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Message: <blockquote data-quote="grimslade" data-source="post: 8406174" data-attributes="member: 6061">This thread didn't have much of a rail to begin with, so it is not surprising it has wandered off into the weeds a bit.Evil is not necessary to run a D&D campaign, but neither is combat or magic. The majority of campaigns are going to have them though. Alignment has been used as a straightjacket for much of D&D. It is supposed to be descriptive, not prescriptive, but we still have the Awful Good Paladin as the poster boy for the extremes of alignment. We sometimes twist ourselves into knots to avoid labeling something Evil. We consider it a loaded term, but it is a great descriptor. Demon and Devil are loaded terms too. Reskinning them as Tanaari and Baatezu didn't change what they were in 2nd Edition. Switching evil to 'bad guy' is the same.The 9 point alignment system was a rigid relic of AD&D. It lives on today as a shadow of itself and only really comes into play in the Great Wheel Cosmology. The funny thing is the Great Wheel is and has always been more granular than alignment, 17 outer realms versus the 9 alignments. You can have shades of grey campaigns. You can build a deep and thorough backstory for each antagonist, showing the internal motivations of each of their choices.  Not Count Vlad Dracula of not Bavaria has a full and deep story of how he came to be in Ravenloft. He is a narcissistic jerk, a bad guy, and ultimately, evil. Now, you can also have a campaign where one cultures Sun god is trying to convert other cultures Sun god worshippers, say Pholtus vs. Pelor in Greyhawk. To the Oeridian Pholtans the unconverted Old Faith, Pelor-worshipping Fflan are heretical and 'evil'. They are blinding their flock from seeing the One True Path. This is mislabeling evil for an antagonist. The Pholtan Inquisitors who wage war with the demonic hordes of Iuz can pretty safely use evil for their enemies that stream out of portals from the Abyss.There is a place for evil and good in most campaigns. It doesn't need to be there, but the cosmology and some monsters strongly suggest it is there. It just doesn't have a subsystem to recognize levels of morality or a scale of order/entropy. Whether those would help are up to individual DMs and tables.</blockquote>

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