"Bad Guy" could be very broad here. An antagonist, an imposing neutral party, an ally the players should not upset, a character you want to be scary.
"Effective" could be broad too. General scariness, being good at their job, or just good at leading the plot along.
Might not be singular entity either.
Tangents encouraged.

A jumble of questions:

How to make a character actually scary to be around? (Besides just big stat numbers.)
How do you accomplish the above without high risk of accidentally wiping out a player/the party? Or making the players frustrated against them?

How do you make players really hate the bad guy?
How can a bad guy effectively pull the plot along? Events?

Things to avoid?


One quick though, a bad guy doesn't necessarily have to be a big bad scary person, but could be something smaller, like a harasser.

The thing to avoid if you don't want to kill the characters is to not be trying to kill the characters. Instead, be trying to accomplish something the players don't want the bad guy to accomplish.

Look at Terminator. It's target is usually pretty helpless. People around the target try to protect the target, and the Terminator will harm them if it has to, but it might not have to, if the protectors fail in other ways. And the protectors don't necessarily have to kill the Terminator - in fact, they assume they can't. They just have to get away and hide.

Furthermore, the Terminator and the protectors don't necessarily have to survive in order to succeed. Either could die and still manage to win.

If either the PCs or the big bad are in such a situation, either side can be scary without even being very powerful, or can be very powerful without really being a physical threat to the other side (unless the force the matter).

Basically, think of ways the PCs can lose without being killed and focus on those. It might take some buy-in from the players, because they're going to have to care about achieving a goal or keeping the opposition from achieving a goal. If all they want is to stay alive, they can, just by staying out of the way.

(Look to movies, books and shows. Or other kinds of games. Or history. Winning without having to wipe out the other side is how most conflicts, even violent ones, operate. For some reason, TTRPGs have a big (though not complete) blindspot about this.)
This message was last edited by the player at 19:42, Fri 09 Dec 2022.

Any discussion is going to have to decide what Effective means in your game. Is your goal to scare the players (such as in a CoC or Horror game) or is it to make it a tough to kill BBEG. Is it just to make the character memorable? Or simply something that has the potential to kill the PCs?

Let's take these in order.

Scare the players: Truly horrific descriptions of either menacing or otherworldly horrors are a good start. Second don't let them get comfortable. Jason, Michael Myers, Freddie, all attacked when their victims were off guard. The jump scare are a great way to do this. Graphic descriptions of dismemberments might help in this type of game. Psychological horror is also useful, but this can be hit or miss if you are not good at Psychology. With this genre of game though remember to clear everyone's comfort level first.

Tough to kill: A lot of the Mechanics of most systems are geared towards this so I'll only say upping their armor/hp is a good start. Regeneration and/or resistance to certain damages are also effective.

Memorable Characters: These are the most ephemeral characters and the hardest to get. It greatly depends on what the players find memorable, so a questionnaire at the beginning of the game that includes "What was the most memorable BBEG and NPC you ever had in a game?" Would help. For example, My most memorable Villain was Strahd from Ravenloft. He had personality, was tough to fight and kill, and he didn't seem to really want to kill us so much as humiliate us.

Potentially Kill the PCs: This is best done by early on showing that the BBEG is competent. Ozymandias from Watchmen was a great example. He had planned the fight out so well that when the heroes got to him he had already enacted his plan. Another way is to have them finish off a character that is down. This sets the tone early in a campaign. Especially if every one of his minions are like this. For this to work one PC will have to die just to get across that death is very much on the table. Again though make sure the players are cool with this.

There are other ideas, but I want to see what others come up with.

Not a big post, just an example of what I thought captured some of the essence of a great bad gal.

In the Warhammer campaign The Enemy Within there is a bad gal, chaos-worshipping wizardy-type, whose body is rotting and so she masks it with heavy lavender fragrance. Can't remember her name. But the heavy perfume was smart thinking from the bad gal about what she needs to do to survive when she's around normal people. Your bad gal has brains and thinks things through.

After one early fight in which she unleashed some nasty magic that hurt the party a lot, she escaped when things turned, because bad gals won't stick around in a useless situation just to become a corpse. They have their own motivations and killing some adventurers is mundane when they have visions of Kingdom-wide conquest. This is why she has lackeys and even competent lieutenants to do this work for her.

Therafter all I had to suggest was a faint hint of lavender perfume in some location to freak the players out as well as provide a hint that they are on the right path. The bad gal comes come back and back again, sometimes obviously, but usually from a tangent, becoming a thorn in the player's live, gradually escalating towards some climax when they are finally cornered. Weave the threads of the bad gal's life into those of the characters.