THAC0 with Advantage: Recent Episodes
THAC0 with Advantage
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 is our comfort food, and the internet is all about sharing pictures of your meals!
The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.
Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license
Join us on the THAC0 with Advantage Discord hereJoin The Thac0 with Advantage Patreon here
*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 is a spawn point for new players.***
On today’s episode, we’re going to talk about zero level humans. But in this case, we me people that haven’t played D&D before. We’ve talked about new players before, but what about specific techniques? How do you introduce concepts in bit sized chunks that will go down easy? We’re going to talk about setting up your D&D sessions with new players by looking at video game tutorials in today’s episode.
From the Bardic CollegeThere are many famous villains in D&D. Acererak, Lolth, Tiamat, Orcus, Strahd, Lareth the Beautiful, Verminard, Lord Soth, Manshoon, the Xanathar. But for a generation of D&D players, one of the worst villains is Bargle. The BECMI Red Box Basic set taught players the rules by running them through a “choose your own adventure” style scenario which ended in a confrontation with a magic item stealing wizard named Bargle. Bargle’s greatest crime, however, is fridging the NPC that has been your friend all through the intro adventure. There is no way to save Alex . . . I mean . . . Aleena the Cleric, you just have to figure out if you can make Major Force . . . er . . . I mean Bargle, pay.
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The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.
Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license
Join us on the THAC0 with Advantage Discord hereJoin The Thac0 with Advantage Patreon here
*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 presents us with irresistible conundrums.*
Sometimes information is its own reward. Sometimes its exciting to learn new things, or to string together some facts and learn a greater truth. If you’ve ever wanted to run a mystery in your fantasy TTRPG games, or if you’ve run one, but you want to reexamine how to do it for the next time, we’ve got an episode for you. We’re going to look at running mysteries in your fantasy games. Time to conjure some clues.
From the Bardic CollegeThe Assassins Knot, an AD&D adventure from 1983, presented a murder mystery for the PCs to solve. It specifically mentions that the adventure may be less challenging due to the resources and abilities available to characters 6th level or higher. It contains a timeline of events that will happen each day, as well as reactions that happen when characters take various actions. It’s not a bad blueprint for a D&D adventure. But it feels a little unwieldy to have a suggested party of 6 to 10 characters of levels 2 to 5.
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The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.
Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license
Join us on the THAC0 with Advantage Discord hereJoin The Thac0 with Advantage Patreon here
Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends who have been playing D&D a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D collects stray fantasy elements the way English accumulates unrelated words.
The lore of D&D was pieced together from a ton of fantasy and folklore. But what if you took that approach to the mechanics and procedures of your game? What can you steal from Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark games that will help you run your D&D games, or any other fantasy RPG? We’re going to podcast to find out.
From the Bardic CollegeWith the Vancian Magic system, you prepare spells and then forget them until you have a chance to prepare more spells. This has been foundational to D&D from the beginning…aaaand almost immediately fans were attempting to create alternate systems. One notable example was the spell point system. Fan publications like Alarums & Excursions circulated some of these systems, and when the RPG Tunnels & Trolls came out, it relied on a spell point system. Gygax was very normal about all of this and called these alternate rules “beneath contempt,” but in 1996 (after Gygax was no longer at TSR) Player’s Option: Spells and Magic presented D&D players with the worst of both worlds–a spell point system that you used to determine what you could memorize, not what you could cast. In the 3.5 Unearthed Arcana sourcebook, there was another shot at spell point implementation, but with Sorcerers still relatively young, the system stepped on that classes’ strength by giving wizards similar flexibility with a wider range of spells. The 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide also has a spell point system, which adds a limitation of one spell per day each from 6th level or higher. That said, the 5e spellcasting is way less “Vancian” than previous editions, with characters able to use their spell slots to cast whatever they have prepared. So does that mean the system has become above contempt?
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The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.
Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license
Join us on the THAC0 with Advantage Discord hereJoin The Thac0 with Advantage Patreon here
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 is our computer’s eternal desktop theme.
Once again, we’ve rolled high enough to have an encounter, and this time we’re going to talk about what goes into making a thematic encounter. How do you tailor your encounters to fit the theme of your campaign and communicate the wider story you want to work toward? We’re going to look at the building blocks that go into creating thematic encounters.
From the Bardic CollegeThe Mind Flayer first showed up in TSR’s Strategic Review publication, the precursor to Dragon Magazine, in 1975. If you had a really low intelligence, their mind blast would kill you outright, and if you had a really high intelligence, you risked permanent insanity, so its best to be just kind of mediocre around a mind flayer. In the Ecology of the Mind Flayer in Dragon Magazine #78, in 1983, Mind Flayer’s alternate name, Illithid, courtesy of a Githyanki hired to provide information on them. Apparently Illithids aren’t willing to eat the brains of lycanthropes or Grimlocks. So the safest person to interact with a mind flayer is a Grimlock wererat with average intelligence. I wonder if there’s a Baldur’s Gate III mod to add one into the game.
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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 cast Guards and Wards and it makes it really hard to leave.
Now that we’ve talked about what living in a dungeon is like, this time around we’re going to look at how to design a dungeon that doesn’t eat up your life for months at a time. We’re going to look at five room dungeons, and how to use them in your games. Make those rooms count.
