How to convince opponents to be 'the bad guys'

[JamesFlowers]

I am getting into skirmish fantasy , mostly through blade of songs.

I am building up a little warband , no idea how effective it will be , but I come up against a few issues when wanting to play , in fantasy , it's normally the heroes of the piece , ie the fellowship of the ring , or the dragonlance companions or Sparhawk and his fellow church Knights maybe even Belgarion and the others from many set books.

How do you convince someone , oh you have to play the orcs or the undead or the evil necromancers....I know someone out there will collect a massive Orc army or undead for whfb , but the chances I find for smaller skirmish games less so.

I feel the same about games like 7tv , where imagination is fantastic , but not eveyone buys grunts just to throw at an opponent?

How can we resolve such issues , personally , I would offer I say he heros one game , and the villains the next , which is cool , but where do those villains come from ?

Not many would have a small tribe of orcs to hand as they would be building up there own skirmish groups of heros?

Would paper printouts out monsters be appropriate in this circumstance? Which also means you can vary the villains .

But as my main argument , is how do you persuade the opposition player to be those villains.



Cheers

James

[Daeothar]

In my experience, it's fun to play the bad guys! 

Being an evil overlord means you don't have to care for your underlings; you can be as callous as you need to be. After all, there's always more orks in the spawning pit, more skeletons in the graveyard or thugs at the local inn.

You don't have to emotionaly bond with your characters either, and you get to do all sorts of naughty stuff, simply because it's expected of you!!

Switching roles every game is good though, so you don't get rutted in the same role. Also, the prevailing idea around here is that having a small unit of most monster types in one's collection will always come in handy... 

[Momotaro]

I paint the minis I like the look of, and find games to play with them.  I seem to have a lot of bad guys...

At the scale of 7TV or Song of Blades... painting a warband or two of baddies should be fun.  Not so many models to make it a chore, even if it's just to offer your opponent something to play with.  If you get a good game going, you may find EVERYONE wants to paint up several forces and try them out.  There are certainly enough good character models to make the force an interesting challenge in its own right, not just fodder for the good guys's swords.

Or just ask everyone who plays to bring two forces - good and evil.

As Daeothar says, playing the baddies in a fantasy game is fun, and can be viewed as a bit of light relief.    Maybe it's a laugh to throw the goodies out your dungeon for a change; maybe when the evil ratmen win, they just steal your cheese and go home.

[6milPhil]

I enjoy playing the bad guys and have done ever since the "Escape from Colditz" boardgame.

It sounds like you yourself don't like playing the bad guys either and this will rub off on your opponents especially if you're all newish gamers.

Personally I'd flip a coin in that case and then take turns.

[warburton]

Take turns. I also find that if you are the one driving a certain game, it is often up to you to paint two or three factions so your opponents game with your models.

Also, playing the bad guys is fun as others have said above.

[maxxon]

Quite frankly I've found that narrative games work best when one person, i.e. the game organizer, supplies everything.

If you're talking about a competetive environment and no one wants to play a "horde army", well that tells exactly one thing:

The game is badly balanced.

Which may be because the game is intended to be played in narrative mode and the throwaway goons are never supposed to be a serious opponent.

Trust me: if there is a road to victory, in a competetive environment someone will explore it.

It doesn't matter if the models are butt-ugly, it doesn't matter if it requires hefty dollar investment, it doesn't matter if it relies on exploiting a loophole, it doesn't matter if it turns the actual game idiotically boring -- if it wins games, someone will try it.

[has.been]

When being the Games-Master/Umpire etc. I seem to have more trouble keeping the players 'good'
Star Wars role play = 'If you do that you risk building up your Shadow Points & turning to the DARK SIDE '
                                 'Cool, they have bigger weapons'
Viet-Nam= 'You don't know if the villagers ARE V.C. or even if they are armed'
                 'They might be'  (ratti- tatti, ratti-tatti)
Sci-Fi= (Scenario-Space Marines to Find the Medical Scientist)
            First 4 doors of his research facility were blown apart. At door 5 one of them asked, 'Is this one unlocked?'
            I replied, 'All of the doors are unlocked, including the 4 you blew up'
            They next entered a room full of alien creatures. Straight away they opened fire & wiped them out, i.e. every
            one of
            the Doctors patients in his waiting room.
So you see no difficulty getting my lot to play the bad guys.

[Elbows]

Simple...don't use bad guys.  Nothing wrong with a skirmish between two groups of heroes.  They have some suitable disagreement which requires an ungodly amount of blood-letting (something needs to make the grass grow...).

Or, if you game a lot and have a close-knit group, everyone agrees to paint up a handful of bad guys for when you take turns.  You'll find most people approach any game by creating two opposing forces.  This prevents the hiccup when someone doesn't show.

And let's follow the question with: why don't you play the bad guys? 

[maxxon]

Simple...don't use bad guys.  Nothing wrong with a skirmish between two groups of heroes. 

I think the whole concept of "bad guys" only fits in with a narrative context that has a single viewpoint.

Everyone is the hero in their own story.

To paraphrase James Woods, no one wakes up thinking "Gee, I'll be bad today!"

[mcfonz]

I enjoy playing the bad guys and have done ever since the "Escape from Colditz" boardgame.

It sounds like you yourself don't like playing the bad guys either and this will rub off on your opponents especially if you're all newish gamers.

Personally I'd flip a coin in that case and then take turns.

This. Agree from the outset to take turns. I don't mind either. It's a game, no one is actually asking you to be bad as such.

[Mr Tough Guy]

I think the whole concept of "bad guys" only fits in with a narrative context that has a single viewpoint.

Everyone is the hero in their own story.

To paraphrase James Woods, no one wakes up thinking "Gee, I'll be bad today!"

[eilif]

Interesting thought. 
It's not something that's ever come up at the club. We've been playing Song of Blades for 4 years and had such diverse warbands that we never had to worry about bad-guys, as even two "good" warbands were usually different enough on the battlefield. 

To be fair, we haven't played many (any?) games where there has to be a bad guy like LoTR, 7TV, etc.  Looking at the proportion of good and bad armies in the club though I don't think we'd have too much trouble finding a bad-guy player though.

[pixelgeek]

I agree that "good guys" is really contextual. Two groups of ostensibly "good" characters can fight for all sorts of reasons.

That said, I'm always the guy with the undead, Chaos warriors or evil minions.

[phreedh]

I think the important part of the question isn't good/bad but rather protagonist/antagonist.

In some games, such as Pulp Alley, there's a definitive hero in a warband (regardless of moral alignment). In some scenarios, or series of scenarios, it doesn't make sense for both warbands to be the group of protagonists. Instead, you have one (say, Dr Jones & co) travelling the world running into different adversaries, with a possible recurring villain. It can be difficult to sort that out between two players. Yes, you can alternate roles but then you lose the whole "my gang" feeling.

I always play games as the adversary of the heroes, since I'm usually the game facilitator owning the models, scenery and rules.

[WitchfinderGeneral]

I always had more problems getting anyone playing the "lawful good", everybody wants to be the cool bad guy.