This is very common and successful in comics. The Joker, Lex Luthor, Magneto? Hence, movies are doing this commonly over the last decade.
I hates it... The assumption of the BBEG
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After giving this a bit of thought, I noticed one common element in BBEG stories is that it usually creates a stronger connection between the protagonists and the villains. Even when reading advice articles about why one should have their BBEG show up from time-to-time and pester the players, that advice is being given because it helps forge a stronger emotional bond with the enemy. The more you hate them, the more satisfying it is to defeat them.
This really isn’t new at all. Sherlock Holmes has an arch nemesis who serves as his own BBEG. Super heroes, action movie stars, and fantasy characters have all had similar counterparts for about as far back as their genres have existed.
So to retire the BBEG trope, we need to ask ourselves: in what other ways can we make the heroes invested in the story? Particularly in long-term campaign play, but in shorter campaigns and one-shots as well.
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I don’t mean to be a jerk, but this sounds pretty condescending to ones players “they won’t enjoy my game or become invested in it unless I spoon feed them narrative beats…” I also don’t think there aren’t genre (supers, Saturday morning cartoon emulation) and mechanical (games with strong shared narrative or scene based structure) reason to include narrative beats - but they are no panacea.
Again the issue is not reoccurring villains or players developing antipathy towards, and hence engagement with the setting, the thing I hate is the assumption that there must be a reoccurring villain and that conflict with that villain, culminating in climactic confrontation make up a necessary and ideal aspect of campaign design. This leads to illusionism and GM fiat antagonistically used to protect the villain (and story) from the players and by necessity invalidates and disfavors player choice.
In novels, movies and most videogames the user of the medium consumes the story passively. With TTRPGs one of the draws of the medium is that the user (player) is not passive, but active - with an authorial role. My own opinion is that any game that help emphasize player choice is doing what TTRPGs can uniquely accomplish, rather then simply emulated other forms of entertainment. Now I am open to the idea that this can be accomplished by inviting players into the meta aspects of the game - using mechanics and ethics of play where goals and success are themselves measured by how well the story produced hit genre specifics and narrative beats. In these sorts of games BBEGs are perhaps forgivable, depending on genre, but in games where the player is inhabiting a role, as opposed to a authoring the meta narrative I can’t see a function for them because they imply predetermined narrative.
I also don’t think It’s an accident that this kind of adventure path thinking predominates in contemporary traditional play where the question of D&D’s colonialist and racist taint are currently being debated. If your game relies on forced narratives and predetermined evils, scenes and structures, it has no room for moral decisions by the players and without moral play the assumptions and underlying, perhaps unexamined, prejudices of the setting creators will be never face a challenge. Player decision and moral interrogation allows counternarratives and player interaction with these assumptions however - and for this reason (among numerous others) I take a strong stand against illusionism and anti-choice mechanics and design.
So Jacob, I’ve gone beyond your point, and perhaps used your post as a straw man for my own takes about narrative and choice in TTRPGs - for that I apologize. I do think that these questions are important to TTRPG theory at least (which may be the antithesis of important?), and that there’s a lot to be learned by interrogating them.
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I think both @jacob_wood and @Gus.L bring up great points. I quite agree with jacob around the utility of the BBEG, I also agree with Gus that there is a lot to examine in DND, though I think that warrants a longer post. Here, though, I just want want to focus on one thing: I do not think it is “condescending” at all. I mean, I guess it depends on how it is executed. But I have played D&D with lots of nice people who wanted to play, well, a game. And I think this is something that a lot of people in TTRPG spaces have little respect for. Everything is all about collaborative storytelling, narrative, etc. As if caring about the story just sort of was inherent to playing an RPG. Now, I bet for everyone who posts on the gauntlet, when they sit down to play a game, they are already engaged. They want to tell a story. They’re willing to take “suboptimal” choices to tell a good story. They’re engaging with the system and the story to maximize creative fun.
But…not everyone plays these games that way. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, but I’ve had some really great sessions of D&D and Dungeon World that were built around a sort of grand vision of a story. I think there are a lot of reasons that this is the case, and I think a balance must be struck, but I think that it’s doing a serious dissservice to both RPGs, GMs, and players to say that that sort of storytelling is condescending or bad. This is independent of colonialist, racist, etc themes, though of course one can examine why the two might appear together etc etc.
