I've been thinking about villains again. A Big Bad chews the scenery, is arrogant, masterful, always one step ahead...
Until they're not. Until they get fucked up, either through application of intense violence or a more politico-social humiliation that stings just as badly. And that works best if they were a threat, a frustration, a completely insufferable asshole beforehand.
Sometimes it's different: sometimes they survive, sometimes they persist even beyond the campaign, sometimes the party talks them down, empathises, decides there's more to them than the villain niche you were trying to fold them into. And it took me a while to reward that kind of thinking: there's not necessarily anything wrong with saying "nah, this one is a total monster, you're wasting your time" but sometimes it's more interesting to have degrees of intensity for these things. Not good, no, but not beyond reason either.
As a kid I loved the cartoon episodes where the villain had to team up with the heroes. The old "I may want to conquer the world but THEY want to end it" route. It's a classic! It's a great way of opening up the world and bashing together existing elements that might not have had a chance to interact that way before.
I'm routinely surprised by the notion that a GM shouldn't sit down at the table with a story in mind, and should instead prep a reactive and responsive world for the players to explore instead. Setting aside the obvious point that such improvised storytelling is every bit as challenging and involved as the alternative, I feel it's a peculiar way of thinking to make those mutually opposed stances instead of approaches that routinely bleed through into one another.
As someone who is actually pretty terrible at improv I think of it more as the peoples of the world are trying to live a story, a default narrative, and the actual resulting tale (the Final Story if you will) is the result of all those flailing motives and plot hooks colliding with a roaming band of ne'er-do-wells who style themselves the main characters.
Roll for hot take: a GM who "trusts the dice" to "tell the real story" or whatever should have a little more faith in their own storytelling abilities. Yeah sure, roll your dice, consult your charts, draw the cards. We all do that. The end result is still down to you and your players. It's still your work. Tools aren't responsible: you are. It's like the narrative version of the DMs who sit down with their parties and create an immense, horrifyingly complicated flesh golem out of D&D and then still credit all of their changes and accomplishments to the barely recognisable seed rattling around in the middle of it all.
And it's incredibly freeing to have written a safe default story outline and think "you know what? What's happening now is actually way better". True, I don't think it would be healthy to assume that'll happen every time (because in that case, why bother?) but it's not something to fear or resent: you're doing something right.
Emergent storytelling can happen in spite of the story you set out to tell, and sometimes that's great. All that prep isn't going to waste: it's the very thing that lets the end be transformative and subversive.
I had a party that spared a mutant mercenary who was a kind of monstery Wolverine knock-off with accelerated healing. He was a stubborn, violent jackass and they still refused to kill him. They basically left him in a pained heap and moved on before he recovered.
Anyway, that mutant guy's sister turned out to be the head of the only organisation that had any chance of challenging the Big Bad, and said sister was inclined to help because she was most grateful that the party hadn't fragged the big lug. Funny that. What a coincidence.