Who is the MOST Annoying Villain you have Encountered?

[Gauntlet]

4 hours ago, Grailknight said:

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.

 

Actually based on their writeup they have a tendency to annoy lots of villains, VIPER being one of the biggest ones who they have screwed with multiple times, Popgun being a previous member who now does not feel he does not need to use lethal force, some of them are hunted by Raven, and I have seen on some online stuff where they have gotten into it with Black Harlequin a few times. There also is Dark Clown which is a group like Clown but from a black dimension and are twisted and evil. 

 

As for power, most of them can handle themselves in combat and they do have a few that like combat, such as Tag who likes HTH combat with a 12d6 punch that is occasionally AP. 

 

All in all, I think a lot of the complaints about CLOWN may be from bad GMing, not CLOWN themselves.

Edited September 19, 2023 by Gauntlet

[Hugh Neilson]

11 hours ago, Gauntlet said:

 

All in all, I think a lot of the complaints about CLOWN may be from bad GMing, not CLOWN themselves.

 

Ultimately, it is the GM who decides how to run the villains.  If you can't figure out a scenario that's not annoying to the players, maybe pick a different adversary?

[Tom Cowan]

It was a un-named villain in one game that was the most ANNOYING for me. 

the villain had something like

Mental Illusions 1d6, Invisible Power Effects (Invisible to Mental Group; +1/4), Penetrating (+1/2), Constant (+1/2), Cumulative (384 points; +2) (21 Active Points) (GM said he used 25 points for the Mental Illusions power...better Invisible Power Effect 0-END or more Cumulative?)

and Mind Scan or maybe a good view of somewhere the heroes would be.

Edited September 19, 2023 by Tom Cowan

[Hugh Neilson]

Maybe I'll cross-post him here.  No one will ever let him into a game, though, and he's unpublished. But in the honour of the late Jimmy Buffet, I re-present:

 

Quote

 

Margarita Man

 

1d6 Mind Scan, Cumulative (+1/2), 6 doublings of maximum (+1 3/4), Penetrating x 4 (+2), 0 END (+1/2), Constant (+1/2), Invisible Power Effects: Not detectable by mental awareness (+1/4); Target Effect is Invisible to Target (+1/2) 34 AP

 

1d6 Mental Illusions, Cumulative (+1/2), Cumulative (+1/2), 6 doublings of maximum (+1 1/2), Penetrating x 4 (+2), 0 END (+1/2), Constant (+1/2), Invisible Power Effects: Not detectable by mental awareness (+1/4); Target Effect is Invisible to Target (+1/2) 34 AP

 

1d6 Mind Control, Cumulative (+1/2), 6 doublings of maximum (+1 1/2), Penetrating x 4 (+2), 0 END (+1/2), Constant (+1/2), Invisible Power Effects: Not detectable by mental awareness (+1/4); Target Effect is Invisible to Target (+1/2) Telepathic (+1/4) 35 AP

 

1d6 Telepathy, Cumulative (+1/2), 6 doublings of maximum (+1 1/2), Penetrating x 4 (+2), 0 END (+1/2), Constant (+1/2), Invisible Power Effects: Not detectable by mental awareness (+1/4); Target Effect is Invisible to Target (+1/2) 34 AP

 

Margarita Man sits on the beach on a tropical island sipping margaritas. No one knows who he really is. He rolls Mind Scan to locate his target. He keeps rolling until he gets a '3', as he'll need it to weed out the target from the rest of the Earth's population. At his assumed SPD 2, he gets 10 rolls a minute, so this takes about 22 minutes on average. Call it half an hour.

 

Once he hits, he rolls 1d6 per phase to add to his effect of, say, Ego +100 (full effects and -20 to the breakout roll). If the target lacks mental defense and has a 40 Ego, this will average 40 phases, or about 4 minutes at SPD 2. If the target has mental defense, it will take about 14 minutes at SPD 2. If the target has quadruple hardened mental defenses, he's immune.

 

That makes about 45 minutes, tops. MM now selects from Telepathy, Mind Control and Mental Illusions, with a combined attack for two or all three if desired. Now he can attack the target with impunity (unless the target makes a breakout roll, which is not technically impossible - 3's happen on occasion. If so, he starts again, but first he orders another margarita).

 

He takes another half hour or so to roll a 3 and get a lock. After that, another 15 minutes or less places the target at Ego +120 for a combination of effect and penalties to the breakout roll. These hit a lot quicker normally, since they don't have the modifiers for scanning large areas, but take the same time to build up to the appropriate level of success. Longer if he wants to cover his tracks so the target thinks his actions were his own idea. The target already has no idea he was affected by a mental power thanks to Invisible Power Effects.

