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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35106
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35106
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

You can **_show_** more of this planning and anticipation in order to make it more plausible. Show your villain expending large resources and manpower in the pursuit of plans and alternatives.

Take an intelligent (not superhumanly so) leader with an intelligence agency of thousands of specialists, with an army with generals that have trained for battle their entire adult lives. It should not be surprising to us that with such resources, they CAN put together the puzzle pieces, mount investigations for more information, and consider so many alternatives.

Your problem is making the villain a lone wolf that must do ALL of it alone, that becomes implausible by virtue of the effort. But a smart villain that can hire a thousand mercenary spies and investigators, we should not be surprised if his team collectively out-thinks and wins against a protagonist that does not have many resources.

In the end, he can still lose for dismissing a contingency he considered impossible (e.g. a suicide mission) or thought was already addressed (e.g. he believed Joe was killed falling off the cliff but Joe somehow survived the fall).

Original score: 7