How does a protagonist beat an antagonist that knows the future?

I'm not a fan of prophecy like that. Actual tactics and strategy is more impressive.

 

It depends on what you mean by “beat”.

Given that I lack a lot of context here, I’d assume the most sure fire way to beat this villain would be to allow them to defeat themselves. Perhaps, there could be some way to place this villain in an unavoidable no-win scenario.
And I’d assume that someone who knows the future, in complete detail, probably wouldn’t be very psychologically stable so I’d wager they’d have some psychological weaknesses that could be exploited.

This also reminds me a little of the Legacy of Kain video games where the two main antagonists were a (mostly) omniscient sorcerer who experiences time nonlinearly and an omnipresent deity who may as well be omniscient. The main characters of those games were able to beat the villains by exploiting the mechanics of their universe and how time and fate works in the setting.
So, echoing Devor: there’s always a way.

 

Make the protagonist do something that he normally wouldn't do.

For instance, say that the antagonist gets the protagonist in a position where he has to choose between saving the love of his life or defeat the antagonist. The antagonist knows that the protagonist would never sacrifice the love of his life. But then he does (for instance because she/he begs the protagonist to do so). Or the protagonist never kills or he would never give up his own life or some other boundary he would never cross.

Of course it very much depends on how the antagonist knows the future. If he really knows exactly what will happen, then there is no free will and no way to avoid whatever the outcome is. That means the antagonist already knows if he will be beaten or not. In that case, the protagonist will simply win or not based on how good his plan is and how much the antagonist can do against that plan.

If there is free will and possibilities, then just have the protagonist go for the unlikely options.

One thing to watch out for in such a story is the "dumb supervillain" issue. If your antagonist knows everything that will happen and he knows exactly who has a chance of beating him and how, then he can easily solve that, assuming he's stronger than the protagonist at the start of the story and has no problem with killing. Don't have your antagonist send wave after wave of minions who only help the protagonist practise and get stronger or more support. You need a reason why such an all-powerful antagonist doesn't end the story on page one. After all, if he knows everything, then he will just walk up to the protagonist first sentence, shoot him and live happily ever after being the supervillain he is.

 

Use their ego against them. Anyone with that ability is going to get pretty confident, then cocky, next will come arrogant and followed by complacent and sloppy. Or give them two mutually exclusive versions of the future that are equally likely and equally dangerous to them.
Or limit the resources available to them. I might know what X is going to do and think but if I have no power to affect the outcome what good will it do me.

 

I don't like playing around with prophecy. It doesn't make sense to me, because we create our own futures. But here is my advice for if you do.
I would think that your antagonist would most likely either see different paths of the future, or just the most likely path. If the former, then they could plan for anything and be unbeatable. If the latter, they are easier to beat because they don't know every possible outcome, but still more difficult than a typical villain.

 

What else can they do aside from seeing the future? A frail old man that has made enemies all his life whose location became public yesterday who can see everything that happens tomorrow will spend the day foreseeing himself being beaten to death for a day, then being beaten.

 

I have a mind-reading antagonist too. Here's how I go about it:

Spoiler: spoiler

My heroine is of the trickster variety, kind of like a female version of Gollum. She is delusional, but somewhat in control of her delusions. The story starts with her looting a rotten corpse, utterly convinced it's a scarecrow. She is also suffering from the attack of a Mindleech, some of which is still inside her head.
Now, she arrange a duel with the mind-reading antagonist, who is blind. She is, she finally realize, the last of her kind, and wants to go down in history giving her ill-reputed kin a blast of glory, by going up against the the mind-reader only armed with a knife. Preparing herself, she bathes and dresses herself in in the new clothing she had tailored. No matter the costs, she tells herself, she will stick to the role of the honorable.
The duel starts off badly, with her embarassing herself with a rhyming monologue. Nobody does that anymore. Then, the antagonist flatly states that it was a clever trick of hers, convincing herself that the sword she is holding was a knife.
He called her bluff. She meekly begs for mercy. This is denied. This scares her so immensely that she pisses herself. Because, now she has only one horrible option. She takes her hand up to the back of her head, forcing her finger through the soft spot where the skull is missing, the place where the Mindleech resides. It wakes up, taking over her mind.
Now, mind-reading something like that is kinda like looking at the sun though a telescope. I'm not sure exactly how to write the actual fight, but it's going to be rather trippy. It ends with her coming down bleeding and an eye short, the dead mindreader sodomized with his own weapon and the audience greatly shocked. So she won, but didn't exactly help her kins legacy.