From the Bardic CollegeSaving Throw categories have changed a bit over time in D&D. Instead of saves based on ability scores, the saving throw categories were obviously logical Death Rays and Poison, Wands, Turn to Stone, Dragon’s Breath, and Spells and Staffs. This certainly didn’t lead to long discussions at the table about what happens if a wand casts a spell, or a spell creates a death ray, or a dragon’s breath causes petrification. Thank goodness we never get confused of what saves are logical now.
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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 gives us a closed set of places to explore.
What is a dungeon? Well, that depends on what kind of podcast you’re listening to. But since this is D&D, a dungeon is a closed location with a limited set of options to explore, usually containing traps and monsters. We’re going to look at how dungeons function, and how far you can push that suspension of disbelief when beholders, a dragon, some kobolds, and a whole mess of grimlocks share the same address.
From the Bardic CollegeWhile they were presented in the same manner of locations like the Caves of Chaos or the Tomb of Horrors, many early dungeon adventures in D&D were actually about exploring various locations in ruined cities. The aptly named The Lost City and Dwellers of the Forbidden City are both examples, and even some adventures set in the ever expanding new campaign worlds of Dragonlance and the Forgotten Realms, in Dragons of Despair and Ruins of Adventure, continue that tradition. The presentation often remained the same, a map with various locations marked with a lettered or number key, but with fewer moments of wondering where monsters get their food. Or go to the restroom. Don’t think about monsters going to the restroom. It just brings up all the wrong questions.
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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 regeneration and we forgot to use fire.
We’ve talked about making sure you use iconic elements of epic fantasy in your games, going big so that your players will get what they want from the kind of game they signed up for. Today we’re going to talk about doing that early in the campaign. How do you introduce those big iconic elements of epic fantasy without overwhelming or annihilating new player characters just starting their career?
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**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, someone told us that if we stuck with D&D everything would turn out okay**.
We’re talking about news in this non evergreen episode. We hit Perkins and Crawford going to Darrington Press, Daggerheart in general, some state of the industry stuff, and the laying off of Todd Kenreck.
Heck, we missed Ivan Van Norman leaving Darrington Press, Jess Lanzillo leaving Wizards of the Coast, Daggerheart selling out their second printing of the core game, the leaked video of the cancelled DnD video game, and the Horrified D&D board game coming out soon.
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**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, someone told us that if we stuck with D&D everything would turn out okay**.
Once upon a time, one of the greatest sins you could commit was to perpetrate the iniquity of metagaming. Thou shalt not act on information you know, but your character wouldn’t. But is that always a bad thing? Why do we assume that every time we act on information our players don’t have, that we would do it in a way that would be detrimental to the game? We’re going to look at metagaming and why you may not need to be banished to the depths of Nesus for participating in the activity.
From the Bardic CollegeIn 1977 the first Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set came out. This was intended to be the introduction to the hardcover Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks. From 1983 until 1993, Dungeons & Dragons had multiple boxed sets that took characters from 1st to 36th level, included rules for divine ascension, and provided an extremely detailed setting, Mystara. Unlike Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, it often used rules introduced in earlier supplements, like the skill system, using the same system in later products instead of recreating the wheel every time similar rules came up in later products. Setting material was standardized, including a player’s section letting players know what their characters would know about where they come from. In many ways D&D was more intuitive than AD&D, and was just as mechanically robust. One of the strangest things that D&D hung on to for its entire existence was presenting species as classes, meaning that Fighter and Magic-Users were classes as were Elf and Halfling. D&D was more Advanced than AD&D at biological determinism. Which isn’t a compliment.
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**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 wants us to justify all those dice we bought by rolling them at the table.**
We’ve talked about how being a better player can be just as important to a good game as being a better DM, but what about combining both of those concepts? How important is it for a DM to understand the player experience, and what can they learn from being on the colorful side of the screen? We’re going to talk about the benefits of being a player on your DMing skills in today’s episode.
From the Bardic CollegeThe first edition AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide very subtly indicates that Dungeon Masters may not want players to see the contents of the Dungeon Master’s Guide by saying “you must view any non-DM player possessing it as something less than worth of an honorable death.” It encourages you to address the real world concept of player’s reading what they shouldn’t by applying an in game solution of charging them more gold for sages and taking away magic items. Using this logic, should you come into conflict with your housemates over doing chores, the logical way to address the situation is to replace their BluRays with edited copies that remove the happy endings to all their favorite movies
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The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.
Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license
Join us on the THAC0 with Advantage Discord hereJoin The Thac0 with Advantage Patreon here
***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’s second edition mining rules has us digging for player input.*****
Some modern RPG discourse has framed RPGs as a writer’s room, with the PCs being the primary contributor to their character’s story in the collaborative scheme of things. But what if your “writer’s” have broader ideas for the story beyond just the character that they shepherd in the narrative? How can you collect player feedback and input, and how do you incorporate it into your campaigns? We’ll be looking at that in today’s episode.
From the Bardic CollegeUntil D&D 3rd edition arrived, there was a limited number of ways that your ability scores would change. If you were lucky, you might find a magic item or make a wish to increase them, but even wishes were a little stingy on the personal improvement front, often requiring multiple wishes to raise an ability score more than one point. There were a few ways to lower your ability scores, ranging from monsters to cursed magic items. How long did it take to recover ability score damage? Wait, you think you recovered ability score damage? You may want to sit down before we talk about level drain.
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The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.
Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license
Join us on the THAC0 with Advantage Discord hereJoin The Thac0 with Advantage Patreon here
**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, but D&D is having us execute Episode 66.****
Have you ever had the perfect idea for your campaign, but by the time you made it to a notebook or a computer, you completely forgot what it was? Where do ideas for campaigns come from, and how do we capture them? How do we put the ideas we have into game terms and make them sing for our players? We’re going to look at that today on THAC0 with Advantage.
From the Bardic CollegeThe 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide has a plethora of game related material, but the current edition wasn’t the first one to be in love with worksheets. In 1988, one year before the release of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2e, the Dungeon Master’s Design Kit by RPG industry legend Aaron Allston was released. This was comprised of three booklets, and the Adventure Design, the Forms Book, and the Adventure Cookbook. These included random charts that would direct the reader to parts of the Adventure Cookbook, broadly describing things like villain plots and thematic encounters, and worksheets for planning out flowcharts for adventure developments. There was very little in the book that was mechanically specific, meaning it retained its usefulness as the new edition came out, and arguably, still retains that usability. If you utilized the copier at your first job in 1991 to make a ridiculous number of copies of each of the forms in this book, the statute of limitations for office supply theft should be up now, not that I would know anything about that.
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The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.
Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license
Join us on the THAC0 with Advantage Discord hereJoin The Thac0 with Advantage Patreon here
**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 knows where we’ve buried the bodies.**
Sometimes you run the entire night with the assumption that a spell works the way it did from two editions ago, and some poor PCs pay the price. Sometimes the player characters spend three hours exploring something based on what they thought you said, instead of what you actually said. Or maybe what you actually said, instead of what you meant to say. We’re going to talk about mistakes at the table, what they look like, and how to roll with them.
From the Bardic CollegeSage Advice was a column in Dragon Magazine that first appeared in issue #31, in 1979, with the first author being Jean Wells. TSR hired Jean Wells as an editor in 1978; after editing adventures like White Plume Mountain, they gave her the job of officially clarifying rules—a task she enjoyed because she wanted the game to be accessible to new, younger gamers. One of the best rules clarifications she made was probably in response to a query about the damage caused by a bow. She clarified that the bow itself doesn’t cause damage, but the arrow inflicts 1d6 damage, and then she outlined the damage that would result from hitting someone with a bow and explained what would happen to the bow. I don’t really have much else to say, I’m just going to sit here quietly and listen to heads explode at the notion that a woman was the first Sage of Sage Advice, the go-to column for decades to determine if you were doing D&D right.
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The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.
Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license
Join us on the THAC0 with Advantage Discord hereJoin The Thac0 with Advantage Patreon here
*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, we keep needing to hit the reset button to get another chance to conquer D&D.*
Not every fantasy adventure story ends with a big fight, but many of them do. During major conflicts, it’s typical for fantasy heroes to face a singular embodiment of their antagonists: a dragon, demon lord, lich, or a conceptual representation (thanks JRPGs). We’re going to talk about what makes a boss battle interesting and challenging and explore ways to use the concept in your games.
From the Bardic CollegeThe Lost City, a 1982 Dungeons & Dragons adventure, introduced the entity known as Zargon. Zargon’s description harkens back to pulp mythos stories from the 30s, and an ancient, unique monster living under a lost society is almost like something Robert E. Howard would have put in a Conan story. The adventure names Zargon the story’s “villain,” blaming him for destroying the titular lost city and providing his stats, but it doesn’t directly lead to him. Instead, it advises using information about Zargon to craft a higher-level adventure where player characters are ready to fight him. The 2014 Player’s Handbook offers Zargon as an example of a Great Old One Warlock patron, if you wish to channel your inner Zargon without going to the lost city of Cynidicea. That’s Sin i DEE see ah.
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The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.
Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license
Join us on the THAC0 with Advantage Discord hereJoin The Thac0 with Advantage Patreon here
*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 still encourages us to spend our currencies.*
Multiple classes have resources they can use, but what happens when you want to manipulate the narrative outside of what your character can do? What happens when you’re running a game, and your combat just isn’t unfolding in a satisfying manner, but you don’t quite want to rebuild an encounter on the fly. That’s where metacurrencies can come in handy.
From the Bardic CollegeIn 1977, David Hargrave created the Arduin series of RPG products, which were technically their own RPG, but also looked a lot like supplements to D&D. TSR didn’t exactly like some of the wording that implied you could copy parts of that one “existing” RPG, so Hargrave removed the section that said to copy other RPGs, and used white out on his remaining copies to get rid of any references to Dungeons & Dragons. Thankfully, Hargrave made sure to make it clear that Arduin was its own RPG and, by some accounts, made a combat system so complicated that people reverted to using the supplements with D&D all over again.
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The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.
Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license
Join us on the THAC0 with Advantage Discord hereJoin The Thac0 with Advantage Patreon here
*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 too many fiddly bits to leave it alone.*
What happens when you want just a little bit more game material to fit in between two other scenes you’ve already got in mind for your game? What can you do if you can only snag half the time you usually have for your regular game night? What if you have a great idea for a scene, but it doesn’t fit into what you’re doing right now? We’re going to look at modular encounters, building blocks you can store and pull out when you have just the right place to put them.
From the Bardic CollegeIn 1986, the AD&D product called the Book of Lairs came out, followed up by a second volume in 1987. These had short, often two-page, adventures that were largely about encountering a monster in its home terrain, with some additional context. One particular encounter involves 876 undead of various types in a mythical lost graveyard, including a gate that summons more undead, which for some reason has an alignment of lawful good. This may also be the simplest puzzle in all of D&D for characters to solve, because it involves taking every single gemstone out of the gate. Remember, sometimes looting IS the answer!
