Who is the MOST Annoying Villain you have Encountered?

[Duke Bushido]

On 9/13/2023 at 2:16 PM, Lord Liaden said:

 

But the official Champions master villain I dislike the most is Dr. Destroyer,

 

Oh my god; _THANK YOU_!

 

Wow.

 

 

I really thought I was the only one....  I really, _really_ dislike that character.  I dont hate him, simply because there is nothing there to hate: a collection of cliches isn't out of place in comics; some are just more tired than others.

 

 

On 9/13/2023 at 2:16 PM, Lord Liaden said:

 

mainly for one reason: he's boring. You can sum up his character in three words: Power, Intellect, Arrogance. There's nothing more to him, no depth, no shadings. Nothing to make role playing him interesting.

 

Agreed on all counts, but my list against him has one more entry:

 

Derivative.

 

Yes, that is a word that gets thrown around a _lot_, even when it isn't really a good choice:  we all know that Mechanon was an homage to the robot from the Avengers movie, and many, many characters were similarly pastiche or love letters to favorite characters from the source material, especially early on, but Dr D always felt like "we need a villain!  Who's a good villain?"

 

I remember when the Venture Brothers was fresh and new, and the Monarch got off his line "that dime store Doctor Doom!".   Yep; niether Doom nor even Underbheit were the first character to pop into my mind with that line.  I thought immediately of Dr. Destroyer as the most obvious "dime store Doctor Doom."

 

Frankly, Underbheit is a _way_ better framework for an interesting Doom-type knock-off character, and he is specifically a joke character from a joke show poking fun at a genre.   And yet-  he is by far the more interesting character.

 

Doctor D comes off as "okay, we need Doctor Doom, but he can't just be some rich guy with a grudge over a lab accident.  He has to be _evil_. Okay, make him a Nazi.  He was an evil Nazi scientist doing horrible things--

 

Dude....  That would make him.... _how old_..?

 

Well, he invented life-extending science and built it into his armor-

 

So what happens when he takes it off?

 

Well, he probably shouldn't...

 

I bet it _reeks_ in there!  I mean just _reeks_!  And he's like ninety something?  I feel like we accidentally pastiche-ified The Terror from the Tick.  I don't know how my players are going to feel about fighting a mummified nonogenarian who smells of rot and possibly urine...

 

He has to be a Nazi-

 

Nazi _jerky_, you mean!

 

Well he has to be a Nazi, because we don't really want to put a lot of thought into this, and we don't have to, because you are not allowed to question or wonder about anyone's background or to ever think anything but "yep; pure evil" when someone says 'they were a Nazi,' so we save a crap ton of time there....

 

 

 

He was supposed to be _the_ Big Bad of the Champions Universe for decades, and yet he was so hopelessly, blandly generic that he may actually have been the single biggest reason I was and remain turned off on the entire Champions universe.  (Well that and Mechanon.  While he is a much better homage /pastiche than DD will ever be (apparently), I find the idea of the ultimately unkillable / undefeatable recurring bad guy to be supremely distasteful.  A couple of reappearances?  No problem.  Batman's Joker?  No.)

 

Edited September 17, 2023 by Duke Bushido

[Gauntlet]

I liked Dr. Destroyer in my S.T.U.P.I.D. campaign.

 

Super

Twirps

Undertaking 

Personally 

Injurious 

Duties

 

He just works much better in that style of campaign.

[Lord Liaden]

Duke, I thoroughly agree with your characterization of DD, and will henceforth add "derivative" to my list of criticisms.

 

My only correction, and one of the very few details about the character that I like, is that he wasn't a Nazi. Most people on Champions Earth assume he was, because he worked for them during WW II, and mouthed the slogans to keep them happy. But he was never a member of the Party, and considered practically all of them to be intellectually deficient. He found their racist positions scientifically ridiculous -- there was never any genetic factor that made one "race" of humans superior or inferior to any other. (Of course, all others are inferior to Destroyer. )

[Duke Bushido]

 

Thanks for the clarification, Sir. 

 

 

1 hour ago, Lord Liaden said:

 

 

(Of course, all others are inferior to Destroyer. )

 

 

Of course!  Who could even conceive of some other situation?! 

