Teamwork, resources, environment, and planning.

Defenders have a tremendous advantage. They don't have to carry stuff in. They don't have to scout. And they have reserves.

Defenders with an established structure have all sorts of capital:

• Human Capital
• Infrastructure
• Temporal capital

Human Capital

Human capital is the first trick. An adventuring party is fundamentally limited in the number of people they have. These people have relatively limited resources attached to them. There are expenditures, but the nature of adventuring life is that most resources are dropped into incredibly inefficient gear because of the number of hands available to hold it.

By breaking away from the adventuring life and investing in people, you fundamentally get more actions per round. Now, while at much higher levels a capable tier-1 caster laughs at a horde of underlings, there are many things to be feared from a structure that communicates.

At the end of the day, hiring guards based on their ability to Use Magic Device and issuing them all wands of Magic missle is a huge advantage. You don't need to worry about accuracy, and 4 people with a wand of magic missle are far far cheaper than a high level wand.

More to the point, by having purely-defensive people in place and allocating them their own resources for defense means that you don't even need to worry about defensive measures for your offensive folks.

What's even better is that these resources sit around. From the relative cost scales of higher-level gear... if you need to use these resources, you'll probably capture more than their value from the idiots you're using them against.

As a means of insurance, having spells to take care most of the more common problems (adventurers being top of the list) you can amortize the risk and therefore the cost of adventurers over weeks and months, instead of having to pay for the acute cost of repairs.

From a technical point of view, you want to invest in level 1 stuff for most of your mooks. One shot potions, poisons, and wands are absolutely fantastic for this sort of thing. They sit around until they're needed, and there's no worry of "should I save it for later."

Details on loadout:

• Wand of Magic Missle
• More

Infrastructure

Infrastructure is a kind of investment that is nominally impossible or not particularly useful for adventurers. There are different roles for structure, but protection and subdual is the critical aspect here.

The critical thing here is to allow them an "out" so that they aren't forced onto deadly ground. Instead, the architecture should make it harder to go to important places and easier to go to exterior places.

Of course, these exterior places, not being frequented by the public, can have various man-traps (sally ports and whatnot) to thereby contain adventurers in a safe (to the infrastructure) location for handling. But giving them an escape route into this area is critical so that they don't stick around and damage important bits.

Therefore, infrastructure is something that can take as muh money as you want to put into it, and will repay the hotel handsomely.

Features of infrastructure are a function of the role that you want the infrastructure to play

Roles of infrastructure

• Client Protection
• Aggression channeling
• Disturbance containment

Temporal capital

There are two types of temporal capital. Planning and the action economy. The greatest luxury that your environment will have is the ability to have a very short OODA loop. With a plan, the reactions of the opposition will get inside the adventurer's OODA loop leaving them with the feeling that they just need to di di mau because things are simply moving too quickly and the opponents are too well organized.

By having quick reaction forces in place with plans and alert signals, the hotel will completely violate the adventurers OODA loop and social construction of "dungeon." (as the idea of dungeon does not have mutually reinforcing and escalating waves to force people along a desired path. Because fairness.)

Temporal investments

• Signals
• Plays
• Graduated response

My best villains are based off the what the players care about. I'll talk about methods and some recent (in the last 3-4 years) examples. You may want to check out my 7 Types of Antagonists as well.

What the players care about - Flags

So first off, I tend to play games with explicit mechanics for the players to tell me what kinds of conflicts they're into. That makes it easy for me to figure out what kinds of villains will press on those conflicts in interesting ways. As we play, a key point is finding out what exactly hits a player's hot button which is usually near, but not quite on the Flag they've given you.

As you play, pay attention when the players are really serious about winning conflicts, or when they're going above and beyond to protect something or accomplish something - all the physical cues (body language, voice) that tells you they're feeling suspense are key to getting more on point, though games where you can spend hero points can also give you a mechanical cue as well.

The General

About a year ago, I ran a game of Tenra Bansho Zero - the player had a character who was basically an adopted outsider to the daimyo - he was close to the family but still politically a second class citizen. Emotionally, he's like a step-brother to the daughter. In TBZ, mecha can only be piloted by children and adolescents - so usually daughters are put up to this task while sons are raised to be leaders.

Long story short - the country ends up having to fight a defensive war, and a general is pretty eager to send her out on the front line. The player character speaks way out of line at court, and gets exiled by the general's pressure.

The general has hammered on the fact the player character is an outsider, separated him from one of the NPCs he cares a lot about, is going to send her into serious danger, and also put the player character out to the border where he could possibly die.

