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Originally Posted by b-dog
I wouldn't mind writing some articles but I think that the GURPS crowd prefers complex villains who are only evil because of something in their past or the villians don't realize what they are doing is harmful, whereas my villians tend to be total jerks and are fully aware of it. So I don't think my writings would be printed.
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It's not that villains
have to be complex and conflicted with traumatic childhoods, but to be worth publishing, they ought to be
interesting in some way.
Note that there are a lot of ways to be interesting. Frankly, complex and tragic back-stories full of bad childhood experiences are one of the lazier ways to achieve this - and I've been plenty lazy that way myself - but a bit of soap opera is always good for some entertainment value in the reading, and can feed into a game plot that runs for more than a session or two. But you can also make the villain interesting in, say, the way he fits into the setting. Sir Jasper of the Black Mustache may just be bad because he likes having money, power, and all his enemies hung up in the dungeon - but if he's achieving this goal by pulling off some complex military strategy, or he's done something ingenious with the feudal politics that are part of the style of his game-world, or his enemies have formed an unlikely alliance with peculiar tactics, then he's interesting.
And you can always make a villain interesting by giving him interesting game mechanics - a really nifty superpower, or a clever use of spells, or some stylish martial arts. There's a difference there between "interesting" and "pointlessly complicated for the sake of it", mind, but it's at least worth a try.
But bad guys who just like hitting people because they're bad,
and who hit people the exact same way as every other two-bit thug on the block... Well, any of us can create as many of those as we need, before our first coffee of the day. Why should we pay for them? (Though there's sometimes scope for a good article showing a set of standard opponent types for a given setting or class of world.) So the trick is to find
something to make your publishable character stand out.