Many players just want to control their character, and sort of see what happens. They want to play through a movie, a choose your own adventure where they will be tested and ultimately experience amazing, dramatic things. There are lots of ways to get there, and some might argue that the PbtA style approach can facilitate a lot of investment and ultimately drive things to a satisfying ending. But like…a lot of people really enjoy that final showdown with the BBEG, they enjoy seeing the intricately laid plot laid bare, they enjoy finding out how it all fits together. Lots of people enjoy games like that. They sit down and think: ooh! I wonder what the GM is going to throw at me!
In the games I run these days I have tried hard to get people to see it as a more collaborative storytelling exercise, encouraging them to see it as a chance to get invested in the world…create interesting factions, NPCs, etc. Some people love that. Some people…just can’t get into it at all. Maybe you don’t want to play RPGs with those people, I don’t know. But I mean, I’ve had people who wanted a “traditional D&D” type game with narrative beats and all that who still ended up doing things that were fun and memorable and made for a good story.
I think many people in the RPG community focus on the RP and forget the G aspect. Some people enjoy games where it’s all just RP facilitated by a little G, but sometimes, having some G can actually be very satisfying.
FWIW I don’t like to play D&D anymore because I don’t like that it’s all about combat combat combat, I hate murder hobos, and I agree there is some deeply problematic stuff (I despise D&D style “races”), but I feel like a lot of people on the gauntlet have this sort of “narrative reigns supreme” sort of view and I think it is in fact quite condescending to the many many people who want to engage in RPGs as games and not The Next Great American Novel, in session form.
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Also sorry to double post but I still strongly, strongly reject that the presence of BBEGs is because of video games or something. I think that is just a coincidence with when video games came about and when RPGs were developed…but I think that video games in fact are drawing from older storytelling traditions. Moriarty! So to think this is some sort of modern affliction on storytelilng is, IMO, completely off base. Read Chinese wuxia (pre-video game!) fiction, there is a ton of “we have the chance to kill the big bad but guess what, we’re not going to or we can’t because of (convenient reason X)”. Buffy did not invent that.
Edit: I should clarify that I do think video games as a genre (and things like comics, movies) have certainly influenced this sort of storytelling, and made it more of an expectation for many game players. But I don’t think they invented it at all, and I don’t like that line of thinking because I think again it sort of sells short the storytelling utility of a BBEG (even if I think there are other sorts of interesting stories!). As @Jacob_Wood mentioned, the key is to understand what people who use it or expect it want it for. I guess you can also just throw out the idea of any sort of planned narrative but…that seems like a broader debate!
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Just a side note, because it irritates me and has been repeated a few times in this thread
Moriarty isn’t a BBEG in the Doyle stories. He appears in 2 out of tens of the stories. He is described in outsized language, yes, but that’s just one sentence in the entire corpus of Holmes stories. I suspect his role as outsized, recurring villain is a product of film.
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Thanks for your insight. As a common person who only casually follows Sherlock Holmes, I actually wasn’t aware of this.
I think it does speak to my point, though. If he’s not as prevalent in the novels as he is in the films, why is he he so widely known amongst laypeople? What about that one villain has captured the imagination of others so much that he has become legendary, despite not being as significant as we give him credit for?
There’s a very strong link between character / hero fiction and arch nemesis / BBEG-type characters
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I think this is a VERY good point. Good versus evil, good guys versus a BBEG are simpler narratives that people have enjoyed for maybe thousands of years. There is something satisfying in this sort of narrative for most people. I think it largely reflects our wishes to be a hero archetype. The easiest way to show a hero archetype generally is to showcase the opposite theme in a foil…the BBEG. A hero is is defined by the theme / morality they show. Therefore, the puporse of the BBEG should display the opposite morale / side of the theme.
That said, storytelling has become more detailed and complicated as people as a whole have become literate (generally the last 100 years). Perhaps it is an overused narrative tool but it is certainly a popular one. This is especially true in rpgs where players often overlook complicated plots in favor of morality tales.
On Moriarty and Holmes I think you are onto something. The popularized Holmes of cartoons and movies - a stock character of the detective v. Doyle’s own work which plays more on the unease caused by the then novel anonymity of urban life.
At the core of this discussion though is the questions “Are TTRPGs genre fiction?”, “Is TTRPG design genre fiction design and TTRPG writing genre fiction writing?”, and “Under what circumstances are TTRPG designers well served by emulating the narrative tropes of genre fiction?”