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The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.
Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license
Join us on the THAC0 with Advantage Discord hereJoin The Thac0 with Advantage Patreon here
*Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends who have been playing D&D for a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D keeps us trying to find new ways to start over again.*
We’ve talked about starting campaigns from the perspective of setting expectations, getting buy-in, and incorporating information from your session zero, but what about one step beyond that? What does the actual beginning of the campaign look like, and how can you frame your beginnings in new and different ways? That’s what we’re going to look at today on the show.
From the Bardic CollegeThe original Dark Sun campaign setting boxed set suggested that at the beginning of the campaign, players make character trees. AD&D 2e didn’t actually want you to play plants–character trees were a group of four characters that the player managed, which they could swap out between adventures or when one of the characters died. Each time the active character gained a level, they could pick one of the other characters in that tree for an additional level, which also encouraged you to rotate active characters. While AD&D 1e didn’t want you to share items with other party members, AD&D 2e didn’t want you to share with yourself. I wonder if characters in a character tree need followers to protect them from the other characters of the same player.
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**Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends who have been playing D&D a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D has taught us to fill empty voids with creative material****
It has become almost standard for gamemaster guides to discuss player types. It’s important to identify what your players want from the game and how to balance the expectations of the table. But how many people fit into these categories? Can you mix and match player types in the same individual? Is someone always the same player type? That’s what we’re going to look at today.
From the Bardic CollegeIn most editions of Dungeons & Dragons, there has been “A” Player’s Handbook and “A” Dungeon Master’s Guide, but two editions of D&D bucked this trend. D&D 3e had a Dungeon Master’s Guide II and a Player’s Handbook II, and D&D 4e had a Dungeon Master’s Guide II as well as a Player’s Handbook II and a Player’s Handbook III. But isn’t every book actually an iteration of the Rules Compendium, from a certain point of view? I’m going to start calling the 2024 Player’s Handbook the Rules Compendium XXIII.
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*Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends who have been playing D&D for a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D is a funhouse that has a mind of its own.***
Have you ever had that feeling that you just walked into a dangerous area, where at any moment, something bad could happen, you just don’t know what? We’re going to be talking about mechanizing that feeling for your D&D campaigns with lair actions. This episode will start playing on initiative count 20, losing initiative ties!
From the Bardic CollegeIn D&D 4e, traps and hazards had stat blocks similar to monsters. They often had a series of skill difficulties listed, which had to be met to navigate or disarm the hazard or trap. In some ways, hazards and traps hybridized monsters and skill challenges. When hazards and traps appeared in encounters, they could roll initiative and be slotted into the initiative order. That means in the 4e version of the Tomb of Horrors, your whole party might actually get to act before the Tomb tries to kill them.
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Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends who have been playing D&D for a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D
This past year was a busy, chaotic thing, even if you just look at RPG gaming. Today’s episode will look at what fantasy gaming looked like over this past year, both in the broader industry and in all our gaming groups. We’re set to recap 2024 in fantasy gaming, and talk a little about 2025.
From the Bardic CollegeThis year saw the most recent update to the D&D core rules after D&D 5e was published in 2014. Ten years before 2014, we were just a year past the 3.5 version of D&D 3rd edition. Ten years before that, TSR was getting ready to publish the revised version of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition rulebooks in 1995. Ten years before that, the final episode of the D&D Saturday morning cartoon aired, which I feel compelled to mention because the D&D cartoon characters are EVERYWHERE in the 2024 rulebooks.
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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 let us be so many people different from ourselves.
When we imagine the tropes of Dungeons & Dragons, it’s easy to default to images of medieval Europe. While the game’s creators were undoubtedly influenced by European folklore, they were also influenced by pulp stories, cosmic horror, and television series. D&D has always had influences from beyond Europe and cultures that intentionally avoid being based on real-world equivalents, but it hasn’t always done all of that well. We will look at the cultures reflected in the game, what D&D and other fantasy games have gotten wrong, and how it’s changed over time.
From the Bardic CollegeAt the intersection of D&D’s introduction of anthropomorphic animals and its attempt to model fantasy cultures on real-world influences, the Known World, the Mystara setting, had dog people, the lupin, and cat people, the Rakasta—not to be confused with Rakshasha, which the game also had. Mystara’s cat people had cultures based on imperfect implementations of tropes from India and Japan, while lupins were French. One of the Rakasta cultures lived on the moon. While this predates the dogs and cats of the Realms of Pugmire, the post-apocalyptic setting of Pugmire, where humanity has disappeared, probably makes a little more sense, especially in the direction we’re heading.
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Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends who have been playing D&D for a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D keeps us company on the long roads we travel.
Sometimes, when an adventuring party loves an NPC very much, they start traveling together and setting common goals. We’re going to talk about the companion characters, those NPCs with their own goals and sidequests, that we love from CRPGs, why you might want them in your campaign, why you might not, and how to make a standard NPC feel like a companion character.
From the Bardic CollegeThe Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition Dungeon Master’s Guide distinguished between henchmen and hirelings. Hirelings were paid a set rate to do a specific job, while henchmen were somewhat like apprentice adventurers who were given a lesser cut of all treasure found. One of the things your character was expected to spend gold on was recruiting henchmen or hirelings for dangerous situations to make it less likely that the player characters would die. An additional purpose listed for henchmen was to act as a bodyguard for the player character against the plans of the other player characters. AD&D 1st edition dungeoneering sounds like a hostile workplace.
