In a novel, this would lead to soul searching and other dramatic turns. A character (like Ron Weasley) might give up the quest so that they can make a surprise return at a clutch moment. It might make someone (like Leia Organa) realize something profound, such as love for another character. It might lead to a team breaking up (Honor Among Thieves) or even coming to blows (Boromir and Frodo).

But in an RPG, we’re just not dealing with characters. We’re dealing with players. People. Players don’t give up. They bounce back right away. And of course they do! We all suffer enough in real life, and being able to cope immediately with the hardest hits is a power fantasy for many. Players can’t be made to spend a dramatic moment feeling sad, nor should they have to. Experiencing a Long, Dark night of the Soul is a choice. This is one of those areas where writing a book and being in a role-playing game show their differences.

In my experience, most player characters dig in when things are at their worst and that’s awesome! The PCs are the ones who refuse to give up and who rally dispirited NPCs. In fact, make that a part of the Long Dark Night. Consider giving them dispirited NPCs just so that the players can rally them! Have important or beloved NPCs despair so that the PCs can bring the light. It might even be a good time to have NPCs give up the quest, then return at the last moment with a bit of vital information, or a boost when the PCs need it the most.

Your story can have a Long, Dark Night of the Soul and it’s a dramatic storytelling tool. But when it’s time to crank up that tension, let the players bring the dawn.

Long, Dark Night of the Soul was originally published in RPGuide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Okay, good observation Bob, but besides considering that Hazbin and Plotella’s players may have been Slow Cooking it, these two players probably justifiably assumed that their conversation was private. Whether the scene was of a romantic nature or not, it was a scene just between the two of them, having no impact on anyone else. And being of a private nature, it seems reasonable. So why did Bob jump into their scene?

Yes, it can be deeply frustrating, but before you throw dice at Bob’s player, it’s worth finding out what’s going on. I see a couple of reasons why a player might interject.

Do not underestimate FOMO. Fear Of Missing Out is a real, legitimate feeling that can urge players to jump into every scene. Sometimes other players are having great scenes and Bob’s player — whom we’ll call Also-Bob, who named his character after himself — might not want to miss out. Things are happening and participation in those events is exactly what everyone is there for. The line to walk between role-playing in a group and private scenes that are germane to only some characters can be unclear. Missing out on these scenes may cause your player true emotional pain, which we should respect.

Or Also-Bob may also just have something really, really poignant to say about what’s being discussed, even if everyone thought their character had already turned in for the night. I often have trouble restraining myself, even during other players’ scenes, and it’s usually for no better reason than a dick joke. If I see an opening to make my table laugh, it’s just irresistible. Except it is resistible and I’m getting better at it. But sometimes, especially if Also-Bob’s comment is actually poignant, it can be worth the interruption.

Maybe Also-Bob isn’t as comfortable in the social aspects of role-playing. “Piggy-backing” on other social scenes might be the easiest way for them to get involved. It gives them characters and a subject to play off of. It can be difficult wanting to role-play — and watching others role-play — but not know how to instigate scenes yourself.

But these things do sometimes cause problems at the table. A player interjecting themselves into a private scene isn’t always welcome. Two characters might be talking about something they only wanted to share with one other PC or NPC, something potentially secret. Short of having everyone else leave the table, it’s fair to ask that everyone else pretend not to hear, and certainly not get involved. Did Bob make a stealth check to see if he could get close enough to listen? If two characters have gone to the rooftop to talk and suddenly Bob’s there joining the conversation, it’s reasonable to expect that the characters in discussion would have noticed. “I wouldn’t have been talking about that if someone else came up to the rooftop.” Did Bob even know what the two other characters were talking about and have a reason to eavesdrop or was there a metagame aspect?

As always, if a player like Also-Bob has role-playing needs that aren’t being met — such as being involved in social scenes — then it’s worth a conversation. There’s some reason that they’re jumping into private scenes, and it’s probably a good idea to find out what it is.

It might be possible to have a version of that talk in-character and it may turn out that Also-Bob is making a role-playing choice about their character, Bob. Maybe Bob is paranoid or likes to collect secrets. And maybe Bob can be asked to save the snooping for the party’s foes.

This can lead to in-game PvP conflict — which some tables are comfortable with while others are not — but talking it through in-character might leave player issues unresolved. Bringing it up above table is probably a better way to meet role-playing needs than just inserting oneself into other players’ scenes when it might not be welcome.