[Christopher R Taylor]

Yeah Destroyer is a knockoff, he's basically Dr Doom with the numbers filed off.  That doesn't make him terrible, just not particularly unique or interesting.  Mechanon is a bit more interesting, although over the years, that's what Braniac became.  Its very, very difficult to come up with a truly unique character.

[Lord Liaden]

I'll mention one more thing about Dr. Destroyer that really p!sses me off: from an historical perspective, he's practically impossible to really defeat. He always has a backup plan, or an escape route. Even worse, sometimes the scheme the heroes oppose is actually a diversion from what DD is actually up to, so that their fight is essentially meaningless. The worst offender in that category is the infamous Battle of Detroit. The core of Detroit leveled, 60,000 civilians killed, over a dozen superheroes fallen in battle... yet per Book Of The Destroyer, the whole thing was an elaborate charade by Destroyer to fake his own death. He never expected the scheme to succeed, so the heroes won nothing. All that death, all those noble sacrifices, cheapened because they were pointless.

[Mr. R]

2 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

 He never expected the scheme to succeed, so the heroes won nothing. All that death, all those noble sacrifices, cheapened because they were pointless.

 

 

In my last group where I GMed, I was explicitly told that if I set up a scenario where the fight was pointless as there were measurable benefits to it they would voice their displeasure!  Example I has a big fight with a Viper Mech Pilot that they LOVED, because it resulted in the shutting down of a weapon lab selling defective energy weapons to street gangs.  But if I had set it up as this fight was just a red herring and the weapons were still being sold... yeah table flips!

 

Seriously, if I GMed this battle and then DD shows up later big a life and twice as mean, they would have walked out on me!

[Duke Bushido]

I actually dont mind that he is a rip-off.  As Christopher pointed out, it is difficult to make an original character.  I hate that he is not interesting, even a little bit.

 

 

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

He never expected the scheme to succeed, so the heroes won nothing. All that death, all those noble sacrifices, cheapened because they were pointless.

 

Well that's a writing trope, making a bad guy that can't lose because the author always figures out a way they secretly won or were actually accomplishing another goal.  That can make interesting reading, if handled very well, but does not make for very good game play for reasons you point out.

[Lord Liaden]

4 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

 

Well that's a writing trope, making a bad guy that can't lose because the author always figures out a way they secretly won or were actually accomplishing another goal.  That can make interesting reading, if handled very well, but does not make for very good game play for reasons you point out.

 

Frankly, I don't consider that a writing trope, but an example of a writer loving their creation so much that they can't bear to have them lose. Like Jim Starlin turning his Thanos into the perfect villain, without flaw, able to out-fight or out-think any opponent.

 

Villains may have the upper hand temporarily, especially if they're being presented as a major threat to the hero(es). But ultimately, the reason supervillains were invented is for superheroes to defeat them.

[Duke Bushido]

Well, there is still some good to be said for Thanos, ans even for Doctor Destroyer, really.

 

They are not CLOWN.

 

 

[Gauntlet]

Had a villain that I had put together once hat my players hated. He was a clown, but created before clown came out. His wife had suffered from serious mental issues including depression, and he had done everything he could to help her but eventually she committed suicide. At this point he became incredibly distraught and lost his sanity, and that was when his mutant power to alter reality came into existence. He had the ability to turn anything into anything else and he started turning the world into a cartoon. Fighting him was completely impossible as the heroes couldn't even hurt him and half of them were turned into cartoons. In the end, they had to talk him down and get him to turn things back to normal. It was a game that the players both hated and loved at the same time as it was a lot different than let's beat up the next villain now.

[Lord Liaden]

Sounds like a good change-of-pace villain. Someone the players love to hate is a big step up from one they just plain hate. 👌

[Duke Bushido]

15 hours ago, Gauntlet said:

Had a villain that I had put together once hat my players hated. He was a clown, but created before clown came out. 

 

 

 

Funny timing, you saying that.  I have to recreate a villain my original Champions GM created.  This villain was created to serve as a nemesis for a character I was playing:  the Good Guy (if you havent stumbled across any descriptions of him, don't ask.  He was supposed to be a character in a short campaign and disappear forever, but he was popular with my fellow players, and ended up getting a lot of reuse.  Suffice it to say he is a bit "off" ).

 

His nemesis was JoJo, the Human Clown.

 

(This was pre-CLOWN by a couple of editions).

 

JoJo was once a normal human, until the fateful accident that gave him all the powers of a real clown.

