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 has almost completed the process of ceremorphosis on us..

Senda and Phil, our beloved Pandas That Talk About Games, were recently discussing nefarious player characters in a campaign and how to handle them, and they just happened to ask “I wonder what Ang and Jared think about this topic in D&D.” Today, we’re going to explore what Ang and Jared think about evil characters in D&D campaign. Does it work, and if it does, how does it work. Join us in our descent into evil.

Back at the dawn of Dungeons & Dragons, no one was evil. Which is to say, the alignment system wasn’t based on a combination of a Chaos/Law axis and a Good/Evil axis. There was only Chaos, Neutrality, and Law. Micheal Moorcock and Poul Anderson were big inspirations on the early game, and the fantasy stories written by those authors arranged the multiverse as a constant conflict between Chaos and Order. In early D&D, Chaos did tend to be the default “evil,” even though it’s really more about entropy and change. It may also have been a wee bit less confusing for alignment arguments across the decades if Order wasn’t translated as Law, but who are we to advocate for fewer arguments that probably ended thousands of D&D groups and friendships?