just fun, and yea, I only use the original Coalition mecha & armor. I keep the "Skeleton Warrior" stuff as an actual Alternate Universe Coalition (basically the original idea for Chaos Earth from The Rifter instead of being Rifts Earth's past).   

QuoteIn practice we only ever ran one "bad guy" campaign as Zentraedi officers vs the Invid aliens.  This was pre-Macross, so it was a full military campaign.  That got old pretty quick, so it was a short campaign.

For a licensed product, I have to go with Robotech as well, but The Masters forces instead. The problem has been no one yet has actually portrayed the Bioroids the way they are seen during The Masters War. The Zentraedi are basically disposable thugs and the Invid are suicide bombers. In comparison, the Bioroid is basically the futuristic equivalent of an Air Assault/Airborne Infantryman. Palladium's take on them was terrible in both editions for the most part (seriously, Bioroids have the best armor of all the enemy mecha in Robotech) and Strange Machine Games is too weird a system to get into fully. I'm hoping the Savage Worlds version by Battlefield Press does them justice.

In Soviet Russia, villain is you!

Quote from: David Johansen on February 14, 2023, 09:47:49 PM
Any Marvel game has a decent crop with guys like Doctor Doom, Thanos, and The Absorbing Man.

LOL well that's just cheating.