For many people, playing a normal character on Thain follows a very simple and familiar path. You walk around the world interacting with people in the voice of your PC. You find friendly good people to go on adventures with, and express your character to them through simple conversations.
A lot of people, when they start, try to play their evil characters in the same way – they go find Evil player groups in Evil factions and look for Evil Adventures, and don’t really touch on the conflict-creation side. This is fine – but it’s not quite the same thing as playing an evil antagonist.
Playing a normal character doesn’t generally create a big conflict between good and evil. Running bounties and going on Evil Adventures might let you play an evil character, but it doesn’t really create any reason for good and evil to interact meaningfully. When all the characters play this way, you get a situation where everyone just kind of sits in their own corner and there’s little reason for Good or Evil to have genuine interactions or relationships or connections, aside from when they occasionally cross each other’s paths on the roads.
Enter the antagonist. An antagonist is a character whose goal is to cause conflict. An antagonist wants to be a villain, known and notorious among the good guys specifically for their acts of villainy. They want to be the Joker to someone’s Batman.
Playing a conflict-oriented antagonist is different from a normal PC. It’s an aspect of the game even experienced roleplayers often struggle with, because the path to doing it well is so different from what you’d expect from a traditional character or traditional dungeons and dragons. Playing an effective antagonist is more akin to a DM role, where you’re gathering information on the player and using that information to pitch a story to them that gets your antagonist’s own identity across.
The goal of this series is to offer some specific advice to those who want to play as the villains. This includes many MPCs, but isn’t limited to them. I’m writing this from the perspective of assuming that you’re an evil villain, but good villains who antagonize the monsters are very possible with this framework too. I think the advice here could be useful to any character you’d want to play that is primarily conflict-driven.
What is Scouting?
The first rule of conflict is to know your enemy. In roleplay conflict, this means knowing as much as you can about the opposing characters you want to collaborate with.
People who are starting out on antagonists typically underestimate the importance of this. A lot of players, when they picture their monster, have a lot of ideas for who their monster will be and what they’ll want to achieve. But when you ask them who their enemies will be, they just imagine a generic good guy. It’s easy to imagine that every good adventurer PC comes out of the same bucket of interchangeable light-warriors – but if you try to pitch your narrative conflict with this mindset, you won’t get much traction and the resulting stories will feel weak.
It’s important to understand the good guys – because if you’re a villain, the good guys are your audience. Many would-be villains get confused about this, and think that their audience are purely the other villains who are willing to hang out and plot with them. But if your goal is to be an antagonist and not just a distant evil character chatting with other villains in the Watch, you don’t want to overfocus on your evil buddies too much – instead, you want to focus at least some of your attention on pitching to your opposition.
Likewise, treating the good guys all as generic light-warriors might produce an okay story that passes the time – but it’s unlikely to ever produce a good story. Pitching your conflict to the specific people, people with interesting characters you think you could trust or vibe with, is the first way to make your conflict story shine. A big part of telling a conflict story is finding others who genuinely want the conflict you’re selling. You want to find those who have aspects of their character you can challenge them on and help them grow, and in doing this, you’ll get to present and grow your antagonist PC too.
This kind of cooperative understanding is the essence of good roleplay conflict. Your monster isn’t trying to knock down the stories of others, and they aren’t trying to knock down yours. Instead, you’re trying to build each other up. The implicit agreement is that the good guys agree to respect and grow the villain’s threat level while the villain agrees to respect and grow the good guys’ narrative arc. All of this requires that you understand each other well.
Of course, you’ll go into a monstrous character with your own ideas of what your monster wants to do. Maybe your monster wants to bring back the rift, or make himself into a lich, or bring more shadows to the world. I’d actually suggest putting these motivations to the side during these very early stages of scouting. Your character’s motivations and personality will naturally come out as you get further into this process, and you’ll have plenty of time to develop them. Early on, when you’re looking for players to hook into your narrative, you’re better off focusing on who your potential opponents are and keeping your own ideas simple.