 

(My GM decided he wanted in on the screwball action)

 

[Lawnmower Boy]

Dr. Destroyer as created is boring and formulaic, to be sure. Dr. Destroyer as Steve Long and the late Scott Bennie, have  portrayed him is a more interesting case. Long has a clear picture of the man as a clinical victim of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. The question, to me, is where this disorder, classically a pattern of defensive deflection gone malignant, originates. It is often a dual diagnosis, reflecting an underlying bipolar condition, with the deflection aimed at rationalising and justifying manic and major depressive episodes as reasonable responses to external stimuli. 

 

Long's Destroyer is characterised by long periods of inactivity, and in particular his period of obscurity during the Dark Destroyer's ascendancy sounds a lot like a depressive episode, while others sound like episodes of suicidal ideation or manic breaks, once we get past the explanations for them in Long's text, which might be read against the grain as Zerstroiten's own rationalisations. 

 

NPD can also arise from a lack of insight, in particular into aspects of the personality that the individual is unwilling to acknowledge. The late Scott Bennie in particular presented Zerstroiten's relationship with various "brick" superheroes in homoerotic terms, which to me sounds like a good explanation of the underlying pathologies involved in some of his more heinous crimes.

 

Zerstroiten is gay, is attracted to big, strong, "dumb" men, and is in denial about it, likely to the extent that he is still a virgin. He is bipolar, cycling between manic episodes in which he tries to "take over the world," or simply beat up the Sentinels, and depressive ones in which he launches schemes intended to bring about his own death. He is nuts, and dangerous, but, also, if you can somehow divorce yourself from his horrifying crimes, a sad victim of the social mores of his time. 

 

Anyway, that's my Zerstroiten.  

[Gauntlet]

24 minutes ago, Lawnmower Boy said:

Zerstroiten is gay, is attracted to big, strong, "dumb" men, and is in denial about it, likely to the extent that he is still a virgin. He is bipolar, cycling between manic episodes in which he tries to "take over the world," or simply beat up the Sentinels, and depressive ones in which he launches schemes intended to bring about his own death. He is nuts, and dangerous, but, also, if you can somehow divorce yourself from his horrifying crimes, a sad victim of the social mores of his time. 

 

Anyway, that's my Zerstroiten. 

 

That just shows that a good GM can take a whatever villain and make him/her something interesting.

[Duke Bushido]

44 minutes ago, Gauntlet said:

 

That just shows that a good GM can take a whatever villain and make him/her something interesting.

Agreed.

 

 

Now let's see what you can do with CLOWN.

 

 

[Lord Liaden]

LB, your take on Zerstoiten is very interesting. You've gone well beyond what the text defines, but you could overlay your interpretation onto recorded events without much difficulty. I do think you're giving Steve Long a little too much credit, though. IME his super characters tend to be rather psychologically simplistic, and without much of a detailed through-line of life-shaping events. I don't get the impression that his interpretation of Dr. Destroyer has as much clinical thinking behind it as yours. Scott Bennie's version hinted at being more nuanced, but he never really had the opportunity to bring that out in any depth with his writing.

 

OTOH Steve Long's writing did explicitly pose a relevant question: Is someone really insane, if he has the ability to back it up?

[Christopher R Taylor]

Quote

He is nuts, and dangerous, but, also, if you can somehow divorce yourself from his horrifying crimes, a sad victim of the social mores of his time. 

 

This is a good example of how GMs and players can vary.  I find this kind of "aw he's not such a bad guy" villain to be really annoying.  Marvel keeps trying to do it in the movies "they'll never know how much you've sacrificed!" and it just makes my eyes roll uncontrollably.  But others like it, they find that gives depth and interest to a bad guy.

[Lord Liaden]

I can't accept characterizing Albert Zerstoiten as a victim. He was gifted far beyond most human beings. He had genius, vision, drive, determination. He could have been the greatest benefactor in human history, revered for all time. Instead he chose to use his gifts to aggrandize himself, to try to oppress the entire planet and force all of humanity to worship him.

 

(It kind of looks like the competition for most annoying villain is down to either Dr. Destroyer, Orcs, or CLOWN.)

