Superheroes? BAH! The Villains Are Where It's At!

This is the first of my submissions for October's RPG Blog Carnival, hosted by Chatty DM on the subject of Superheroes in RPGs...I'm not entirely sure if this is a valid submission just yet, considering it supports the enemy...but I figure so long as I drop enough super-names, I'm alright...after all, villains are just misunderstood heroes...

Don't get me wrong...the heroes are all well and good...no disputing that...but I always find the villains far more interesting, the good ones at least (got to be specific)...but in case you're one of those naïve simpletons who disagrees, here's my argument in a nice organized list...

7 Reasons Why Villains Are Always Better Than Heroes

1. Evil works better than TAG Body Spray

Women are naturally drawn to evil...most heroes have their Lois Lane or their Mary Jane (Bruce Wayne, Johnny Tremain, Lion's Mane, Candy Cane)...but those relationships tend to have a sort of unfulfilling tension that builds up the suspense in the storyline until the romantic climax when Parker finally tells the girl next door how he feels...

LAME...

Every good villain knows that chick interaction should be limited to the standard Damsel-In-Distress protocol or the occasional one night stand...it's generally a bad idea to keep a lady around your evil operation...you never know when James Bond is going to show up to get with anything and everything that has two sets of lips...

Now, you might be saying that Bond gets all the chicks (which he does) and thus villains are inferior...but that's because Bond is an anomaly...he's invested so many ranks in the art of seduction that no woman can resist him...every supervillain he ever encounters, however, always seems to have a steady supply of half-naked women around him, no matter how ugly, disgusting or vile that villain may be...it's the evil, baby...it does thingssss...

After all, why pay for dinner when you've got all that corrupt ambition lying around, waiting to get you some tail?...

2. When you die, you won't die easy, and even then you won't be dead

Supervillains never go down in a single hit...they don't die of food poisoning, they don't keel over after getting hit by a taxi, they don't have aneurisms and die in their sleep, they don't trip down a flight of stairs and break their neck, and they most certainly do not succumb to heart failure...supervillains always have a climactic death scene that occurs at the very height of their power at the very moment their master plan comes to fruition...

This isn't to say it's impossible for a supervillain to be killed in such a way, but rather supervillains make the effort and take the precautions to avoid doing so...when Lex Luthor was diagnosed with terminal hand cancer from the kryptonite ring he'd been wearing for so many years, he didn't roll over and sob himself into sweet good night!...he faked his death with a plane crash, went to a remote island lair, had his brain removed from his weak cancerous body and grew himself a brand-new clone body!...personally, I'd have gone for the old robotic killing machine, but clone body is fine too...

Now, in the highly unusual circumstance that a supervillain DOES meet his demise before his master plan has been completed, they can always come back and try again!...this can happen through an incredibly unlikely escape, by taking over someone else's body, pulling the lich card and forcing the heroes to destroy some featureless rock you buried way back when (hehe) or simply letting your son/brother/identical cousin take the reins of your operation...don't even get me started on Blofeld...

No matter the case, supervillains just don't die...

3. Morality is for squares

Ethical guidelines to human behavior just get in the way of progress...there are some things that superheroes simply can't do...no killing, no stealing, no hurting the innocent, no drinking on Sundays, no necrophilia...the list drones on and all that droning makes them weak...

Supervillains, on the other hand, have complete freedom...they have no inhibitions when it comes to getting what they desire...they CAN have wild drunken pyro-necro-pedo-bestialic sex and loot the bodies afterwards...mind you, some D&D "heroes" do this anyway, but that just means they're on the right track...

4. They don't take crap from nobody

Exhibit A: CAPTAIN KILLDOZER

Some people in the world you just don't fuck with. Unfortunately you can't always tell who those people are until it's too late and such was the case with Marvin Heemeyer. He lived in a little town in Colorado with a population of about 500. He was a welder and owned a muffler repair shop and, presumably for a while, he was a totally non-sinister individual who never even considered doing anything crazy like building a massive, nearly indestructible machine of terror.

For a while.

Then, Heemeyer wound up in a dispute over his land with a cement manufacturing plant. He leased his business to someone else and sold his property while the new owners gave him six months to vacate. It was during that six months that Heemeyer built a death machine, a Komatsu D335A bulldozer outfitted with armor plating over the cabin and engine.

The armor in some places was over a foot thick and had concrete between sheets of steel, making it pretty much unstoppable. The tank was also outfitted with onboard cameras and monitors in the cabin so Heemeyer could see where he was going. The inside was made nearly airtight to resist a potential gas attack and had air conditioning, food, water and life support. Once he got in Heemeyer had no plans to actually leave the bulldozer.

Outside, the bulldozer had .50 caliber semi-automatic rifle mounted on the back, and three other semi-automatics mounted elsewhere. Basically, this was a machine designed to make everyone in his town of 500 take one massive, synchronized fear shit the moment it rolled out of his workshop.

Heemeyer took his machine of insanity out for a spin on June 2, 2004 by crashing it through the wall of his workshop. He then plowed through the concrete plant, the town hall, the local newspaper, a judge's house, a hardware store owned by a guy who had pissed him off, and seven other buildings, causing about $7 million in damages.

The bulldozer, which came to be known as the Killdozer since that really is the only appropriate name for it, was hit with over 200 rounds of ammunition and three small explosions that barely left a scratch on it.

Eventually the Killdozer got stuck in a basement and the engine failed. A single shot was heard in the cabin. While Heemeyer took the easy way out, and it still took authorities twelve hours to cut their way into the machine. Surprisingly, Heemeyer had not rigged the dozer to then self-destruct and destroy the entire town.

Exhibit B: There are no more exhibits...I've made my point...

5. Friendship ^_^

Peter Parker and Clark Kent were both outcasts and loners...Drizz't ain't doing much better, despite all the sympathizers...Harvey Osbourne and Lex Luthor are rich, popular socialites and it's not like Parker or Kent are threatening to kill their friends all the time either...

Not to mention the revolving door of nemeses there seem to be whenever a hero succeed in temporarily defeating a villain...these guys are more well-connected than even the most well-connected of well-connected nobles...

6. The Overly-Convoluted Master Plans

The best part of being a supervillain is also the best part of being a DM...those impossibly complex designs for world domination that, while completely unstoppable, always seem to be interrupted in some fashion by a bloody superhero...

*shakes fist menacingly*

Of course, it's not the destination that matters...it's the journey...which is why supervillians often have multiple plans in the works at any given time...superheroes just run around tossing wrenches at things...what's the fun in that?...

7. Impeccable Sense of Humor

Q: How can you tell the X-men have been in your fridge?

A: There's claw marks in the butter.

It's a well-known fact that superheroes are not funny...it's always the supervillains that have the good puns, quips, and one-liners...I doubt the Flash has a Civil War era satire sitting in his file cabinet, ready to burst from the genius comedy contained within...but Reverse Flash probably does!...

Plus, have you ever heard a superhero deliver his good laugh?...of course not!...it's all about the maniacal cackle...

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!

That's enough for now...tune in next time when I talk about world domination and how to do it...