Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends that have been playing D&D a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D is the patron to whom we swore allegiance to get our powers.

In the Great Wheel cosmological system, the souls are tortured by two separate yet equally important groups. The demons who improvise destruction, and the devils, who prosecute long term plans. These are their definitions. In other words, we’re going to talk about the differences between demons and devils, and if you need there to be a difference in your D&D game.

Devils are younger than their chaotic evil cousins, as they weren’t introduced until the AD&D 1e Monster Manual in 1977. Not long after, in Dragon Magazine #28, the article The Politics of Hell was published. This is mainly notable because it has Satan’s stats in it–did the Satanic Panic start because Satan has a -8 armor class, 333 hit points, and can only be hit by +3 or better weapons? Maybe that got cut from the 1985 60 Minutes interview with Gary Gygax.