I don’t think I have to clarify my positions on these questions, but they are very different then the question of where the BBEG trope comes from.
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Why can’t the answer be “sometimes”?
I haven’t said it can’t in fact I’ve suggested two situations when it can:
A) When one is focused on genre emulation of a genre where a specific cliche is powerful. E.g. comic book villians.
B) when one has brought the players into the metanarrative through mechanics specifically aimed at genre emulation and playing with genre.
Yet I’ve also suggested that neither of those exist in the common places where the BBEG theory of design is most popular (contemporary trad play) and that even when there are reasons to do so the trope often forces antagonistic GMing and abrogation of player choice to maintain a predetermined narrative, which seems a high cost.
It’s not really a question worth asking in this space though, given this is a PbtA forum about narrative play. I might as well go to Dragonsfoot and talk about when and how illusionism is useful.
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I agree that “spoon feed” can be read as dismissive. I can also attest that a less colloquial version of the same statement–e.g. “some players do not enjoy my game or become invested in it unless they are provided vivid, identifiable, narrative beats to work with”–is absolutely true. It’s not my preferred environment at the table by a fair margin, but I have friends who are smart, clever, respected, completely devoid in expertise with cartoons who immediately become frustrated and/or bored when there is not an adventure path with a targetable adversary. Why that the case is to some degree irrelevant: They know the style of play they enjoy and what aspects they find entertaining.
Along those lines…
Streamed play is not a contributor to the preferences of the example table I just mentioned–I say this with a fair amount of confidence since only two of us have even watched any streamed play (well, unless the other folks are refusing to admit it.) That said, based on the experiences implied in your posts @Gus.L, I can imagine in many situations streamed play is a contributor in the way you posit. Meanwhile, I’d argue that “adventure path design” and “videogame narratism” are the same apect, when it is a contributor. And I am interested to hear more about how you think complex mechanics would foster a predilection toward use of BBEG.
But I also think one key contributor is missing: Some (maybe many, or maybe even most) players like having a BBEG. They enjoy it. It brings them pleasure. To tease out why is to tease out why you see a BBEG so often in so many other media. The game system or adventure module is not shaping their play as much as the play they prefer is attracting them to the system or adventure module. The players are choosing to play that way.
The people at the table always have more of an effect on the style of play than the rules and notes, yah? If I read you correctly, you’d have no problem if a BBEG emerged organically from gameplay, but you bristle at the idea that a preordained BBEG be the center of all interaction. I’m right there with you. I personally lose interest quickly when a I feel a BBEG is present as a trope, a crutch, or McGuffin’s Steward. My mind wanders quickly when I feel like a party is being shepherded through a series of set pieces toward an obligatory end spectacle. But I know for a fact that sometimes when that happens the person to my left and to my right is having a very different experience, that they feel they are being given a framework of opportunities to indulge in the experiences they like (battle tactics, problem solving, rolling lots of funny-shaped dice, speaking in outrageous accents). The table above shows up for the set pieces, emergent themes feel arbitrary to them. The good news is that they have a GM (not me) who groks this groove and everyone has a swell time.
None of this negates the passionate dismay you feel. You very much do not dig implementations of a certain approach. I hear you. It is not my experience, but I would definitely be frustrated if I felt like one specific, personally-unsatisfying style of play was choking out other options. I may be optimistically reading between the lines, but it seems like you have opportunities to play at tables that enjoy the same aspects as you do. I hope that is the case! And if it isn’t, I am confident you can find some opportunities here in this community!
Dig this thread!
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Another option to the BBEG could be an intangible, underlying evil force that drives and unifies everything, and the PCs can’t really confront it outright or fully understand its nature. Examples would be the Dark Powers from the Ravenloft campaign setting (or the similar Red Death from the Masque of the Red Death Gothic Earth setting) and The Evil Way from the CHILL RPG. Such a force adds a layer of depth to what would otherwise be a monster of the week type setup.
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Thinking about this more and going back to basics, it’s conflict that’s at the center of any story. The BBEG is just [and I really hate the archaic, sexist phrases man vs. man, man vs. nature etc. so I’m going to go with] protagonist vs. antagonist. But that’s not the only type of conflict found in stories and by extension, this should apply to RPGs as well.
So there could be RPG adventures and settings that feature protagonist vs. nature, or vs. the environment, vs. society, vs. machine, vs. fate, even vs. themselves as the central conflict.