And should you feel like another player is intruding, then above-table talks should be had. It’s just as valid to want to be able to take in-game conversations somewhere that other characters won’t hear. If the players can tell the DM “We’re whispering all this, by the way,” while they plotting the downfall of an enemy while walking through the streets, then they should be able to say “We’re taking this conversation to the rooftop.”

FOMO was originally published in RPGuide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

So now combat scenes are part of a larger story. We’ve talked before about using them to propel the story forward; a combat may tell the story of a heroic triumph or a bitter defeat, may feature saving an NPC who becomes a part of the story, and can change the map itself. A well-run combat scene with stakes and character can be just as much a part of the story as any pure RP scene. The combat tells a story.

And the reverse is also true: sometimes the story tells the combat.

In one of our games, I wanted to throw a water elemental of some kind at Erica. She wore a magic item that gained powers from each elemental type, and after playing with fire powers for a while, I figured it was time to add some water powers and she was on a sea voyage, following the next leg of the plot.

Plenty of the elementals I looked at were neat and had some abilities that would make the combat interesting, and I even picked out a variety of them so I could spice things up. I settled on a marid, though — because of all of them, it was the one that presented the most options for a story. I came up with the Great Mardita, who left his home in the seas beneath the ice sheets in the Plane of Ice when he discovered a way to leave and build a home in the tropical Thunder Sea.

Mardita had left his opulent palace behind, bringing only a few servants, and began stopping ships to collect tribute and servants to build himself a new court. Erica and her companions, of course, volunteered to handle negotiations, hoping to pay out reasonably and be on their way.

But first, they had to get a tour of the underwater palace! It was under construction by aquatic species — slave labor, so you know this guy is a villain. Mardita described his vision for the palace and heartfelt wishes to fill it with not just riches, but with art and culture. Of course, he demanded an exorbitant sum and either half the crew to work as laborers, or their finest artist. He was shocked that surface people didn’t travel at all times with courtiers. So instead, Erica’s character volunteered to try her hand at sculpting a grand statue for Mardita using one of her spells.

The whole thing became a role-playing scene that culminated in a statue of the Great Mardita that looked more like a blobfish than a marid and offended host… And the battle that I almost forgot was my original point. All I had needed was for Erica’s character to fight a water elemental to power up a magical ring, and now it was a whole story with terrible art and affronted bluster.

Exciting battles can advance the story, but exciting stories can also advance a combat scene and give your players really fun and memorable reasons to leap into the fight.

A Tale of Two Smites was originally published in RPGuide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For player characters, now they have to deal with a prisoner: disarming and restraining them, transporting and feeding them. If the table’s lucky, there’s somewhere nearby to drop off their extra NPC — a guard station or town constable, that sort of thing. But just as often, an adventuring party is out in the middle of nowhere and will be stuck with a prisoner for days, weeks or even months.

This isn’t always a bad thing! In a recent game, we took a crashed ornithopter pilot prisoner because we thought he had plot information that we might need later. He wasn’t a plot hook, but rather than us now being shackled to a problem NPC, Aron made this pilot so fun and charismatic that by the end of the game, we adopted him into the team.

But NPCs are Aron’s specialty. He makes them easily, plays them well, and generally has the mental bandwidth to manage a few of them. Not everyone has that skill, and adding another character to the Storyteller’s plate might not benefit the game.

And then, of course, there’s deciding the prisoner’s ultimate fate. Unless the player characters either drop them in some kind of confinement, release them or keep them on the team as we did, it generally leaves only one option — execution. Understandably, most players aren’t eager to make that decision! Even in fiction, killing an unarmed and pacified foe is pretty universally awful. That’s some BBEG shit, not the actions of a party of heroes!

So for players, be careful how often you take prisoners in game. I’m not saying never to do it! If you’re playing a pacifist who doesn’t kill even in battle, that’s fine — as long as you talk to your table ahead of time. Give the other players and your Storyteller the chance to let you know if that’s not going to work for the group or the story, or for them to be ready for prisoners. As long as everyone’s on the same page about what’s going to be fun, then you’re good to go.

For Storytellers, the prisoner dilemma (not to be confused with the prisoner’s dilemma game theory) is a little different. If you don’t want your player characters taking prisoners, make it easy on them.

