Emperor Palpatine and Sauron are still evil. Their minions are still evil. What's changed is that now you need to have a motivation for Blorg the Orc to be evil because "Blorg the Orc is evil because he's an orc" isn't a good motivation.
I re-watched the Hunger Games recently and it was less grim than I remembered. I'd say it was about on-par with D&D. I read the books a while ago and they may have been grimmer, but the setting is less oppressive/scary than Dark Sun, say.
I can give an example for him, of something that would be hard to change because of backwards compatibility, but ideally should be changed - 6-8 encounters/day assumption. It's so baked in to 5E that, short of taking the entire game apart and reassembling it, you couldn't fix it.
I mean, I don't think 1E targeted a "universal" audience. I don't think it was even thinking very hard about "targeting an audience" though, to be fair. I think the writers were thinking solely of "people like them" (i.e. slightly nerdy white men with decent educations in their late teens through thirties) where they thought about it at all.
How about Blorg the Orc is a follower of Gruumsh so therefore we know he's evil because only someone evil would follow that god?
but then we must ask why is gruumsh is evil?
Because he is a selfish god.
all of them seem guilty of that so we need something to make him more than cn.
I dont think selfish, is particularly chaotic, I think selfish is evil.
I mean, the problem kind of is that about 70% of gods (at least in the FR) labelled "Good" display zero characteristics that you would expect from a Good-aligned PC and numerous characteristics you might expect from an "Evil" one. Someone like Ilmater, yeah, unarguably good, basically a take on a Jesus-type or Issek of the Jug or whatever. But like, Clangeddin? Basically the Dwarven god of genocide? Ehhhhh. He's labelled as Lawful Good. Basically nothing he teaches nor the expected behaviour of his followers matches up with LG. He's not far off Gruumsh.