 

Maybe he wants to get the full 384 point maximum (so that 30 EGO master villain with Mental Defenses will be caught at Ego +50 and -60 to the breakout roll after 384 phases – that takes almost 40 minutes, though. He could, I suppose, use Rapid Attack to sped up the process, but that takes a full phase – that means he can’t sip his margarita!

 

No one can detect his attacks due to his Invisible Power Effects. Once he selects a target, it's only a matter of time. If the target has quadruple hardened mental defenses, he'll get someone else to go kill that brainshielded freak. Or spend some xp adding more Penetrating levels.

 

He's a pretty standard Mentalist, except that he's slow and lacks an Ego Attack to do direct damage. And he has over 250 points left to buy other things. I'm thinking perhaps a [tropical island] base and some very loyal followers [who have good margarita-making skills] might be useful.

 

Actually, he could spend some of those point to have a 140 point Variable Power Pool of Mental Powers so he could have an array of other abilities instead of his standard "slow but steady" power suite. That would let him have Mental Paralysis if he wants, or a big Mental Blast. He could be quite the powerhouse - if he weren't content to lay on the beach, sip margaritas and bend targets to his will slowly, but surely. Are you SURE he isn't in your head right now?

 

 

I'm sure he could win "most annoying" if he could be bothered to put some effort into it.

Edited September 20, 2023 by Hugh Neilson

[Tom Cowan]

1 hour ago, Hugh Neilson said:

Maybe I'll cross-post him here.  No one will ever let him into a game, though, and he's unpublished. But in the honour of the late Jimmy Buffet, I re-present:

 

 

I'm sure he could win "most annoying" if he could be bothered to put some effort into it.

Yes, he would make a most annoying villain.  hmm, low on salt and cash... the bounty on Seeker would fix that...  I think he is going to call out Firewing

Edited September 20, 2023 by Tom Cowan

[Hugh Neilson]

He's a lot like CLOWN - does what he wants; the PCs can't prevent it; readily removes control of the PCs from their players.

 

I'm sure someone could design a spectacular campaign around him as the mastermind behind it all, but it would be much easier to (ab)use him in a highly annoying manner.

[AlgaeNymph]

On 9/17/2023 at 4:23 AM, 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.

reads this, and next analytical comment

 

Huh.  I thought he was ace.

[CaptainCoulson]

Honestly, nothing interesting has sprung to mind. The annoying enemies I've faced tended to be those that somebody is using to push players along a very narrow route through a plot that we can barely affect. At which point, it is not very relevant what the stats suggest, or what the name is, or anything like that, since they all end up being the same generic filler between scenes of plot I'm having functionally narrated at me.

[Gauntlet]

7 hours ago, CaptainCoulson said:

Honestly, nothing interesting has sprung to mind. The annoying enemies I've faced tended to be those that somebody is using to push players along a very narrow route through a plot that we can barely affect. At which point, it is not very relevant what the stats suggest, or what the name is, or anything like that, since they all end up being the same generic filler between scenes of plot I'm having functionally narrated at me.

 

That comes across to me as more of an annoying GM and not an annoying villain. 

[Duke Bushido]

8 hours ago, Gauntlet said:

 

That comes across to me as more of an annoying GM and not an annoying villain. 

 

 

Dig into your memories; into the past....

 

Remember the early days, the infancy of the game....

 

When the GM _was_ the enemy....

 

 

[Gauntlet]

25 minutes ago, Duke Bushido said:

 

 

Dig into your memories; into the past....

 

Remember the early days, the infancy of the game....

 

When the GM _was_ the enemy....

 

 

 

Even so, there are fun and interesting enemies, and boring and pointless enemies.

[Rich McGee]

12 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

 

 

Dig into your memories; into the past....

 

Remember the early days, the infancy of the game....

 

When the GM _was_ the enemy....

 

 

I've been lucky and never experienced the "enemy GM" thing in any game, not even 70s era D&D where it was supposedly endemic.  Haven't even had the flipside, where the whole player group treats the GM as purely adversarial - but that's probably thanks to the good GMs, since there's kind of a feedback loop of distrust there.  Closest I ever got was reading Knights of the Dinner Table, which beat its solitary joke to death hundreds of issues ago.  