 

I went about it in a rather simple way. A protagonist simply broke prophecy and far sight altogether. Which may not be entirely attainable in your world, but I based it a little off of the Golden Path set down in by Leto II in the Dune Series. Just without the several thousand year tyranny by a god ruling sandworm dude.

 

Outsourcing.

 

There's two ways to go about it:
The antagonist sees everything 100% perfectly, but there are limits to it. In Thats So Raven she only sees a few seconds without any context, so it's easy to assume the wrong thing is happening. Diavolo can see several seconds into the future and then "erase time" to prevent certain things from happening, so he can't stop something years down the road, just the immediate future. Paul Atreides sees the multiple branching paths of the future and his actions "choose" one of the paths to come true. However, he is still aware of the various ways things can go wrong (he can die, humanity goes extinct) and those cause significant distress. There's also certain people/places in the Dune universe that's immune to being seen in this way, so there's still stuff he can't see at all.

Or...your antagnoist sees his own doom and there's nothing he can do about it. If he sees a giant meteor is going to hit the planet and kill EVERYTHING, what can he do to stop it? Probably nothing, so what does he do with that information? How does that affect his mental state?

You said your antag sees/knows everything that the protog can do....is it ONLY the protag? If so, then someone else could do the beating of the bad guy, the protog would just be a distraction....this would require the protag to be kept in the dark, of course, which could make some interesting challenges to the structure of your story. If you only showed things from the protag's POV then them being set up to fail/die so someone else can win can be taken really poorly, since it's a bait and switch. But if you have multiple POV characters and you see everyone else building up the hero to be the special exception for the bad guy's powers and will save the day, then that can be really interesting, though you'll have to be careful with how information is dispensed so the reader feels the way you want them to about the hero's "free will."

But if your antag can see/know everything about everyone and aneverything....then can you really make an interesting story out of it? You might be able to pull something out of your butt to beat the power, like they did in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, but it probably won't go over very well. Dumb, OP powers being beaten by newer, even dumber and OPer powers isn't very satisfying and your hero wins because the plot says they have to. It works in JJBA because the ridiculousness is the point of it, but they're the exception, not the rule. Maybe there is a literal deus ex machina that beats the baddie, but again, is that going to be interesting to the reader? Will that be satisfying?

You can do anything as a writer, including your proposed villain powers if you want. However, if you're going to do something weird/different you need to do a dang good job executing it for it to work. Fantasy stories are about heroes triumphing over evil, especially against impossible odds. Gaining new powers to beat the baddie is expected. Creating a story where our heroes literally have no hope of winning, where someone/thing literally outside of the story (such as capital g God) can work if you have a purpose for it. Are you making a commentary on the ridiculousness of these mythologies and stories? Are you subverting expectations of both the readers and your genre-savvy characters? Or do you just want a super-duper OP villain because you think it's cool? You need to ask yourself these questions before you get too deep in your draft because the answers will be the muscles and bones of your story.

 

Let me preface this whole post by saying that I'm only poking holes in your suggestion to point-out how ridiculous this "perfectly clairvoyant villain" premise is and not to discredit or mock your suggestions...
1. If the villain needs to be "beat", we can assume what they are doing means that they need to be stopped so waiting until they die is out of the question.
2. The villain would foresee the planet being destroyed and will either stop you or escape.
3. The villain would foresee the attempt at convincing them to kill himself and would prepare accordingly. Possible by killing himself but possibly not.

From the villain's perspective, this paradox would just be a faulty prediction on his part. If he foresees himself doing something he wouldn't want to do - such as a scenario that leads to his death - he would likely opt not to do that and accept his prediction as wrong.

To use the chess metaphor: if the villain knows with full certainty that he would lose the game should he play, he would choose not to play.
Going to your proposed scenario: the villain would know of the protagonists plan to corner him in before the protagonists can enact it. He would know of the trap before it is set or even conceived of and would then take actions to avoid or sabotage it.

 

So the villain can’t base his own actions off of what he foresees and is every bit the victim of predetermination as the protagonist?

That would have been worthwhile information to include in the first post. It also makes his clairvoyance a totally worthless power. I mean, he knows what moves the enemy will make but will do nothing to stop it because he knows it.

I mean, does that protagonist even need to create a strategy when the outcome is already determined. He may as well ask the villain how things will turn out in chapter one and then just sit back and let the “story” play out.
I think all this business with time travel and paradoxes are just making this scenario needlessly complicated.
I see it less that the two characters are equally capable and more that they are equally powerless.

 

You probably should have mentioned the point of this thread in the first post.
I jumped to the conclusion that this was one of those “I want to do this thing in a story but I’m not sure how to make it work” kind of threads.