This only worked because I had successfully played up the daughter as being sort of a great younger sister character - a nice kid trying to do her best - so the player CARED about her, and now the general was basically threatening all of that. The thing is, the general actually isn't entirely wrong about wanting to use the daughter to defend the nation - they're outmatched and a giant robot is actually one of the few things they've got to equalize. Because of this, it makes it harder for the players to argue against it. What finally made him absolutely hateworthy was that the general had nothing but trash talking to the player on TOP of everything else. (The general falls under "The Hater" category).

AU Star Wars

5 years ago, I ran a Primetime Adventures game in an alternate universe Star Wars (clones were not an army, but rather a way for the government to replace troublesome individuals in positions of power...)

We had several villians who were all very good and emotionally charged:

A senator - the father of one of the Jedi. He was kind of an ass and ended up getting in the way of their plans, though I made sure his motivations were clear. He was hated because it hit on the player's actual personal issues with his own father.

A clone of one of the player characters - absolutely there to take over someone's life, and threatened to pretty much do the opposite of everything the player character wanted to do. The player found themselves having to kill the clone and feeling terrible about it - it forced them to cross their own moral line in the process (see below for more on that).

A Jedi who was on the same side as the player characters, but was just a little too overzealous and violent. He took the player's goals but twisted the reasons for doing so, even though he often used the same rhetoric. He made the players question the very cause they were fighting for.

The moment of moral bankruptcy

What usually makes the villain click for players is the point when the villain crosses a single line that makes the players angry. What people often confuse is the idea that this moral line has to hurt the player characters, or their allies - it doesn't. This also can be how a character who is relatively neutral or even supportive of the player characters becomes a villain in their eyes.

This works best if the goals are understandable, but the methods are extreme or twisted along the way.

Transhumanism whether you want it or not

I recently ran a sci-fi game where a roboticist found out one of the AIs he had built had survived the destruction of his lab, and in fact, was still out there, doing stuff. Since the lab and it's fellow robots were destroyed by angry rampaging humans out of ignorance, it decided the solution was to improve and fix humanity. To snatch up souls from the dead and give them immortal bodies, better bodies, and more time to learn - eternity.

Of course, no one was asked if they wanted this. And the AI simply treated them as objects, to be turned on or off at will. ("Don't worry, if this unit bothers me too much I'll just reset it's memory. It's easier that way.") And the AI decided that in order to show how much better this new path was, it would destabilize the religion on the planet by supporting terrorist violence along the way - "If they die, it doesn't matter, I can simply bring people back. This is why my path is superior to religion. I can bring people to life, eternally, now. So who cares if they die in a bomb blast? They'll be back soon enough."

The casual disregard for human life, or human will was pretty much what made this AI a great villian. It stepped on the roboticist's sense of responsibility for his creations, and another character's sense of obligation to the dead soldiers he once led.

Drifter's Escape - casual racism

A friend of mine played a game of Drifter's Escape and relayed this event in play. The main character, a drifter, is picked up in a truck along with several other folks to do day labor. The character is white, but the other men are Latino. The farm owner picking them up, also white, says to the drifter, "Hey, why don't you sit up front, in the cab? We'll have some good work for you." and throughout the session basically offered the character preferential treatment to the other workers throughout the session.

For everyone at the table, it was a great example of a villain who didn't have to do anything overtly violent or say anything ugly - in fact, he simply offered the drifter good things - but everyone could see that part of that price was to participate in putting down/cutting out the other workers from a fair shake too.

A simple, moral line.

Justice delayed is justice denied

Along with the specifics of a villain being either an obstacle to goals or twisting ideals, etc. a key part of how you play that out is having a villain the players cannot pay back or overcome immediately. The frustration makes you hate them more, and you really can't wait to finally see them get theirs. Of course, when that time comes, it might cost enough that you have to really decide if it's worth going for.

A good extra is your allies or friends also like this terrible character. It turns the battleground into fighting for their hearts - convincing your allies of your cause and avoiding social fallout for taking action.

Troublesome Villains > Fiat Villains

In the games I run, I don't have villains who simply auto-succeed at doing terrible things - they don't just manage to kidnap your loved ones, or get you ousted without the players getting a chance to prevent it. I don't fudge the dice or simply play a "gotcha" on the players.

What this does is establish a position of trust for us as a group - the players know if they protect or save something, they really did it, I didn't hand the victory to them. They also know if they fail or things go wrong, they COULD have possibly succeeding and stopped the villain, which means they really rack their brains over "what could I have done better?"

In comparison, when you have a game where the villains do their evil by GM Fiat, the players don't feel like fighting harder, they feel cheated and angry at the GM, not the villains. I've played those games, they're not fun.