This is pretty much what’s happened with my latest character.

I’m playing a reborn/dragonborn, who had previously tried to fight Strahd but lost. And a part of that loss means that my character lost a good chunk of his memories of fighting Strahd before.

But Strahd still remembers my character. So it has lead to some interesting interactions.

From the campaigns I’ve DMed, I’ve gone for a bit of an in-between. My primary focus is to have a fun, shared narrative. I’ll always let players do stupid things that get them into grave danger. But at most, I’ll usually only ever kill a few of the PCs.

If they act carefully, they can avoid getting into that situation all together. If they act stupid, they may have some deaths on their hands, but never a TPK. I don’t want that kind of narrative dead end.

The other thing, is that I will never put the players in such a situation in which there isn’t a way out of it. Usually this comes down to abusing the rule of cool a bit. Maybe they use a well aimed shatter to collapse a cave and separate themselves from their enemies. Maybe they jump down the cliff into the river below. Maybe the enemies have taken such a beating themselves that they find they aren’t willing to fight to the death.

Absolutely. But I wasn’t talking about the lore reason why they’re generally evil.

I feel like the bigger reason to have evil races is to have a more or less ever present challenge and point of conflict. For instance, the underdark is horrible place to be, in large part due to the drow. Their presence and general alignment of evil makes the setting dangerous and interesting. Is this town safe? Have the drow been messing about assassinating local leaders? Should we help this group by liberating them from slavery from the drow?

It’s almost like their species is in of itself a character, with this species sized character being evil. Having an entire species be generally evil gives the world more scale than a single evil character would. But yes, an individual villain needs more than just their evil race to be interesting.

You could rotate it before battle to your preferred position, but not rotate it mid battle.

Probably none. This is like a peasant trying to stand up to Lolth. I admire the lack of shits given in the face of a ban.

Absolute legend either way.