It’s wonderfully nuanced Storytelling to show the enemies’ humanity, and it can bring true pathos and depth to a table-top game. But it can also make it hard for characters to actually kill their enemies. Great ethics, difficult mechanics! If you don’t want the party taking prisoners, then don’t put them in a position of guilt or moral quandary when battling them.

This is where truly evil BBEGs are incredibly helpful. There’s a deep and meaningful tale to be told between enemies across a border or social divide, but it’s usually a lot more fun to launch the biggest up-cast fireball into a horde of baddies. In Dungeons & Dragons and many, many other role-playing games, the greatest portion of rules are dedicated to combat. So let your players fight an army of imps and cheer for each other when they take down the biggest monster of the land. Real life is full of gray areas, difficult moral calls, and nuance, and many of us game to escape all of that and fix some nice, solvable problem.

Of course, if those gray area, moral quandary, and ethically nuanced games are your thing, great! If there’s much combat, just consider that you might also end up with a lot of prisoners.

Taking prisoners was originally published in RPGuide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

But divination can be your friend, too.

If players and their characters are leaning hard on divination or any other way of getting super-secret spoilers, there’s a reason. They might just like to play that way. Some players don’t mind being kept in the dark, they love exploring the shadows and hunger for reveals — but some of them want to know. Maybe they’re completionists and they want to uncover every little bit of the story, or just don’t like having information held out of reach. Maybe they’re just optimizers and they’re going to take every advantage they can get.

If your players like to play a certain way, they are going to play that way. If they’re people you want to game with, run a game that they will like. And if that’s not how you want to run a game, they might not be the players for you. Talk it out, see if you can find a middle ground in which they get to use the tools at their disposal, and you can tell the story you want.

Keep in mind that sometimes when characters are using divination type stuff and asking you what the villain is up to, it’s because they need help. Maybe they missed a vital clue. Maybe a villain’s motivation is a little opaque and they’re having trouble following the story.

If the players are using divination to ask for help, help them. It should be okay for a player to tell you “I’m lost and I’m trying to figure out what we’re supposed to do next, so I’m going to cast divination.” You can always ask above table if that’s what they’re after, or ask “Okay, you’re visiting the psychic center for a precognitive reading. What are you hoping to find out?”

Let divination be your friend. Help your players when they need help. But help can be a spectrum. The psychic center doesn’t have to lay out everything in perfect detail. That’s one option, sure, and it’s okay to do it if your players are getting frustrated. But on the other hand, you can just let everyone know up-front that precognition and divination is no-go for this campaign. Maybe it doesn’t exist in your setting, or maybe you just tell them “I’m not including divination stuff in my game because it makes it less fun for me.”

But there are lots of options between those poles. Maybe give the characters a clear answer, but let them know that people’s actions change the future. If something unexpected occurs, the foretelling might become inaccurate. Hell, the characters’ own actions might be what changes the future! You can also give them unclear answers. The divination might come in the form of a riddle for the characters / players to solve. It might point them to a side quest. (“For the answers you seek, find the serpent-sage on the mountain of red ice…”)

Divination can make things hard on a Storyteller — players reading this, remember this and be kind — and I’ve heard it said that information is the enemy of suspense. And that’s true, but lack of knowledge or context or direction can be the enemy of fun. Between letting characters use these kinds of abilities and spoil my surprises or forcibly keeping them in the dark, I’ll choose to give them the win every time. “You gained an ability that you should be able to use and you used it well. You found out the villain’s secret. Good job! Now let’s see you do something about it.” Cue evil grin.

Knowing is half the battle, but the other half is still to come. Sometimes showing the players and their characters what they’re up against can be even more frightening than not knowing. Sometimes divination can be your best friend.

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Divination was originally published in RPGuide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Everyone is the hero of their own story, and that can include the Big Bad of your game. There are some easy examples that players are probably familiar with. In Marvel’s Black Panther, the Killmonger’s goal was to address systemic worldwide racial injustice. That’s a truly noble goal. Most people could get behind him… If not for his plan; distributing weapons to embedded spies for the purpose of a violent world-wide war.

In Avengers, Thanos had a noble goal, too. In a (theoretically) resource-starved galaxy, he wanted to address need and the destruction that comes from people who don’t have enough. Again, a nice idea, if only his plan wasn’t to just kill half of all living people so they would use fewer resources. I mean, that plan is riddled with problems anyway, but no one can argue that heroes need to stop him.