Edited September 17, 2023 by Lord Liaden

[Lawnmower Boy]

19 hours ago, Christopher R Taylor said:

 

This is a good example of how GMs and players can vary.  I find this kind of "aw he's not such a bad guy" villain to be really annoying.  Marvel keeps trying to do it in the movies "they'll never know how much you've sacrificed!" and it just makes my eyes roll uncontrollably.  But others like it, they find that gives depth and interest to a bad guy.

This isn't quite what is going on with Zerstroiten. To remind myself of Powerhouse's name rather than to rehearse my case, I spent an arduous minute and a half with my copy of Book of the Destroyer, and confirmed that Long says that he has serious mental issues, which are identified as  sociopathy and delusions of grandeur. He has also had anger management issues from childhood, which are not given a diagnosis in the text, but which I take as evidence of mania. The depression, and thus bipolar diagnosis is a bit more of a stretch, I admit. He is also clearly not quite right in terms of sexuality, although here there's a lot of possible explanations. 

 

So how do we understand this man? As someone who had his first, overwhelming, sexual experience, no doubt having sternly repressed early homoerotic stirrings, watching Powerhouse tear his laboratory apart.  "It's the moment I knew I was gay," is the way they frame it over on the LGBTQ+ internet. Depending on one's background, these kinds of stirrings can be repressed for a long time. 

 

Zerstroiten's response was to shoot Powerhouse in the head with his pistol and then vivisect the man. We know that Zerstroiten did not get sexual release from his actions because he has never repeated them. The question, which therapists wrestle with in the rare cases they are invited to work with a victim of NPD, is how aware the patient is of the nature of their own reactions. We instinctively imagine that the memory of vivisecting one's first crush in a fit of homophobic denial would be intensely traumatising, but Zerstroiten is still functional. On the other hand, Narcissistic Personality Disorder seems to be a defence mechanism gone malignant, a way to constantly wall off unacceptable parts of the self and deal with trauma by denial. 

 

The adult Zerstroiten loves to arrange encounters with flying bricks in which he can perform "Dr. Destroyer" for him --the elegant, honourable, brilliant European man of culture, with his wines and his chess and his classical music, the potential benefactor of all mankind who is just waiting to step into that role when his genius is properly acknowledged. To put it bluntly, he gets off on it. And every moment that he is doing it, he is repressing the thought that if only he had done this with Powerhouse . . . 

 

It's that internal turmoil that drives his insane cycles of manic overaction and his elaborate attempts to commit "suicide by cop." Zerstroiten causes mass destruction and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people when he decompensates at the traumatic recall of that time when he vivisected a fellow human being so that he could deny his sexuality to himself.

 

Zerstroiten is not a good person; but there's a social tragedy here, too. 

 

 

 

 

[LoneWolf]

On 9/15/2023 at 12:08 AM, Gauntlet said:

Had a villain that I had put together once hat my players hated. He was a clown, but created before clown came out. His wife had suffered from serious mental issues including depression, and he had done everything he could to help her but eventually she committed suicide. At this point he became incredibly distraught and lost his sanity, and that was when his mutant power to alter reality came into existence. He had the ability to turn anything into anything else and he started turning the world into a cartoon. Fighting him was completely impossible as the heroes couldn't even hurt him and half of them were turned into cartoons. In the end, they had to talk him down and get him to turn things back to normal. It was a game that the players both hated and loved at the same time as it was a lot different than let's beat up the next villain now.

 

I never hated Jester.  His saving grace was that he never harmed anyone.   You gave him a physical disadvantage so that he was unable to cause harm anyone no matter what he did.  He could not even cause indirect harm.  If he was not insane, he would have been a lot worse.  If he was sane stopping him would have actually been a lot harder.  When you have the ability to alter reality there are a lot worse things than wanting everyone to be happy.  He was what CLOWN tried to be but failed at.   

 

[Gauntlet]

On 9/17/2023 at 5:33 AM, Duke Bushido said:

Now let's see what you can do with CLOWN.

 

Okay, lets go then.

[Duke Bushido]

2 hours ago, Gauntlet said:

 

Okay, lets go then.

 

I really can't do it.  I get side tracked by how satisfting it was to brutally murder them.

 

[Grailknight]

Another reason that we hated CLOWN: They're cowards.

 

They play their tricks on heroes not villains or even corrupt politicians. Why? Because if they antagonized those people, they'd have to face some brutal and possibly lethal retribution. Most heroes will probably go easy on them, they only pick on those who won't fight back seriously.