Villain 105: Means

"Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battlestation!"

Welcome to the end of the Villain 100s series. If you've gotten this far, you're in the clear. Today we're talking about an easy and well understood topic, Means. The villain's Means are the resources and powers they're using to accomplish their goals, like Joker's Smilex gas, Mola Ram's army of murderous cultists(and his mind control...and the KALI MAH thing...), or Jigsaw's traps. The Means control the way a game feels more than anything else, since it'll be present even when the villain themself is not. Today we're also talking about how to react to player preparation as a bonus sub topic.

 Anyway, the villain's Means includes anything you can justify them having in specific, so the theming is generally more important. The players are generally not going to question what the villain had at their disposal unless it's really far out of line, and a lot of the time a simple explanation is all you need. Big Bad villains tend to have gold, and gold can buy you a lot of assorted low-morals monsters and thugs. Magic is also a huge justification, and saying the villain used a dominate or charm spell will also go a pretty far way. Finally, villains tend to be charismatic, and it can be easy for a PC to assume a lackey was convinced with honeyed words and promises, or threatened and intimidated into line. I've found most decent PCs want to believe and 'get on with it'.

The question of the means changing significantly or being irrational can also push the plot, if you're obvious enough. In the case of our previous example The Mournful Bard, they function as a bard villain until part way through the plot where they finds a powerful necromantic artifact. This is a very important plot point, so it happens off-screen where the PCs can't prevent them from taking it(sorry guys), and instead will eventually find the empty, sprawling mausoleum the Bard broke into to steal it. This creates a halfway point where the Mournful Bard's Means change from social manipulation and paid-off thugs to an army of the dead, wearing masquerade masks and ruined finery. This changes the feel of the game considerably, makes their efforts feel more serious and "Irises out" the focus of the game. They're not just threatening a few people or a city,They're threatening the WORLD. That's all us just going from thugs to zombies, guys, aside from descriptives from the GM. The amusing thing is, we made all those changes and the average combat encounter doesn't have to change THAT much.

This is a sidenote, but if you're struggling to figure out a feel for your D20 pathfinder or D&D game, look no further than the undead. There are a massive amount of undead monsters out there, and they're all deliciously weird. Look up some weirdass monsters online, plumb through some old D&D books, and you'll never want for variation. The undead seem to be a publisher's go-to monster for filling a few pages out.

Anyway, that's your bottom line when it comes to Means, you're controlling how the encounters you run will feel, mechanically. Obviously you can(AND SHOULD) mix this up with short-subplot encounters or non-plot chance encounters or whatever, but the villain's means will generally control how encounters will go and how the PCs will prepare. You can(and should) come up with signature monsters the villain uses so the PCs feel familiar and have encounters where they feel they immediately know what they should do, but also mix this up with new challenges so nothing gets to feel old or tired. Casting a wide net to what the villain can logically have at their fingertips is key.

I said mechanically because when you choose a general 'type' of monster, they have common elements to them. The undead type not only brings a host of immunities, but most undead monsters have some form of 'nasty' attack like ability damage, drain, or crowd control. Abberations have strange and worrying abilities or inspire madness in some form. Dragons have powerful physical attacks, and even PC class cultists will tend toward a small list of classes. All of this controls how a game will feel to play it on the mechanical side, and be aware that this is what you're deciding with Means.

Means can also be a macguffin or threat, something the villain already has and can use that the PCs feel they must prevent. For example, the heroes of Star Wars were never in danger of the Empire killing them with the Death Star. The crew of the Enterprise were never in danger of Khan firing the Genesis Device at them like it's a fucking ray beam. The stakes were higher than that because it wasn't JUST the PC's ass on the line. Just make sure you're not creating a plot hole here, because in both of my examples, the massively powerful weapon the villains had in their possession simply do not work like that: they can't be used against individual people. Be sure there's a reason the villain can't or won't do the same.

A final note on preparation. The PCs will notice your theming, they will generally find out the villain's Means rather quickly and prepare accordingly. Let them. In fact, sometimes it's best to warn them of theming before the game begins so they don't accidentally build a character who has an ability that's going to be negated a significant amount of the time. After it's obvious the PCs have prepared(like with swarm-destroying AOE attacks, bane weapons, anti-vehicle explosives, and so on) you can adjust your combat encounters accordingly, but never, ever make a habit of negating their preparation. Even if they're really, badly wrong about what they're about to face, try to guide them a little bit. You can pull a "fake out" MAYBE once in your game, but keep in mind it's always going to feel Meta. As in, the PC's preparation is always going to have the game's rules in mind, and your fake-out is going to feel the same way, like it's seated in the game's rules and not fully in-character. Partial negations are fine and sometimes suggested to keep the PCs on their toes, like the PCs finding a nest of ghouls also has a young dragon nesting inside it. Some systems even have deliberate fake-out monsters in them, like the yellow musk creeper that makes "zombies" that aren't really zombies, or golems that appear like another type. Use these sparingly and not with a lot of build-up, it's much more satisfying to encounter one suddenly and figure out its weaknesses on the battlefield than to prepare for like an hour of real time then find out nothing you brought works on it.

In fact, if nothing else, take that lesson away from Villains 105: The more you make preparation a trap, the closer the PCs get to not fucking doing it, and instead glumly marching toward the next encounter in complete blindness. You take away a significant portion of a pen and paper game's fun by constantly listening in and foiling them in a meta nature instead of offering challenges and letting them fail or succeed honestly.

So, The Villains 100 class is over, and I hope everyone learned something. What can we expect for the future? Well, there's going to be a Villains 200s course in the future. We built the bones of our villain with these lessons, and next we build the flesh, the more subtle and subjective things like personality and quirks. Also coming up are full page villain examples, some invented just for this and some coming from games I've played in the past. Those will most likely come up in the middle of the week, depending on how much time I've got to write them. See you then.