Crossover Earth '98
Playing a Villain Jay Shaffstall
With the recent attack on New York city by Apocalypse Now, I guess this is a good time to give some of my thoughts on playing a villain character. Note that all of this is my personal opinion, and not any GM requirement (although I'll note things that make the GM's job easier). This is pretty much a stream of consciousness piece. Take from it what you want.
Villain characters, besides being fun to play, have two basic functions in a Crossover Earth type game.
First, they provide month to month action for the heroes with minor robbery and similar activities. A villain provides something for heroes to do while they're not pursuing plot-lines. There's a corallary here: heroes have a responsibility to try to stop villains.
Second, villains provide additional plot-lines by scheming on their own. This is one of those things that makes the GM's life easier, by providing more grist for the hero mill, and providing hooks for GM plot-lines. Villains usually generate short-term to medium-term plot-lines, based on the villain's objectives. As an example, in CE II, my villain character (reincarnated here as the NPC Angel) had a six-month plotline to become the power behind the White House. She started small and worked her way up, trying to get the President under her control. Heroes had plenty of opportunity to catch on to what she was trying to do and do something about it. Along with these minor plot-lines, Angel also provided plenty of regular action for heroes by trying to fulfill her destiny of punishing the human race.
Players of villains must accept a certain level of risk. Players of psychotic killers or highly active terrorists accept the most risk (these are the sorts of characters who attempt mass murder every turn). That risk comes in two flavors: NPC and PC. The PC risk is that the villain will piss off enough of the PCs to generate a fatal backlash. The NPC risk is much the same, but it takes longer to drive NPCs to retaliate. If you play a villain with a high body count, you should go into the game with the full expectation that the villain will eventually meet his end. The best attitude is to ask the GM to drop the script immunity from your character and play the villain until someone does away with him. That gives satisfaction for the heroes, to have rid the world of an evil menace, and gives satisfaction to the villain's player, to have gone out in a blaze of glory. If you're not comfortable with eventually losing the villain, you're better off not playing a mass-murderer.
From a GM's point of view, the ideal Crossover Earth player character villain is a person with something driving them. It may be something like Angel's divine command to punish sinners, or it might be the need to acquire material wealth. Whatever that driving force, it should cause the villains to do something. Villains should be willing to do their own dirty work (the Lex Luthors of the CE world are typically under the GM's control). The ideal villain would generate several month's worth of overts out of a single idea.
For example, a villain who was driven to acquire wealth could just rob banks month after month. Eventually, that gets boring. Instead, he could plan to rob a diamond show, and spend one month infiltrating the exhibition hall where the diamonds will be stored, another month laying false trails for the heroes, and a month actually trying the heist.
That's not to say that robbing banks is bad. Robbing banks (or a jewelry store, or an armored truck, etc) is a time honored villain tradition, and is a good 'filler' overt for when the villain is otherwise unoccupied. Often, robbing a bank will lead to a running rivalry with the hero who stopped the villain. In CE II Angel spent half her time in plots against the hero who foiled her first attack on a prime-time television evangelist.
From a GM's point of view, the least ideal Crossover Earth player character villain is a strict mercenary. A mercenary generates no plot-lines, and requires the GM to generate plot-lines just to keep the character busy every month. While a mercenary character is certainly easier for the player, it generates more work for the GM. That's not to say that mercenary player characters don't have their place, it's just useful to realize their impact on the game. Looked at another way, if every player played a hero and a mercenary villain, it would be the same amount of work for the GM as if they each played two heroes.