Dungeon Master Basics: How to Make Your Players Hate Your Villains?

What is a role playing game without a villain? Whether it’s a necromancer busy at work in the local cemetery, a corrupt Baron levying too many taxes from the peasants, or a monster emerged from the caverns beneath the earth, your players will come back each night to your gaming table in the hopes of being presented with villains they can love to hate, bad guys whose plans they can seek to foil, and in general all sorts of nasty opposition that they can triumph over. But how do you take these villains and make your players truly hate them? How do you raise the emotional intensity?

One of the problems is that your players will see so much combat and so many enemies over the course of their PC’s life that after awhile they’ll begin to take a business like attitude to defeating them. Like pest exterminators, they’ll wade into every crypt, dungeon and haunted house with a professional demeanor, wipe out the zombies, orcs or ghosts and then nip back to the inn for a pint of beer and a good laugh. There’s nothing more frustrating than having your villains not taken seriously, or even worse, to not make much of an impression on your players. So here’s how you go about getting under your player’s skin, and making them hate them.

Get personal. The only way you will get your players to care is if their personal beliefs, feelings or emotions are involved. Say they break into a necromancers tower, and as they confront him he unleashes a score of zombies against them. No big deal. Now, what if those zombies are the animated corpses of their families? Now you’ve got their attention! Say they apprehend a pickpocket and give the lad a hard clout on the head and send him running. No big deal. Now, imagine they find out later that very same pickpocket snuck into the inn stable and cut the front right tendon of the knight’s charger. How that player will hate him!

You guys get the idea. The villain has to in some way personally affect the PC. I had a player suddenly develop an undying hatred for a villain in one game after not caring much about him despite sessions worth of slaughters, sacrilege and worse. What did this villain do to finally earn this hatred? He cut a scar into the PC’s cheek and left him disfigured. Where slaughtering villagers failed, a personalized attack worked.

Players present endless opportunities to mess with. Anything they prize, care about, or are proud of can be a source of antagonism should a villain interfere. An inn that they’ve built with hard won cash. A wife, a prized sword, a sacred temple, their reputation at court, a trusted ally: all of these are potential sources of personalized hatred.

Just one word of caution: be sparing with this technique. If the villain turns the PC’s lives into a bad country song, then the player will lose connection with his PC. You have to add insult to injury, not drag the PC’s whole life through the mud. A couple of choice insults will always go much farther than a total undoing of everything the player cared about in the PC’s life.