I have a really neat idea about playing villains which I’m not honestly sure how it’d be implemented. It’s probably totally unfeasible, but it’s a sort of “dream idea” I had recently, so take it with a grain of salt and maybe dream along with me if it's totally impossible.

Imagine if one of the end-tier villain paths allowed you to gain control of your own gang, right? Not like Masterminds, but more like an additional content sort of thing. You’d get to design the looks and basic power structures of your own minions, lieutenants, bosses, and maybe any special members that might con as some sort of superboss. Sure, there would be some room for abuse here, but I figure players could report it like anything else if they found something particularly bad.

Now what would you do with these gangs of yours? Why, you’d send them out on missions, of course. You’d have some sort of menu where once every like, I dunno, ten minutes or something, you’d be able to send your gang out to do a mission.

You’d have choices like “Rob a bank” which’d just give you some money or whatever, and other missions that involved robbing an armoured car or building some technology for you to use, which would grant random enhancements and/or inventions of good quality.

Different missions would be given higher or lower success rates. Higher success rates would mean lower rewards, but more certainty. Lower success rates would mean potentially incredible reward, but high chance of failure.

Obviously, a success would mean you’d get the dough/invention/whatever. A failure, though, would mean that the appropriate mission type would suddenly have a chance to pop up on the police scanner equivalent somewhere, and some enterprising young hero or villain might bump into a game-generated mission where they come across your goons making a device, or robbing a bank, loitering around in a cave doing rituals, etc.

Then they’d have options like any other mission, only it’d be tagged as a player-sourced one. Maybe they'd be told somewhere that these were a fellow player’s minions, and they might be more difficult than normal minions to face, or they might find the content objectionable and should report it if it breaks any rules.

They’d have the option as a hero to beat the tar out of your gang and learn your character’s name (leading to some fun opportunities for roleplayers to bump into names they recognise, for one thing), or if they are a villain, they might get a chance to threaten your gang for a cut. In this situation, you might be told later that despite the mission being a failure, you’re getting half the rewards because a player chose that option.

It’d be a much smaller and less hands-on system than something like the mission architect, since you’d just have your minions populating a bunch of existing mission types as opposed to making actual arcs - though in a perfect world, you’d be able to do some of that, too. As it stands, my idea is basically just a pretty menu with some costume designing and some "Send Minions" buttons.

It’d usually just be an optional way to earn money and XP and stuff without doing anything (or while doing something else), with failures directly turning into content for other players to potentially enjoy. I know it’d be a heck of a lot of work and is probably totally impossible to figure out from a coding perspective, but it strikes me as a way to make the gameworld feel much more in the hands of the players and keep the optional “Grinding” mission content fresh.

And maybe next time you run into Darklord Doomgloom IV, you can have a word with him about those darn crafty minions of his.

Any thoughts on this? Improvements on the idea, maybe an idea of how feasible it is for something to be added later?