It’s about the ends versus means. A villain with a noble goal that uses terrible methods to achieve it is understandable, even sympathetic, like Killmonger. You might even be able to get your player characters debating whether or not the villain is right. Does the establishment need to be torn down in order to build something better? Or can it be saved? How many people have to die for a new future?

In extreme cases, the PCs might even join the antagonist! It also gives you a unique option — what if the characters confront the villain, appealing to their noble purpose, and they talk the villain down? Instead of a boss fight, you might be able to engineer a dramatic debate, with the city / world / universe at stake! You can even still punch it up with something like “But I’ve already triggered the Armageddon device, and I saw to it that there’s no way to disarm it. Unless… We’ll have to work together…!”

Heroics might take a little more thought than something like greed; you want a goal that a hero might pursue and then give them the worst means of achieving it you can think of. But some of the best examples of this kind of villain — according to box office gross — aren’t terribly complex, yet they resonated with audiences and it made them memorable. Your villains can be memorable, too.

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Villain motivations: Heroism was originally published in RPGuide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let’s consider a corrupted villain. This kind of antagonist might have been rotten or evil from the start, but then things get worse. Take a small-scope game in which the villain is a crime lord. We’re already dealing with someone who peddles drugs and commits murder, but what if they start using their own product? What if they become a meth-fueled murder-monkey?

What might a villain like that do? Almost anything! If you want to create a villain who makes unexpected moves and acts erratically, a villain under the influence of drugs or demonic corruption makes a lot of sense. How many times can you get a villain who acts almost randomly and the players actually buy it? This is an incredibly rare treat and gift!

Now let’s scale up that corruption. I once ran a campaign in which a powerful lord had been infected by a conscious virus. It physically altered the man, sure, but more importantly, it twisted his mind. He led his people down a dark path, made deals with demons as he plotted conquest and destruction.

There are a lot of options presented by that kind of corruption, and the player characters can easily buy into the ensuing evil actions. Even better, when my players found out why the villain had gone from noble lord to cruel overlord, they realized that he was a victim in his own right. Hatred turned into horror and pity, and the whole tone of the game shifted drastically. How’s that for motivation?

The reason for corruption doesn’t have to be complex. It can be someone seeking strength but driven mad by their new powers. (Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin in the 2002 Spider-Man is this one dialed up to 11. And then his return in No Way Home. So good!) Maybe it’s somebody who opens themselves to hellish corruption out of grief, or even who comes into a corrupting influence by random happenstance. They can all motivate a villain that players will understand, accept, and hate or pity.

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Villain motivations: Corruption was originally published in RPGuide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Motives don’t need to be complicated or difficult, though. You only need enough to make the antagonist believable. Don’t over-complicate it; keep it simple and easy to convey. And if you can make your villain understandable, it’s easy to get the players hooked on them. Hooked on defeating them.

And it can be as simple as they’re evil. Yep, that basic. It just takes a little buildup.

Some villains are just bad to the bone: the Dark Side, the devil or demons. Maybe it’s just the nature of this villain to be evil. They might be a foul being from beyond the stars, or from the depths of hell, and that makes them just bad. (For a sympathetic devil / Lucifer, we’ll talk about heroic villains in another post.) All the characters and their players need to know is why their enemy is evil.

Now, some players might not even need convincing. If your villain is a demon, they may just take it as read that they’re bad and need to be fought — and that’s fine! That’s less work for you. I’ve run a lot of games that begin simply with “So, there’s this demon.” Then I just dressed it up with likable and hateable NPCs (because that’s my specialty) so that they didn’t notice how incredibly simple my villain really was. And it works really well.

And remember that good versus evil is pure hero’s journey stuff. Those archetypes and story beats hit us in some primal place that enthralls and moves us. Evil by nature doesn’t need to be cheesy. Is Emperor Palpatine goofy? Okay, maybe there’s some scenery chewing, but no one ever asks why he wants to destroy the Jedi and rule the galaxy — that’s just what evil does.

Make sure your table knows that the villain is simply evil by nature, something they can believe is evil, that can’t be negotiated with or reasoned with, something that deserves no sympathy, and there’ll be no questions about your villain. They’ll be all over killing them with fireballs, swords and chair legs.

