Should You Be An Evil Overlord With Style Or One Who "Gets The Job Done"?

How about a comprimise. Become an effecient evil overlord. When the James Bond character comes, shoot him in between the eyes. When someone questions you how you killed him, lie. Make up some elaborate scheme. You’re an evil overlord, you answer to no one. Lie all you want, no one can deny you were eleborate. If they do, shot them, then lie about it.

I hear that computer graphics and special effects can do wonders for an evil overlord after the fact. Limiting yourself to only honestly reporting the method in which you dispatch the good guy is like refusing to use half your arsenal when invading some small bordering nation with beachfront property that looks good to you.

You do for the good guy quickly and efficiently, then let your PR people come up with a great stylish looking “security camera videotape” of the event later, that not only makes you look good, but will swing the opinion of the masses as well.

Of course, I’m now breaking the nth rule of things not to do, by revealing my secrets before my plan to rule the world has come to fruition. Curse you, hero-guy, foiled again!

Why not have both style and win? Kill off the hero, but, let no one know of this event. Let them believe he/she will arrive in the nick of time to save them all. And suddenly when they don’t arrive, suprise them with flair and style in the conclusion of it all as if the hero was to arrive any second up to the moment of your true conquest. The taking of their hope, dreams, and children. BWAHAHAHA!

looks around guardedly to make sure Wintermute isn’t around

The trick is to get really incompetent heroes. That way you win and can do it easily enough that you look good while doing it. :slight_smile:

Easy!

Having recently had the opportunity to be an evil Overlord (or would that be Overlady? Nah, that sounds silly) here http://forums.prospero.com/foxxfiles/messages?msg=113242.1 -If it asks you to log in hit “guest” and you may need to go to the “read more” button at the bottom to keep reading (I’m NeoX there BTW and I show up in the story beginning with post 6) - I learned that style isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. What the hell good did the lovely high heels do me in the end? They were useless! And so were my evil hencemen.

Learning from my mistakes, I think that I’d be a far better villian-ess if I learned to act with simple cold efficiency - If you want to kill someone, don’t let him take a bath first, just kill him why you’ve got the chance. Nice cars, pretty dresses, and hoards of people willing to do your bidding make for a pretty set, but if you don’t have the basics of hero-killing down, the Goddess Pele is still going to take you out in the end.

You made the basic error most would be overlord do. You become consumed with the style. you See the style, the flash, the jack boots and cape are all means to an end. Witless henchment, goo d comedy relief, but otherwise about as usefull as a third testicle in a bar fight. Get jackbooted henchment who carry out your instructions with cold blooded ruthlessness. As that level of single minded ditermination has it’s place in any evil empire, but the master the overlord must always keep the broader pitture in mind. THe plans must be elaborite, how else can you expect to topple goverments left and right? How else do you cow the populace? WHY else would they revere you? They must be made to feel that 1) you are all powerful, and 2) better and smarter then they are. So sure, let the hero take a bath before you kill him. Just make SURE there is no way in or out of the room. Seal it. No giant air ducks, or drainage holes. In fact no drainage at all, let the room just fill with water. And in the off chance he does somehow manage to cheat death, have a cadre of you most leathel assiassins surrounding all possible exits (which avre covered in hidden tripple redundent lethal body traps)of the room. And on the off chance he survives that, he must then navigate the death walk or your locked down fortress, allso traped and rigged. If he survives all that just shoot him in the eye, the point has been made. You are still better smarter fast and more powerfull then him, and his death at your hands after surviving such insurmoutable odds just serves to rasie you to anotehr strosphere.

Remember, you are only as good as your enimies :wink:

I’m afraid I’ll have to disagree with MonkeyMule and the Count. While I can see the benefits of style over efficiency, there have been too many instances of failure. I would hope that as a successful evil overlord, I would learn from the mistakes of my predecessors. Everyone who makes Easily Escapable Yet Nonetheless Deadly[sup]tm[/sup] traps ends up losing the main good guy.

“Why don’t you just shoot him now? Here, I’ll get a gun. We’ll just shoot him. Bang! Dead. Done.” - Scott Evil

My point is not to create an easily escapable trap, but a deadly trap with NO escape, full of style and panosh (sp?), a trap so fiendishly cleaver and distructive that the mere thought of even witnessing such a death with drive your average hero insane with fright.

And he’ll problely(sp yet again. Get off my back, I never leave home with out my trusty 1920’s style death ray) poop his pants too.

Maybe the Evil Overload fails time and time again because what he is really looking for is attention. The hero will always rush to save the day, essentially he sucks at interpersonal relationships and his always looking for an out from the bikini clad bimbo’s that are after him.

It’s really a co-dependancy issue.

::Blasts Shirley Ujest with 1920’s style death ray::

YOU FOOL!! How dare you enter into my inner scantum and spout your blastphemy! Take your dime story phsyco-anayasis and shove it! I GRIND YOUR PUNY ASHES WITH MY JACKBOOTED HEEL!!

Upon refection, Tuckerfan has pointed out to me that I may have over reacted in the last post.

He has been summarily dispatched in a highly lethal and complicated manner. I witnessed the entire procedure.

I also brought in my anger management specialist so that I may have him tormented at my leisure, this should satisfy my blood lust for an hour or so.

Maybe MonkeyMule can make some people’s heads pop with that spelling he’s got going there. That should be worth some style points.

The OP boils down to: Who was the better Soviet leader: stylish Stalin or bureaucratic Breshnev?

A really, really tough question.

Well I have never heard of Breshnevism.

Breshnevism: It’s all in the shoes

Breshnevism was all about bubuska’s and furry hats, I thought.

Nope, sorry – Stalin was an example of how you CAN combine style (in a sort of retro Ivan-the-Terrible spirit) with effectiveness at Evil Overlordship.
Trotsky giving you trouble? Send someone to hack him upside the head with an ice ax. Old-school but effective. And people were deathly afraid of Uncle Joe and trembled when he entered the room.
With Brezhnev, OTOH, the USSR kept building bigger and badder ICBMs and deploying Bulgarian agents to kill people with ricin-tipped umbrellas… And all people could think of when Brezhnev came in the room was look at those damn eyebrows .

Exactly my point. Stalin had style. He had a whole fuckin’ era. Even 50 years after his death, he still casts a huge shadow. Breshnev just chugged away at the 5 year plans. He too cast a huge shadow, but in his case it was all eyebrows.

But still, how do you judge? Stalin was certainly a more entertaining if also more dangerous tyrant. But in terms of deaths per ton of industrial output (that’s the stat I would keep under the old Soviet system), Breshnev was probably more efficient.

Boyo Jim Has proven my point. Stylish and effective, verses cold blooded efficacy. True the goal is always to get the job done, but without that flair you will not separate yourself from the pack, and how will you draw the legions to you to die on your behalf? You won’t I tell you

Except, of course, you’ve been talking totally about style and worrying about whether or not your hair looks right, and not bothering with making sure that the “good guy” is dead or not.

As Bucky Fuller said, “I didn’t sound out to design beautiful things, I set out to design efficient things, and what I discovered is that their effecientcy is what made them beautiful.”