 

OTOH, I've seen a fair number of players who just wanted to ruin the game for everyone but themselves.  Most were summarily ejected after what they were doing became obvious, but a few managed to be subtle enough to stay under cover until they really loused things up by (say) murdering the whole party with poison or arbitrarily and secretly killing some NPC everyone else liked interacting with.  "I'm chaotic" and "It's what my character would do" are not justifications for that kind of thing.

12 hours ago, Gauntlet said:

Even so, there are fun and interesting enemies, and boring and pointless enemies.

To be fair, the same villain can be both, depending mostly on how the GM uses them.

 

Comedic villains also suffer from the subjectivity of humor, of course.  Some jokes just flop.

[Gauntlet]

8 hours ago, Rich McGee said:

To be fair, the same villain can be both, depending mostly on how the GM uses them.

 

The GM is the villain I was referring to.

[Tech]

I can't remember the villain's name nor do I want to. A GM created a nutso villain with a bizarre picture; I don't mean it was bizarre but cool, just bizarre. Anyways, we get to a suspicious abandoned town. As we investigate, occasional doors and even floors blow up - no chance of dodging, making PER roll or anything. Eventually, we started objecting. We even said as players, "WHY are we staying here in this town?" We found the guy, beat him up and left. I never want to meet that villain again.

[Pariah]

There was a one-shot my friend ran for us when we were all home from college on winter break. The antagonist in question was Captain Heroic™! He had Superman-esque powers: brick, flight, super senses, a couple of ranged attacks, etc. He just showed up in town one day and started doing good deeds.

 

The catch: there was a fee schedule attached.

• Help an old lady cross the street: $5
• Get a cat out of a tree: $20
• Rescue people from a burning building: $50 per person
• Stop a robbery: $500 (Mom and Pop store) up to $10,000 (large chain bank)
• Fight a team of supervillains: $5,000-$50,000 per villain

...and so on. He even had a toll-free help line: 1-800-HEROIC-1.

 

It was annoying, but as he and his well-dressed publicist pointed out, there was nothing legally or ethically improper about it. We had no real reason to shut him down.

 

Until we discovered that he was using his powers to cause a lot of these problems. For example, using his heat vision to start an apartment building fire, hiring villains (through shell companies) to rob banks or kidnap the mayor, things like that.

 

It was a hard final fight, but it was incredibly satisfying to take that guy down.

[Pariah]

My first GM had a trio of villains we found really annoying. They didn't have a group name, but they always appeared together. They were:

 

Fastback: A speedster (33 DEX, 9 SPD, 30" Running if memory serves) who also had a SPD drain and a DEX Transfer. Note: This was under the early rules where the number rolled in the dice was the amount of SPD or DEX you lost. A few of us used XP to buy Area of Effect powers after fighting this guy a couple of times, because that's the only way you could hit him.

 

Hummel: A guy in a suit of powered armor. 80-ish STR, 40-ish PD and 35-ish ED, fully resistant, pretty much every exotic defense available, and an Energy Blast as powerful as his punch. He also had Radar that he could use for targeting if he got Flashed. With no obvious tactical weaknesses, all you could do was beat on the guy until he fell down

 

'Chuk: A bare-chested Martial Arts Master with DEX and SPD values only slightly less ridiculous than Fastback. He also had the ability to create a Chi energy field around any weapon he held (like his ever-present nunchaku) that would make the damage Armor Piercing. He had some other Chi powers that made him unpredictable and hard to put down. 

 

Anytime we saw these guys, we knew it was gonna be a long night.

[Jkeown]

My players (and most of them from 1983 are still my players today) hated Mondrian, a shapeshifting alien with an early form of VPP that I would make up slots for on the fly. In 1983... imagine how bad that must have been for them. Why am I still trusted with dice? 

 

I suppose this means the most annoying villain was me. Unsurprisingly so.

[death tribble]

Well we still like you

[Hugh Neilson]

7 hours ago, Pariah said:

There was a one-shot my friend ran for us when we were all home from college on winter break. The antagonist in question was Captain Heroic™! He had Superman-esque powers: brick, flight, super senses, a couple of ranged attacks, etc. He just showed up in town one day and started doing good deeds.

 

The catch: there was a fee schedule attached.

• Help an old lady cross the street: $5
• Get a cat out of a tree: $20
• Rescue people from a burning building: $50 per person
• Stop a robbery: $500 (Mom and Pop store) up to $10,000 (large chain bank)
• Fight a team of supervillains: $5,000-$50,000 per villain

...and so on. He even had a toll-free help line: 1-800-HEROIC-1.