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The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.
Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license
Join us on the THAC0 with Advantage Discord hereJoin The Thac0 with Advantage Patreon here
The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.
Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license
Join us on the THAC0 with Advantage Discord hereJoin The Thac0 with Advantage Patreon here
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.
A few episodes ago, we talked a little about homebrewing and setting building, but much of that was hypothetical. This week, We’re getting practical by talking to Chris about his homebrew ideas and how he’s used them in our play, The Heroes of Hovel’s Way. We’ve custom-crafted a new episode just for you.From the Bardic CollegeIn Search of the Unknown was an adventure that came out in 1978, and for a while, it was the included adventure in the 1981 Basic Set. This adventure was a little different than other adventures that would be published, because while there was a framing device describing why the PCs would show up, and what they might find, but the adventure itself included rooms and caves without any key. There was advice for the DM to guide them toward what encounters should be placed in those empty spaces. It was meant to be a teaching tool that provided the DM with some momentum. One thing the adventure didn’t do was teach the DM how to pronounce the name of the location where it takes place, Quasqueton.
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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 was our training wheels for getting into roleplaying games.
How much experience do your players have? Not their characters, but your players. What do you need to do to run a game for players that don’t think about tactics and how classes complement one another, versus players that know the best collection of abilities to actions to defeat monsters way above their weight class. On the other hand, what about players that are naturally tactically minded, but haven’t quite warmed up to the aspects of D&D that doesn’t revolve around finding the best way to navigate combat? We’re going to look at different levels of player and their ability and appetite for tactics.
From the Bardic CollegeAccording to the D&D 3rd edition Dungeon Master’s Guide, a well constructed adventure will consist of 10% easy encounters, 20% conditionally easy encounters , 50% challenging encounters, i.e. the encounter level is equal to the average party level, 15% very difficult, i.e. 1 to 4 encounter levels above the party average, and 5% overpowering, meaning that the encounter is 4 or more levels above the average party level. Now that we know that part of the equation, if a challenging encounter should use 20% of the party’s resources, and characters should level up after 13.33 encounters equal to their average party level, how many times will the party sleep before they get killed trying to complete City of the Spider Queen?
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The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.
Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license
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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 is the five page backstory we wrote for our characters.
Characters in our fantasy stories have always had varied and interesting backgrounds. From Conan being born on the battlefield to Raistlin being weak and sickly his entire life. These moments in their lives helped push them into who they were as the characters we’ve enjoyed in fiction. RPG characters can be the same but it’s nice when the game helps us get there. Jared and Ang discuss the history of backgrounds in DnD and then their current implementation in D&D 2024 and other contemporary high fantasy games.
From the Bardic CollegeKits were a concept from AD&D 2e that modified a character class by giving it some minor abilities and a few extra proficiencies. The first appearance of kits was in the Time of the Dragon boxed set, where they were used to portray the standard abilities that people from different cultures would have. These weren’t broad concepts, but more setting-specific, like Minotaur Legionnaire or Gnomish Companion of the Dead. In this version of kits, you had to “pay back” the extra proficiencies you got at 1st level, meaning that by the time you reached a specific level, you had the same number of proficiencies that anyone of that class would have.Kits continued on into the PHBR series, with PHBR1 The Complete Fighter. Some kits, like the swashbuckler, opened up new abilities and playstyles, and others just penalized you for fun, like the barbarian. But by the time the Complete Book of Elves came around, kits were starting to just add things to make characters better than they were without kits, and some much more so than others.TSR tried to get the Kit Horses back in the barn with Player’s Options: Skills and Powers, where kits were a minor add on at the end of character creation, that bundled some abilities slightly cheaper when taken as part of the kit than if purchased otherwise. Skills & Powers had to get that power creep under control before it introduced it’s own power creep.
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The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.
Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license
Join us on the THAC0 with Advantage Discord hereJoin The Thac0 with Advantage Patreon here
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.
From the Bardic CollegeBack 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?
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The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.
Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license
Join us on the THAC0 with Advantage Discord
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 still has a lot of potential energy.
From 3rd edition forward, when asked, the majority of DMs indicate that they run a homebrew campaign, rather than a published setting. But what does that mean? What goes into that homebrew setting? Where the the inspiration come from? Does this mean that setting material is less valuable than general material? We’re going to pick apart what goes into creating a campaign from the ground up, and look at what gets ground up to make a homebrew setting.
From the Bardic CollegeHow many official Dungeons & Dragons settings have been published over the years? If official means published by the current owner of D&D, there are more than 35 settings, including some interesting familiar locations from beyond D&D’s IP, like Conan’s Hyperborean Age, the movie version of Red Sonja’s word, and the Blizzard properties of Diablo and Warcraft. But, to be clear, Warcraft was a D&D setting briefly, but World of Warcraft was a d20 game using the 3eSRD. And the Warcraft movie definitely isn’t a D&D setting.
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The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.
Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license
Join us on the THAC0 with Advantage Discord
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 followed us into cyberspace.
Time changes all things, including the procedures we engage with when we set up and run our games. We’ve broadly looked at VTTs before, but this time we’ll be examining our time using VTTs, how that’s changed over time, and what other VTT experiences we’ve had to expand our horizons.