Motivate your villain, and that motivates your player characters. It doesn’t even have to be hard. Evil must be stopped.

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Villain motivations: They’re just evil was originally published in RPGuide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Killing everyone who ever hurt their feelings!

I’m exaggerating only by a little bit. A villain seeking revenge has been hurt by someone or something. If they’re going to be the main antagonist of a story, that pain should be caused by something big enough to fuel all of their epic conflicts. If it’s revenge against one jerk they seek, the villain goes after them, kills them, and then they’re done. Not that you can’t make that awesome! All of Fury Road is the story of a villain chasing down a handful of people — but that’s a movie and something on that scale is probably best used as a one-shot, something non-stop and action-packed.

But if the force that caused the initial injury is something large — like the leader of a nation or an institution — then you have something much bigger for the villain to try to destroy. When they’re tearing down an entire kingdom or mean to shatter a galactic government, that’s full-sized campaign fodder. Maybe the villain is an escaped political prisoner or terrorist who means to bring the whole system crashing down. Maybe they were hurt and abandoned by a god, and now they look to have that deity dead at their feet, no matter what it takes.

Revenge has a lot of potential for a villain that the players can be sympathetic toward. Perhaps the government did imprison a political opponent unfairly. Maybe they had some good points about corruption in the system. What might begin as defending the institution as noble defenders might call for soul-searching and moral questions when they find out the motivation behind the villain’s reign of terror. Do they stop the villain? Help the villain? What about the innocent people caught in the crossfire or dependent upon the system to support them.

Another potential twist on revenge might be a villain who wants revenge on the player characters themselves! Perhaps the lover or family member of a villain that the party has defeated returns to make the heroes pay. You can create a John Wick-style rampage through everything that the party holds dear — blow up their homes or their stronghold, murder their NPC allies, and then come for the players themselves.

Revenge is another nice, simple motivation that anyone who’s been mad at a coffee table for stubbing their toe can wrap their heads around. As long as the players come to understand who the villain wants revenge on and why they have to get it, it’ll be believable.

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So what makes a villain do villainous things? Pure destruction is a simple desire, but selling it to the players can be hard. I mean, who wants to destroy the world for no reason? That would be pretty silly, but you can make it work.

You don’t have to, though. What are some good reasons a person (or thing) would want to destroy everything?

Let’s start small, with something not so epic; a BBEG who doesn’t want to crack open planets or wipe out realities. Alucard of the Hellsing series springs to mind. While technically the protagonist of the series (and note that protagonist and hero are not necessarily the same thing), Alucard’s desire is, to quote the vampire himself, to “revel in the destruction.” He’s old and bored, and he’s so powerful that nothing has been a challenge for him in a long time. He serves the Hellsing Organization and picks fights with villains just because he’s looking for a good fight.

A villain like an immortal might be searching for relief of ages of ennui. They might even be looking for someone who can kill them and end the torment of immortality. Enter the player characters. Surely raising an army and conquering the land will call forth worthy heroes? Maybe a plot to unchain a demonic force is a bid to summon the only being that can finally kill them?

Now let’s crank it up a notch. What if the villain needs destruction to live themselves? They might need to consume souls, the lifeforce of the land, or the sunlight from the sky. They’re driven to commit what others might view as destructive acts, conquest, and slaughter, just in the name of their own survival.

It might just be their nature — or even be a force of nature — but what if we make it more personal? What if our villain has been cursed? It’s not their idea and it’s not their fault, but they have to feed. Maybe they’re even trying to restrain themselves? One time they tried to starve and let themself die, but they went into a mindless feeding frenzy. That wasteland on the map there? That was created by a poor, hangry villain. Rounding up people en masse to farm people as food might be seen as an attempt to save the world.

You can do weirder stuff, too. (And by weird, I mean it’s been done in comic books and movies and novels and everything, so you can do it, too.) Let’s say that there are multiple realities, and that the existence of the one the game takes place in threatens the stability of the others. What if the villain is trying to save entire realities of people by destroying their own? A few bajillion lives to save bazillions more. Do the player characters stop them? Join them? Can they find a way to save everyone?

If your antagonist is driven off the rails and wants to wipe out people / worlds / realities, that doesn’t take a ten page backstory to convince the player that they have a good reason.

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Villain motivations: Pure destructive drive was originally published in RPGuide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.