After many years of putting it off, I've been reading through the Sharpe novels by Bernard Cornwell. One of the things I've found very interesting is a comment in his foreword to "Sharpe's Eagle" (the first novel written): "One of the first things I learned was that Sharpe's enemies, by and large, had to be British. I had thought, before I began writing, that the French would provide him with enemies enough, but the circumstances of war meant that Sharpe spent much more time with the British than with the enemy French, and if he was to be unendingly challenged, irritated, obstructed and angered them the provocations had to come from people with whom he was constantly associated."
The application of this to RPGs is obvious, I think: although the PCs will spend a significant amount of their time doing battle with all sorts of monsters, and although they will end up pitting themselves against some terrible BBEG in their campaign efforts, the truth is that most such monsters appear for all of five rounds of combat and then they're gone. And the scope for recurring villains is surprisingly low in RPGs - it's surprisingly uncommon to meet the same opponent for a second time not to mention a third or more.
All of which means that the "villain you love to hate" is actually unlikely to be a monster or the BBEG in the campaign.
But if he is instead a foil - someone on the PCs' own side with whom they cross paths many times but, for whatever reason, cannot simply kill and have done with it? That's someone they can really learn to hate. And when they finally get their hard-earned victory over this opponent, that will be one to savour.
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