So how do we learn about other characters when we’re a monster and they probably wouldn’t talk to us? With a conventional character, learning about the people around you usually involves striking up conversations with them. But as a monster, this isn’t really viable – your dark elf or mind flayer can’t exactly walk up to a Steinkreis knight and ask to go on an adventure at the Crossroads. If they did, they’ll just look weak and kill the intimidation factor before your story even starts. So what can we do instead?
Spying
A simple way to learn about your opposition is to spend a lot of time spying on them.
You can do this in all the usual Neverwinter Nights ways. Use a high stealth score, or just follow people around while invisible. Find other players on /who and sneakily watch their scenes. If you can’t find them, literally just ask them OOC if they mind you watching what they’re doing so you can learn about them.
You can also just ask players OOC if you have clarifying questions on their character, things you don’t understand about them. Most people are OK being asked about their character if it’s for a potential story pitch, and this signals early on that you (even as an antagonist) respect their roleplay and are interested in helping them build on it.
The goal of this kind of spying isn’t just an in-character way for your monster to gather information that they can use, though that might be a side-effect. Rather, what you’re doing here is trying to discover OOC which aspects of your enemies are the most distinctive and interesting, that you could use OOC to build your conflict around.
Maybe in the course of your spying, you learn that Dmitry struggles to choose between justice and mercy. Or that Nicolette has doubts about her service to Steinkreis, or that Bunny struggles with losing her faith in the world. These things might not be of interest to your monster yet. Your monster may not even know these people yet. But to you, as the player pitching the story, these things are like gold. The kinds of strong personal character conflicts and questions that can become the core of your antagonist’s pitch.
Information-Gathering
If you want to go beyond just spying, or if the person you want to learn about is all alone, you can build a simple scene for them that allows you to gather information directly.
Maybe you want to learn about Roland, but all Roland is doing at the moment is sitting alone in his knight’s office. All you know is that he’s a Steinkreis knight. You could give him a simple pitch where another knight approaches him with some small mission into Lowtown. Maybe this mission ties to your monster somehow – like the knight he’s with turns out to be your undead minion who hints at your monster’s existence – but the actual important thing here is that you get to talk to Roland and learn some basic things about him.
Of course, you can go more complex here. When Ath’Ragnoon was getting started, he would run “Mindscape” events that would create a small environment for characters that would ask them difficult questions about themselves. Varmar’s I’nelde has done a similar thing with dream sequence events.
There are a multitude of ways to do these little information-gathering stories. And the great thing about them is that they give you a chance to learn both about the character of a person, and their player. Do you vibe with this person? Do you have fun in your first scene with them? Do they pitch back and answer your questions in interesting ways, or try to shut down your story early on? This will tell you whether you want to continue pursuing them as an enemy of yours.
Another avenue of this is just asking people about each other. Maybe your monster isolates a good character who’s out on the roads and you pick a fight with them. If you win the fight, you can interrogate them to get information about others.
Or maybe you ask your evil friends in the Watch to gather information about a specific person you think you might be interested in. This can create little mini-missions for your friends, while also giving you more of that precious information on your enemies.
Another really good way to get information? Play a good guy. If you play a good guy among the other good guys, you’ll have a lot of opportunity to learn OOC about the various characters, and you can use this generalized meta-knowledge to your advantage when building stories with your villain. Of course, you shouldn’t assume your villain knows every secret your other characters do – but even if your villain doesn’t know the secrets, you can still use your knowledge of those secrets to build better conflict scenarios.
Regardless of how you get the information, gathering as much of it as you can is your first goal. You, as the monster, want to build a strong mental model of all the team good characters you might pitch to. You want to have a good sense of what each of them are up to, where they are in their story.
All of this information is going to be the framework on which you build your story. The key to a conflict-driven character is that you need people to set yourself up in opposition to. The more specific things you know about them, the stronger your story will be. If you know the inner hearts of your enemies, you’ll be able to pitch to them well and to get them fully engaged in what you’re doing. By learning about them through these little scenes, you’ll make them curious to learn about you.
That’s all for this installment! In the future, I’ll be posting the following sections, with a link here to each of them.
Part 2: Interacting with Others
Part 3: Relationship-Building
Part 4: Creating an Arc