 

It was annoying, but as he and his well-dressed publicist pointed out, there was nothing legally or ethically improper about it. We had no real reason to shut him down.

 

Until we discovered that he was using his powers to cause a lot of these problems. For example, using his heat vision to start an apartment building fire, hiring villains (through shell companies) to rob banks or kidnap the mayor, things like that.

 

It was a hard final fight, but it was incredibly satisfying to take that guy down.

This seems like a positive example of an "annoying villain".  The PCs were engaged with an active dislike for the villain, and challenged to find even an excuse to try to take him down. When they did find a reason and win the struggle to take him down, that "incredibly satisfying" result would not have been nearly as strong, I suspect, if he had been less annoying, or more easily/quickly dealt with.

 

I think a lot of "annoying villains" (and other annoyances in RPGs) start out with this kind of expected result, but the GM (or maybe a player whose character may have an annoying trait or two) becomes overly enamoured of the villain, background element, NPC, etc. (or the player becomes overly fond of that annoying trait), so it doesn't get resolved, but just drags on.

[Lord Liaden]

AKA the Joker syndrome.

[Hugh Neilson]

26 minutes ago, Lord Liaden said:

AKA the Joker syndrome.

 

I was more envisioning the situation in your game extending over years, first just being reminded every game that this guy is still out there, charging for Super-Services.  Then, when you become aware of his behind-the-scenes activities, you spend many games investigating, but nothing ever sticks. This drags on incessantly - you never get that satisfying win, or even the opportunity to confront Captain Heroic.

 

The Joker is more recurring - Batman wins, but the Joker keeps coming back. Even a long-running game will never approach the number of Bat-Stories published over his long history, though, and reappearances  of old enemies should therefore be commensurately fewer.

 

A well-used recurring villain's return will be seen as an "event" by the fans (or the players).  A poorly-used recurring villain will get that "them again?" reaction like your comment above of "Anytime we saw these guys, we knew it was gonna be a long night. "

[death tribble]

I am reminded after much thought of one villain that the original GM used but I don't recall the name properly, something like Janos V Banjlyk. He was a time traveller and a nuisance. Not the sort of time traveller who goes back and helps Hitler win WW2 or tries to kill Hitler. No he just sort of would go around being a pain. He was built to do that rather than something that came out in play. And as one of my characters had interdimensional teleport it became a bone of contention.

[Lord Liaden]

The NPC "Dimension Man" from Champions in 3-D was designed to be that kind of nuisance.

[death tribble]

The GM designed Banjlyk before that came out. I am not aware if he ever saw it. He vanished at the time the Yugoslavian Civil War kicked off and was making his way back to England from Turkey by land.

[Cancer]

We had a homebrew villain, an uber-brick in Luchador trappings called El Gigante.  Massively overpowered, though that was due two comparable power (in terms of build points) noncombat types, Bambi and Thumper, cheerleaders who pumped up his stats and END and STUN to way way way above what anyone imagined, and this in a campaign with CvK required in all PCs.  The cheerleaders were built on points comparable to ours, but they were ords (other than some rather boosted charisma-type stuff) physically, everything going into those Aid powers.

 

In this campaign was my old character Mr. Terrific, who was a Multiform guy, one of which was an "invulnerable" form with maximized defenses but no offensive powers other than the stungun and the antitank/antifortification rocket launcher (4 levels of armor piercing, but not a lot of intrinsic damage) he carried.  (He was a test pilot for his day job, and supersonic controlled flight into ground tests were among his duties.)  His other forms were more offensively-minded, but the way I built him, each form was available only once per day.

 

El G thin-red-misted one PC in a single punch in the last encounter (that is, went from full points positive to more than full points negative; that character was at DCV 0 at the time needed for the spell he was casting).  Our brick could stand up to him though not hurt him (using defensive maneuvers) and Mr Terrific could get in his way, but otherwise we Could Not Touch Him, relying on some illusions (he wasn't very bright) to keep him off the other squishy types.

 

Our ninja type snuck away and KO'ed his cheerleaders (who, frankly, I had left entirely out of my calculations), and immediately El G started deflating visibly.  (Amazing the things you can't do when you're used to having 50+ END a turn pumping into you and it suddenly stops entirely.)  When he went down, I had to be talked out of pressing the rocket launcher to his head and pulling the trigger.  Instead I pressed it to his knee and vaporized that instead of his braincase.

Edited January 21 by Cancer