From the Bardic CollegeKas the Betrayer is essentially Schroedinger’s Henchmen. Depending on what edition of the game you’re looking at, he was Vecna’s bodyguard, his general, an assassin, or Vecna’s partner. He’s also variously has been a vampire when he first worked for Vecna, got turned into a vampire while he was working for Vecna, or became a vampire after he betrayed Vecna. He has also been accidentally turned into a vampire by spending too much time in the Negative Energy plane, because he was cursed, or because Vecna used an artifact called the Mask of Kas on him. Kas’s backstory has been changed so often that he qualifies for a walk on part in DC Comics next continuity reboot.
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The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.
Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license
Join us on the THAC0 with Advantage Discord
Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends who have been playing D&D a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D lets us practice our diplomacy skills.
Dungeons & Dragons is a game that requires social interaction. It is a game that can inspire strong emotions and great feelings of satisfaction. It is also prone to miscommunications and mistakes, just like any other social interaction. This episode we’re going to look at when there are problems at the table, and what we can do when those problems come up.
From the Bardic CollegeIn the “Handling Troublesome Players” section of the 1st edition Dungeon Master’s Guide, one of the bits of advice the book gives to curtail metagaming is to tell the players that they expressly can’t do something that a metagaming character suggested, so the metagaming player quits talking. Nothing in D&D says that Gygax played some of his first games of D&D with his kids more than a rule that is the equivalent of “I will turn this car around right now.”
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Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends that have been playing D&D a long time, and podcasting for two years as of this episode! While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D speaks our language.
Many fantasy stories revolve around lost and arcane languages, or characters that can speak for their party when they encounter creatures that don’t share a language with anyone else. One of the most consistent elements of character creation in D&D has been determining what languages a character knows, but what does that mean at the game table. We’ll be talking about language and seeing if we share a gaming dialect.
From the Bardic CollegeIn AD&D 1e, in addition to other languages, each character knew the alignment language that matched their alignment. That means that if you were Lawful Good, you know a language known as Lawful Good. The 1e Dungeon Master’s Guide proceeds to explain that people are socially stigmatized for speaking alignment languages in public, and no one will risk using their alignment language with people that aren’t their alignment around them, which explains why later editions no longer had alignment languages. If you can only speak to people that you know already speak your language, but you can’t speak your language to ask them, I’m sure the gods of logic babelled them since they were completely unusable.
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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, the multiverse may come unraveled if we don’t play D&D.
Published adventures are often juggling a lot of objectives. The adventure may be trying to illustrate a specific style of campaign, it may be highlighting a certain type of creature or opponent. And sometimes, it may be trying to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons. In this episode, we’re going to look at Vecna: Eve of Ruin, and see what kind of fine tuning you might want to explore when engaging with this plane hopping epic adventure.
From the Bardic CollegeThe Hand and Eye of Vecna first appeared in the Eldritch Wizardry supplement in 1976. Back then, all we knew about Vecna was that he was a lich that left some body parts behind. Vecna’s name is an anagram of Vance, in honor of author Jack Vance. The idea of a matched hand and eye set of artifacts comes from Micheal Moorcock, where the Corum stories introduced the Hand of Kwll and the Eye of Rhynn. Vecna has had a resurgence in modern times, at least in part due to Stranger Things using Vecna for the name of its most recent season’s villain. If you still can’t get enough Vecna, you can put your life in Vecna’s hands by using Vecna Healthcare’s online health portals. No, really, that’s a thing.
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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 is coterminous to our gaming reality.
Fantasy stories abound with places beyond the mortal realms. Fae domains, magical islands outside of time, and the lands of the dead, among others. How can you instill this kind of otherworldly adventure into your game? How do you make a realm outside of mortal existence feel different, memorable, and distinct? What are some of the pitfalls of taking your mortal adventurers and placing them beyond? We’re going to example these questions in today’s episode, as we pass beyond the veil.
From the Bardic CollegeHow many adventurers make up an adventuring party? According to the 1980 Basic set, parties should be made up of 6 to 8 adventurers. Ideally, everyone only has one character, but if you want to make sure you are in that 6 to 8 range, some people may have more than one character. But the most important thing to remember is . . . your characters shouldn’t like each other that much. If they like each other, they might share stuff. We know players won’t share stuff with each other, right? Sure, we all need to work together to survive, but not if the +2 dagger I had before I found my +3 longsword needs to be shared with someone. Can you imagine the uproar if D&D taught people about Satanism AND Communism?
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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, a whole lot of them have a family resemblance to D&D.
In 2008, Wizards of the Coast released the extremely restrictive GSL, making it unattractive to develop for the 4th edition of the game, which led to the creation of Pathfinder, a game that effectively allowed gamers to continue using the familiar structure of D&D 3rd edition in a familiar fantasy roleplaying game. In 2023, Wizards of the Coast attempted to assert that they could revoke the OGL and issue an amended one that gave them more control over creators, which resulted in a lot of creators building their own games. Today, we’re looking at one of those games, Tales of the Valiant, built on the Black Flag System Reference.
From the Bardic CollegeCavaliers first appeared in AD&D 1st Edition in Unearthed Arcana, and like many wealthy nepo babies, were probably more trouble than they were worth. That said, they were the first class that had a built-in way to advance their ability scores when they gained levels, with all of their physical abilities having a percentile score that went up by 2d10 when they leveled. By the time 3rd edition came around, everybody started getting ability score boosts at set levels. Thank goodness we’re not still trying to make a class whose main abilities are about mounted combat work in an adventure game where mounted combat is pretty rare. We save that for a subclass now.
