Lately, as I’ve been playing various games, reading various stories, and watching various shows/movies, I’ve been thinking about the lines characters say right before starting a battle. Villains are notoriously fond of their dramatic one-liners, but they don’t have a monopoly on them. Heroes use them plenty as well, as do people engaged in more social-oriented encounters since, no matter who says it, a dramatic one-liner is supposed to represent a blow delivered. Sure, in physical combat scenario, that social blow doesn’t mean much in terms of damage dealt back and forth, but it represents a level of confidence and self-assuredness the speaker is displaying in order to either boost their own morale or to unnerve their foes. Mostly, though, these lines exist in stories for we readers/watchers/players, to tell us something about the encounter that’s either happening or about to happen and the people who are participating in it. After all, the famous “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die” line tells us tons about the person speaking it. Mostly, perhaps, in the context of the broader scene and as an accentuation on a character rather than a defining trait, but that line is the only thing I remember, since I’ve even forogtten the name of the villain who spoke it (I’ve also literally only seen part of that movie once, when I was far too young, when I came down from my bedroom to ask my parents something long after I was supposed to be asleep, so my memory being spotty is fairly reasonable in this case). I feel pretty comfortable saying that, regardless of their original context or what else might have been going on in the story, these kind of memorable one-liners eventually come to define our ideas of these characters more than anything else does.

As a storyteller myself, I’ve only once created a villain who would monologue. Heroes are dangerous things, of course, and most of my villains have been aware of that, so they tend to avoid unnecessary monologuing. I tend to creating villains who have just as much on the line as the heroes do, who are working to make their goals a reality and who have to take the threats against them seriously, so I tend to avoid one liners when writing or playing them in tabletop games. I also tend to avoid one-liners from heroes, though I’m a bit more generous with them (though I tend towards comedy with them rather than drama when I’m the one speaking the line out loud during a tabletop game, but that’s more reflective of me as a whole than the kinds of heroes I play). I’ve been reconsidering this stance, though, for a while now. I had the chance to, in a largely defunct Dungeons and Dragons game, finally play a monologuing villain. He is the first mastermind type villain I’ve ever played, so I get to bring out my love of wordplay and verbal jousting, which is the only time that such one-liners make sense. He’s not a major villain though, so I don’t know how much time I’ll get with him unless he somehow survives an encounter with the heroes and grows into a major villain, all of which will only happen if the campaign returns from its ten-month draught (which I do not expect to ever happen).

Some of this consideration is fairly moot. A lot of my villains are more than some individual who might try to fight with words before exchanging blows. In my first D&D campaign, the players were rebelling against a repressive and colonizing religious society and killed almost every villain or minion they ran into except a few of the more brute-like villains, who were more into throwing hands than bandying quips. In another game, the heroes never managed to catch up to any of the villains they were trying to track down as they worked through hunting them down by slowly eliminating their followers, but that wouldn’t have helped in the end because the ultimate “villain” was a world-eating creature caught in the middle of a war between Heaven and Hell, so it wouldn’t have considered them worth their attention, let alone the effort of wordplay. In my on-going game of Heart: The City Beneath, the ultimate villain is a corporation run by several executive suites, at least one board of directors, and is best treated as a personification of the vile aspects of capitalism rather than as anything they could undermine with clever commentary or biting remarks. Sure, there are frequently individuals who could do the job, but they’re not usually someone the player characters have enough of a relationship with to be interested in verbally sparring. Well, so far, anyway. That might change in the next few sessions.

In my writing, I’ve tended to go for more nuance than pure quipping allows, and while my writing is not entirely free of pithy one-liners, I tend to focus more on good characterization and joking between characters rather than trading barbs with an enemy. I don’t think any of my writings have suffered from this particular lack, but then I wouldn’t think that. I’ve done it as it feel appropriate, based on the story I’m telling and the characters involved, but I’d rather have snappy dialogue than a group of people quipping at each other. I feel like its a spice best used sparingly, but I think I might be heading towards the first story I’m ever going to tell (as a GM) that will have this kind of quippy character in it. Maybe even a quippy villain. I’ve been inspired by Dimension20 to play some D&D and to take all the ideas I’ve compiled for almost a decade now about a modern fantasy setting so I can run a game that better reflects the kinds of stories I’m interested in right now. Which will probably include a charismatic, clever villain or at least some charismatic, clever NPCs for my players to encounter. After all, there really isn’t a lot of space for a “might makes right” modern setting since most modern systems tend to (eventually, at least) react poorly to that kind of thinking and “philosophy.” It’s the perfect setting for a “manipulator” type villain. A cult leader who can’t be pinned down. A dangerous wordsmith.

Honestly, I’m a little worried about how much I might enjoy that. I love wordplay. I love insinuation and speaking the truth without being helpful or providing the information being saught. I try to only ever use my powers for good (and for bad puns), but being able to spin up a charming, friendly, and absolutely vile character who is able to hide their villainy behind a layer of approachable schmooze isn’t exactly evil if its for a game. It’s all in good fun, after all. Maybe, once I’ve gotten some practice, I’ll employ it more widely. Not too widely, though. As John Scalzi reminds himself and the internet fairly frequently, “asshole is the failure mode of clever” and I really try to avoid being an asshole. Which is why I’ve avoided this kind of clever, quippy wordplay in my day-to-day life. I don’t want to be an asshole. As a fake villain in a tabletop game, though… Well, sometimes its fun to pretend to be an asshole for a bit.