Quote from: Spinachcat on February 15, 2023, 12:33:33 AM
Skaven from Warhammer Fantasy.

Now you're talkin.

Quote from: tenbones on February 15, 2023, 03:19:00 PM

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.

Adapted settings should at least be a separate category. For adapted settings, my node would be to Call of Cthulhu for most interesting opposition, with Alien as an honorable mention.

For original-to-RPG settings, one of my favorites is Torg. The reality-bending invaders were a lot of fun as they came in such varied flavors. I also think the Zhodani from Traveller are an inspired bad guys, with literal thought police in a believable way.

Okay, so if Marvel was cheating would DC be losing deliberately?

Mutant Chronicles has the Brotherhood a church group that tells the world they're the only hope while escalating the conflict.

The Dark Legion is pretty cartoony though Necromutants and Razides are pretty cool.  But the real villains are the Brotherhood, whatever the latest edition may have done to redeem them.  They will torture you on live TV and make your family watch.

I'm also inordinately fond of Palladium's Mechanoids.  Evil cyborgs abused by their human creators they now seek to destroy all humanoid life.  They strip mine stars to power their ships.  They're all psychic and they're all crazy.

Quote from: David Johansen on February 15, 2023, 10:29:49 PM
Okay, so if Marvel was cheating would DC be losing deliberately?

Mutant Chronicles has the Brotherhood a church group that tells the world they're the only hope while escalating the conflict.

The Dark Legion is pretty cartoony though Necromutants and Razides are pretty cool.  But the real villains are the Brotherhood, whatever the latest edition may have done to redeem them.  They will torture you on live TV and make your family watch.

Man, I love the Mutant Chronicles setting.

I don't know what the current lore is regarding the Brotherhood, but I always though that not directly, but they were the kind of attitude the Dark Legion were trying to forment among humanity. "You're going to have to become awful in order to defeat us." *Rubs claws together*

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.

I've always found Robert W. Chambers' King In Yellow / Carcosa ideas most disturbing, particularly as it has been presented in the Delta Green setting since Pagan Publishing's Delta Green: Countdown in '99. It's subtle and surreal, but always terrible. The most recent followup treatment, "Impossible Landscapes" also did not disappoint.

I suppose it depends on context. If you're talking just about the game with the most interesting antagonistic forces in it, then I feel like Call of Cthulhu is almost objectively the correct answer. As JHKim pointed out, that's almost cheating, since that game gets to use the work of several of the greatest science fiction writers of the 20th century, but it's worth saying that Sandy Peterson is not only a legitimate expert on the Cthulhu Mythos, but also did a ton of his original creative work expounding and expanding on it.

If you're talking about the best "bad guys" for gaming purposes, that's a bit more difficult.  As interesting as the Mythos monsters are, they have a couple handicaps for roleplaying games. One is that they're supposed to be a big secret, so the adventures have to bend over backwards to explain how everything can happen without the wider world noticing. The other is that most of them are beyond "boss-monster" in power levels, so they're a little limited in their uses.

For gaming usability, I think you have to go with Dungeons & Dragons just based on pure quantity. Whatever kind of antagonist you want, it's probably in a D&D book somewhere.

A couple people have mentioned Warhammer. Personally, I really like the Chaos Dwarfs from Warhammer Fantasy. Pity GW killed them off as a faction years ago.

My favorite bad guys in RPGs still has to be Warhammer 40k.  They're all bad guys. 

I'm gonna say Warhammer 40k.  Since nobody is a good guy.

Quote from: weirdguy564 on July 11, 2023, 10:13:59 PM
My favorite bad guys in RPGs still has to be Warhammer 40k.  They're all bad guys.

Totally beat me to the punch!

Quote from: jhkim on February 15, 2023, 04:47:54 PM

Quote from: tenbones on February 15, 2023, 03:19:00 PM

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.

Adapted settings should at least be a separate category. For adapted settings, my node would be to Call of Cthulhu for most interesting opposition, with Alien as an honorable mention.

Call of Cthulhu for sure: between mad pharaohs and modern megacorps as a front for the cult of Hastur (*), it has all of them.

BTW, many consider Alien as a honorary lovecraftian entity.

(*) Just look at Tiktok...

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.

What are you talking about? The computer is your friend. The villains are the mutants and the secret societies. Maybe your security clearance isn't high enough to know about the real villains. You should take your happy pills.

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.

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. 

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.

Most bad guys just want power which is dumb because it can be taken from them. STUPIDSTUPIDSTUPID.

Then you have Delta Green's Black Brotherhood, a splinter cell of the Church of Cthulhu. All they want, is THE END. Of EVERYTHING. COMPLETE UNIVERSAL ANNIHILATION. When you absolutely positively gotta kill EVERYBODY in the world --

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.