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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 keeps coming up on the random encounter charts.
What happens when player characters come in contact with non-player characters? That interaction in D&D is called an encounter, and its where much of the game takes place. Some encounters happen in a set place in time, some happen at random, and some emerge from play. With all of this variability and versatility, what’s the best way to make encounters sing? We’ll take a look at that on today’s THAC0 with Advantage.
From the Bardic CollegeEarlier editions of D&D, especially Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st and 2nd edition, included a monster rarity in the monster stat block. Encounter tables in those editions placed monsters in encounter tables based on their rarity. Unique entities were often listed as Very Rare (Unique), and some encounter tables abused math quite a bit by putting things like demon lords and archdevils in those “very rare” slots. That means that deep gnomes would use the same slot on those charts as Demogorgon. One of those is a much nastier surprise than the other. Unless you really like tentacles. No judgment.
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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 cast a temporal loop spell over us that we can’t escape.
There are a thousand stories you can tell with Dungeons & Dragons, but what if you really want to tell the same story more than once? Because roleplaying games present players with so many choices, sometimes it can be fascinating to go back and see if your current players will take the road less traveled, or if some mistakes are built to last. We’re going to explore running the same adventure more than once, and how to get the most out of the experience.
From the Bardic CollegeAdventure I6 Ravenloft came out in 1983, and in addition to being the origin of the famous vampire antagonist Strahd Von Zarovich, the adventure also featured a unique structure that allowed for the cards drawn by a fortune teller during a reading to randomize elements of the game, making I6 a natural adventure to play multiple times. On top of all of this, Konami completely stole the image of Strahd Von Zarovich as a stand-in for Dracula on the cover of 1987’s Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest.
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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 is the recursive program that we’re still running to solve for a perfect campaign.
In some fantasy stories, everything is steeped in myth and magic, and anything that distracts from those themes detracts from the story. But that’s not every fantasy story. For decades, pulp heroes could just as easily wield a sword as a laser pistol. Sometimes it’s worth it to see the looks on your player’s faces when the dragon they’ve been hunting is actually a cyborg with laser vision. Today we’re going to talk about when and how to include science fiction in your D&D campaigns
From the Bardic CollegeThere have been several adventures over the years that have blended fantasy and sci-fi, but one that doesn’t get referenced as much as Expedition to the Barrier Peaks or City of the Gods is the 1997 adventure Tale of the Comet. Eventually the PCs head to a science fiction setting to defeat the final villain. There are rules for converting characters to the Alternity game system, the science fiction RPG TSR was just beginning to launch. The final boss is an evil AI that ruined the world by stealing all of the art and writing in the culture that created it. Or, maybe it destroyed every living being on the planet with drones. I can’t keep that straight.
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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 still acts first in all of our rounds of gaming.
Imagine a table full of gamers. Each one of them has a character with multiple options available to them. Now think of all of those characters in the same scene with a giants, a dragon, and a band of ogres. How do you keep all of those characters straight and make sure that everyone gets to take their turn? We roll for initiative, and let the dice tell us who gets to take what turn and when. We’ll explore how 5e D&D works, as well as variations that exist in the game.
From the Bardic CollegeAdvanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition may have some of the most confusing rules surrounding initiative and combat rounds. Most people that have played multiple editions of D&D are familiar with the idea of a surprise round, but AD&D 1e didn’t actually have a surprise round, it actually had a process for determining the number of segments lost to surprise, and the only actions that could be used against the surprised characters are actions that took the same or fewer segments as the segments lost to surprise. Apparently it’s usually not a surprise that someone with a great sword is going to attack you.
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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 is the crucible that trained us in the tabletop RPG disciplines.
We’ve looked at the kind of background details you can add to divine and arcane spellcasting characters, and what questions you should ask about your setting when adding these details. It’s easy to assume that characters like fighters and rogues don’t need these kinds of details on the origins of their abilities, but martial character backgrounds can still add a wealth of details to your game setting. Shields high, we’re charging into martial character backgrounds!
From the Bardic CollegeThe AD&D 1e barbarian couldn’t rage, an ability that didn’t appear until D&D 3e. Dragon Magazine #133 did introduce a 1e Berserker class, meant for NPCs. These Berserkers had a rage feature similar to what we now think of for Barbarians, except that the Berserker couldn’t stop raging early, meaning they might start walloping their allies. A Berserker also couldn’t enter a rage voluntarily, but had a percentage chance to rage in stressful situations. You wouldn’t like them when they’re angry.
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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 is the patron to whom we swore allegiance to get our powers.
In the Great Wheel cosmological system, the souls are tortured by two separate yet equally important groups. The demons who improvise destruction, and the devils, who prosecute long term plans. These are their definitions. In other words, we’re going to talk about the differences between demons and devils, and if you need there to be a difference in your D&D game.
From the Bardic CollegeDevils are younger than their chaotic evil cousins, as they weren’t introduced until the AD&D 1e Monster Manual in 1977. Not long after, in Dragon Magazine #28, the article The Politics of Hell was published. This is mainly notable because it has Satan’s stats in it–did the Satanic Panic start because Satan has a -8 armor class, 333 hit points, and can only be hit by +3 or better weapons? Maybe that got cut from the 1985 60 Minutes interview with Gary Gygax.
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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 called us to be its heralds.
