Over in another thread, terminal night raised a common-enough issue: “how to make enemies more than big, dumb meatsacks with a gun”
AW does this by giving you a ton of different sorts of fronts and threat-types and such, but still, there comes that moment when one wants a little more variation than whatever happens to be your personal usual default enemy. So what tricks or tools or techniques have you learned or designed to give your adversaries dimension and nuance as well as the occasional “meatsack with a gun”?
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I’m quite bad at this. So I’m listening
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Make the adversary an organization, and make each member a complex individual. Play up the tension between loyalty/conformity and individualism.
Or make them sexy.
For the purposes of fights, I try to give “bad guys” some tricks up their sleeves. For the purposes of making them more interesting characters, I try to make their lives look hard and unfair.
Example of both: Eoghan and Dara, a pair of faerie henchmen from Urban Shadows. They were tasked with attacking the PCs in disguise to implicate a rival faction. For the fight itself, they had some tricks in the form of unexpected range (extending limbs) and cooperative tactics (each strong and fast enough to grab the other and make a getaway if needed).
They still got caught in the act and the PCs exposed them, though, which led to nearly everyone in their organization being brutally slaughtered by their mutual enemies. The PCs took pity on them and let just those two – the henchmen who attacked them, the only ones they’d actually met – crawl away from the massacre to save their own lives.
Rarely show them.
I’m planning on listing lots of methodologies of oppression in the game I’m writing as a “how to antagonize now” list.
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I try to remember that all NPCs want something, and “enemies” only antagonize the PCs because they think it will help them get what they want. To go with this, I like to have my NPCs want something perfectly decent and reasonable and the PCs just happen to be in the way.
🙂 Sebastian Baker one would think you’d been raised in our house! Yeah, what he said. Also, I like to look at threats as not necessarily obviously a threat, right? Like, a meatsack with a gun is an obvious threat, but a dependent puppy who loves you is a HUGE liability!!! And that rash on the back of your hand could be more dangerous than just getting shot. Thank you, The Expanse.
● Cause collateral damage (bystanders, infrastructure)
● Neutralise PC advantages (while having other weaknesses)
● Frame the PCs
● Bent move responses (when you Go Aggro on Balls, roll +Hard, but treat 10+ as 7-9, and 6- as if you were the one under threat and he’d hit a 10+. He’s not a man, he is murder.)
● Use smokebombs and flashbangs and tripwires and ballbearings and strobes and noisemakers to hide your true position and appear as a greater threat
● Use allies, especially unexpected ones
● Aim to capture rather than kill, use nets and pits, bolas and tasers
This is a pretty good link that mirrors the above: http://soogagames.blogspot.com/2015/04/goal-plans-and-desires.html
Ooh!
Make the NPC the star of their personal show. So Roark isn’t a gunlugger, more like a gunholder, but he has his thing, a little respect, steady gig as security. Then this posse roll in from the outlands and one of them is armed to the teeth. What’s Roark going to think about that?
Make them pitiable.
following what Meguey Baker mentioned above, i sometimes go for enemies that are not sentient (like wetware viruses, environments etc).
for sentient enemies, i always try to keep in mind that
– most things don’t want to die, if they can help it
– the reason for the first might also be important: is it for themselves, others, both, etc
– most things have something to draw upon (culture, thugs, their own intelligence, pacts with the devil etc) to ensure the first and will use them in desperation or for survival
I think I’m stealing this from Burning Wheel, maybe? People who do good things for bad reasons, and people who do bad things for good reasons.
Interesting bad guys have their own agenda, which the players are interfering with. They have people who are loyal for a reason. They’re not fully evil.
The best thing you can do is simply treat everything and everybody as a potential threat.
Jocko the Hardholder has an elderly mother that he would do anything for, and his mother is a Sybarite (Brute; impulse: to consume someone’s resources), his mother isn’t going to be bursting out in violence or making a show of power but she will be telling stories, defying reason, demanding consideration, and asking for help regularly… these are all threat moves, and done right they compromise the character and make them vulnerable. Played through Jocko’s mother you can use other MC moves: put someone in a spot, take away their stuff, and activate stuff’s downside are all appropriate! Jocko’s mother is not going to kill anybody (not outright) but is also not just somebody he can kill either.
I’ve had a lot of fun, and I’ve seen a lot of great role-playing, simply by taking an NPC that the player’s don’t think too much of, and making them a focal point of capital-T-trouble.
Patrick Henry In other words, make the world seem real.
Craig Vial sometimes you need to use a parable