There needs to be a happy medium between the PCs and the Villain for the sake of presentation. Most players now days never let the Villain have their time to shine and roll to strike mid monologue. That feels like it cheapens the moment and the Villain. While at the same time you can't just have a Villain suddenly pause the game for 10 minutes while the GM cues up the right music and reads from a script.
>>98394911Don't have the villain monologue while the party can strike them.Put the speeches in the messages left as clues, as recordings, via phone/crystal ball etc. If you want to explain villain's philosophy, motivation, or inner workings, you could do it as exposition provided by a friendly NPC.Or drop the monologue and stick to one-liners.
>>98394911Make it a manifesto that's put on public display.New generation of gamers loves manifestos, but the concept is perfectly viable even in medieval setting.
>>98394942I disagree, theatrics are important.Just have the villain on a position of power (like having a hostage, subduing the heroes, sheer intimidation, whatever) and start the speech.Then, if you feel it's dragging out, make a opening for the PCs, stop the speech, eventually make the villain flee or resume his speech at another moment of power and finalizes his thoughts, so you break his speech but he doesn't lose charisma
The "Let's strike them while they're talking!" Always feels like people trying to bring realism into a game. If they want that type of realism then the villain would just attack the PCs base all the time with high level mobs
>>98395067>If they want that type of realism then the villain would just attack the PCs base all the time with high level mobsYeah, that's where hobo part of murderhobo comes from, PCs have no permanent residence exactly because if they did they could be easily targeted there.
>>98394911Just have the villain able to talk and fight at the same time. Learn how to parse out your monologue in whatever combat rounds you're dealing with, you'll probably have to adjust the length of the monologue to the game a bit but writing with constraints is an important tool to increase quality and impact.
>>98394942I use magic mouths, spectral minions.Once, I had the entire hallway talk to the party thru the faces carved in to the walls.The faces then spat out giant spiders, because fuck them, and the doors slammed shut. The poison softened them up right good before the fight, too.
>>98394911Villains shouldn't get monologues, that's retarded egotism.
>>98394911Idk my group that I hand selected players for always lets me finish and do the unrealistic tropes and cliches like cool villain monologuing - because that adds the theatre and the spice to the game of pretend that we all love and enjoy together.
How fucking hard is it to figure out that different players have different preferences on how much non-game they want mixed into their game?
>>98395067That's why communication is good, with an extra carrot just to make sure it works. For example in 5e right now I already had cases where I wanted to do a short monologue, so I gave my players the offer>for the duration of his speech your buff timers don't expire, and if you allow him to yap to his heart's content before engaging, I will give you 2 inspirations to grant to whoever you want, by the way he will only talk and listening to him won't cause his reinforcements to appear in the meantime or something so don't worryIf the group doesn't bite that, then you've got literal psychos as players and you ought to look for new ones if you want to do anything remotely cool. On the other hand it's true that the monologues shouldn't be overly long and you can provide journal loredumps or whatever to explain deeper motivations if necessary (from my experience the players don't give a shit about in-depth motivations though). One-liners and similar are best. I'm having a final boss to a 2-year-long campaign soon and my plans for his final speech are "You may now lay down your weapons and I will kill you painlessly and you will become a part of the greater plan. No? Fuck you then, worms, you will suffer."
>>98394911I don't know what psychopaths you people play with, but we talk and we like to enjoy the villains.
>>98394911No thanks, I'll continue allowing my players to make decisions.
>>98395034Theatrics aren't important, actually.
>>98395067Yes, of course they do. Are you new to games or something?
>>98394911For me, monologues are either the villain laying out their philosophical motives just before the final showdown, or a declaration of absolute evil where they promise to destroy all the hero loves in midst of the climax
>>98394911Speaking is a free action. Monologues can't be interrupted. You can prevent the players from ever doing anything by simply having any character talk indefinitely in their presence.
I always interrupt lengthy monologues by calling the villain childish names, and making fun of their couture.>Made fun of Strahd for appearing on a rooftop to threaten us and twirling his cape dramatically like a big poofter
I don't actually do this btw
>>98395067>>98402303It's media literacy award winners trying to be le special snowflakes who are totally different and smarter than the characters in their animes trying to prove how different and cool they are. Main character syndrome at it's finest. Case in point: >>98402465
Yeah, trying to make good decisions is correct, and is the whole point of a game.
I wonder why the nuh-uh troll seems to be seething at a such innocuous topic.
Sadly, we will never know why you are.
>>98394911I played Marvel Heroic Roleplaying and the way that initiative worked was that, when combat started, a PC always went first. The players were happy to chat with villains before combat started because they knew they weren't at risk of losing the initiative (literally) by doing so.
There's a lot of options for a villains monologue, it's all in what you do to prevent the players from being able to perform an attack. Video games are full of those situations where the players are separated from a situation by a window or seeing something on a monitor or a pre-recorded message or something like that. The first Big Daddy encounter in Bioshock has you in a hallway with a reinforced glass window between you and the action. You can't break the window so you are there to watch the scene play out.You can have the world morph around them, as the reveal moment happens. Tech or magic can be used to have walls shift around or otherwise reshape a normal room into a secret room and a screen is revealed as their plan is laid out.Body Doubles/Life Model Decoys/Doombots/etc can also be used. The one revealing their plan wasn't the real villain, just someone who was brainwashed, bribed, or otherwise somehow convinced to be used for the monologue while the villain is somewhere else, perhaps pulling another heist while the players are distracted.How many times did Shredder or some other 90's cartoon villain take over the TV to broadcast their latest scheme and that was how the heroes found out something was going on? Gives them plenty of time to get whatever they want to say out.
Speaking is a free action. /thread.
>>98394911You know, it just dawned on me that over my ~15 years of GMing and a few dozens of campaigns I had almost none actual villains. It was always just kinda faceless enemy factions, various obstacles and oppositions that the PCs face along the way, groups they antagonise themselves due to their actions, but almost never THE designated BBEG. Weird honestly. Gotta try to do that a bit more often
>>98394990That's not a bad idea.
>>98416085considering PCs and GMs were mentioned by the OP as well as rolling and "game" itself, its fair to assume this is a bot post
>>98416086Which game?
>>98395067>standing around and talking while several armed hostiles are directly in front of youWho is being unrealistic here, really?You monologue when they’re helpless or you have sufficient leverage to make them question motives.
>>98402465I did this.It was really fun for the table because I’m particularly good at it.But my homie running the game basically gave up all interest in DMing after that and I feel like I unfairly took something from him he was really ready for. He never shows his disappointment but I can tell it changed the way he looked at things afterward. Of course he’d eventually have to suffer stupid player every once in awhile and learn to deal but he didn’t deserve an advanced fuckwit at their peak derailing his fist attempt at running a table; especially considering he’s one of the more impartial and thoughtful players we had
>>98394911What do you mean by "the villain"?
>>98394911I don't mind players interrupting them. It gains them no advantage, since the villain is right there looking at them and talking is a free action in most systems, not just D&D. But it is gratifying to cut off an obnoxious narcissist mid-sentence, I'm sure. This does occasionally backfire, one villain I had got so upset at one of the PCs being rude that he went from intending to take it easy to start to furiously using all of his power. Got them pretty dinged up.
>>98394911>Most playersHow tf do you know what "most players" do? In either case, even if you did somehow have magical spyware on all RP tables that allowed you to actually know it was most players, the solution is the same anyway: get better players. There is no mechanism where you can force your players to have patience that will also be appreciated by said players. Either they want to hear the monologue, or they don't. If they do you wouldn't have a problem, and if they don't, forcing them will not result in anything worthwhile.
>>98394911Traditional games?
