Summary
It feels good to be evil — in games, we mean. When we create a character inDungeons & Dragons,we are free to be a hero, a villain, or a neutral character who can start a good or an evil story arc, depending on what happens in the game. Whether you should play an evil character in a group game is its own can of worms, but it’s doable depending on the group.
Of all the classes available in the game, paladins seem tricky to turn evil. However, despite representing purity and justice, they can be fantastic options for a villain. How do we twist the patrons of good into evil monsters, then?
Bonus: Talk To The DM And The Players
This topic should be addressed regardless of your character. D&D is a group adventure whereeveryonecontrols part of the narrative and builds it together, so please, no twist-villain character that gets the players, and especially the DM, by surprise.
A villain among heroes has a significant chance of causing chaos, which can evenresult in PvP. Tell your friends you are interested in being evil, and see if they’re on board with the dynamic. It’s okay to be evil and still have friends; you don’t need to screw your party members over just because you’re mean.
5Use The Oathbreaker
No Rules, No Problem
The biggest issue in making evil paladins is their oath. Unlike other classes, they have a specific set of rules they need to follow (each set of rules changesaccording to your subclass) at the cost of losing their powers if you break them.
However, a paladin with no rules becomes a special subclass from the Dungeon Master’s Guide called the Oathbreaker,which has its own abilities and no oaths, as the name implies. It’s also one of the best subclasses for paladins, so you won’t be weak just because you want to be evil and don’t need any justifications for your behavior.
4Use Neutral To Evil Oath Options
Not Every Oath Is Black And White
If Oathbreaker isn’t appealing to you, but you still want to have your character to be very ‘rules-as-written,’ then you can still have your character work just fine depending on which oath you pick. Sure, ones like Devotion would be a hard pass, but there are some options that give you some gray area to play around.
The easiest example is theOath of Conquest,which encourages you to destroy your enemies utterly, complete with their power bases, so you’ll humiliate them as well as destroy them. All other tenets are pretty evil here, too.
Along with that oath, our other recommendation would be theOath of the Crown,which revolves around being the ultimate soldier for an order or kingdom. If whoever you follow is evil, then you’re evil by default. Even theOath of Glorycould be slightly twisted, but this one would work better on a more neutral character — someone who does good for, well, glory rather than actually caring, and you get to be evil behind the scenes.
3Create Your Own Oath
Make Your Rules
As you talk to the DM about your ideas, nothing stops you from creating your own tenets to follow — unless the DM vetoes the idea, that’ll stop you. And no, we don’t mean an evil homebrew subclass — you can play as a simple vengeance paladin, for example, but work out new tenets with your DM to create something that better suits your character.
You can even create an ironic problem for you, with one of your tenets wanting you to be utterly evil in a situation you don’t think would be the best option, such as having an oath that forbids you from being non-lethal against enemies and a specific target is worth leaving alive.
2Twist Your Oath’s Words To The Extreme
Follow Them To The Letter Or Have A Tenet Contradict The Other
We mentioned twisting your oath a few times above. What we mean here is that, by messing with the proper wording of your tenets, you can technically follow them without being a nice person in the process.
A big example is the Oath of Glory, which focuses on glorious actions rather than words. What classifies an action as glorious? Slaying a dragon sounds pretty glorious, for example, but nothing there specifies doing something with the dragon’s hoard. For all you know, you can keep it or use it for evil deeds later on. Other than being encouraging to your allies, nothing in this oath tells you to be nice — take advantage of that.
Another fun example of twisting things is the Oath of Vengeance. Its goal is to destroy evil at all costs, and ‘all costs’ may include letting innocent people die if that helps you destroy evil — it does have a section about helping those affected by evil, but that’s not as crucial as the other parts of the tenet. A monster who kills bigger monsters works here. Find the loopholes and exploit them.
1Tend Towards Lawfulness
The Law Isn’t Always Good
Unless you’re going to be an Oathbreaker, we recommend keeping your character in the lawful alignment, even if they’re going to be evil.Lawful Evilis for characters who either have a small sense of morality with lines they still do not cross (like being stupid towards their friends) or follow the rules for wrong reasons, such as rising among the ranks of a specific group for the sake of power.
That’s even more interesting in cases of a moral gray area, like a law being too ruthless in its punishment and sentencing a commoner who stole food out of necessity to death. If you go forward with said punishment, you can still say you’re doing the right thing as you are following the law. This would make your character perfect for mature stories with groups that enjoy dealing with these dilemmas during the campaign.