Do the gods in your campaign look down upon the game board of the world, moving their followers into and out of conflict like the Olympians in Clash of the Titans? Do your characters lament that, or embrace it? Was your character called to service, or did they join the clergy on their own? We’re going to explore the divine and how it informs your D&D character.
From the Bardic CollegeThe AD&D 1e rulebook Deities & Demigods was the first D&D product that provided details about gods, supernatural planes of existence, and concepts underlying the cleric class. The first printing of the book contains Moorcock’s Melnibonean gods as well as creatures from the Cthulhu Mythos. Urban Legend says that TSR didn’t realize they couldn’t use those characters, but the truth is, between the first and second printing, newcomers Chaosium started producing Call of Cthulhu and the Stormbringer RPG. TSR could have kept those sections in the book, but they had to credit Chaosium. Eventually TSR decided they didn’t want to advertise for another RPG company, and cut the content, publishing the shorter work as Legend and Lore. Now, if you want to talk about IP that TSR used that they didn’t have the rights to use, just ask the Tolkien estate about that.
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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 is an evil spell put on us that made us shun our friend when Blackleaf died.
Arcane magic can reign down destruction, create something from nothing, and bend the rules of the multiverse. But how often do you think about the means by which your character harnessed that power? Do you believe in a grand theory of magic, or is magic a mystery even to you? We’re going to look at how to work more magical roleplaying details into your arcane caster player character.
From the Bardic CollegeThe first official D&D glimpse the public got of the Forgotten Realms was in Dragon Magazine #62, in the first installment of Ed Greenwood’s Pages from the Mages. Instead of just publishing articles with new AD&D spells, the articles described specific spellbooks, their history, the wizards that owned the spellbooks, and what was contained within them, including the new spells. Greenwood’s motivation for publishing the articles? He wanted to give his NPCs new spells, and he thought it would be fairer to his players if an editor accepted them into a professional publication.
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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 is the bag of snacks at the back of the shelf that you thought you already ate.
No matter how long it is between our game sessions, its easy to lose track of what was going on the last time you played. Even though we want to get caught up, no one wants to wait 15 minutes for the GM to read the previous session into the record. We’re going to look at the best way to balance recapping your last session with having enough momentum to hit the ground running.
Fun FactoidThe displacer beast is one of the most iconic of D&D monsters, and even appeared in Honor Among Thieves, looking damn cool. The displacer beast isn’t in the 5e SRD, meaning that D&D products not made by WotC can’t use them. Ironically, the displacer beast was inspired by Coeurl, an alien hunting cat with tentacles on its shoulders, that appears in A.E. Von Vogt’s story “Black Destroyer,” in July of 1939. Couerl tracked down the crew of a spaceship one by one, killing them, until it gets tricked into going into an escape pod where it gets shot into space. So the displacer beast came from the same inspiration as the xenomorphs from Aliens. But displacer beast kittens are still cuter than facehuggers.
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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 is a phoenix that just keeps rising from the ashes.
Last year was a roller coaster ride for all things Dungeons & Dragons. The year started with breaking a 23 year old promise with the OGL, a reversal that saw the 5e SRD added to creative commons, the release of the Dungeons & Dragons movie, the excitement of the 2024 anniversary year plans, and the sudden, sobering stop of the December layoffs from Hasbro. We take a look at this tumultuous year and what it means for the game and the brand.
Fun FactoidThe setting that is currently called Mystara started off as the Known World. Lawrence Schick and Tom Moldvay created the setting as a shared world that multiple gamers could contribute to, for their home games. When the BX edition of D&D came out, Schick and Moldvay were told that the Greyhawk setting was reserved for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons only. That’s when the Known World became known to D&D players, as it became the backdrop of the BX, and later BECMI D&D adventures. When Basic D&D was phased out of existence so TSR could focus on only developing AD&D 2nd Edition, the Known World was renamed Mystara, and was ported to AD&D. Unfortunately, modern gamers haven’t been exposed to the Known World, which is ironic, considering they have been exposed to the Forgotten Realms.
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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 taught us when to bring the snacks.
Ang and Jared discuss Beer & Pretzels versus Wine & Cheese, and it’s not just what they’re having for the holidays. Come with us on this episode of THAC0 with Advantage as we explore different play styles in D&D, from casual and cathartic to engaging and exacting.
Fun FactoidAuril’s Blesstide is a floating holiday in the Forgotten Realms, where people in Waterdeep dress in white and don’t eat hot food, to appease the Frost Maiden in hopes of a mild winter. The Wonders of Gond was a holiday randomly determined by the church of the Wonderbringer in which they encouraged people by making gadgets and toys to hand out to people to brighten their spirits. Wintershield is the first day of the year, where people gather to discuss the previous year, look at maps, and talk about politics. This is how you know the Forgotten Realms is a fantasy world, because no one thinks explicitly talking about politics on purpose during the holidays is a good idea.
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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 is what taught us our RPG manners.
This episode is all about being a better player. Ang and Jared talk about their past trials with rough players and what they believe helps be a better player at the DnD table. Let us know what you think are some quality traits to bring to the table and any tips you might have for being a better player.
Fun FactoidNow that we’ve seen Sigil in D&D 5e, it’s interesting to take a look back on the history of the city and how entrenched it is in D&D lore. It didn’t appear in the AD&D 1st edition Manual of the Planes, but was the focal point of the 2nd edition AD&D Planescape campaign. AD&D 2e ends with Vecna attempting to enter Sigil and vaguely causing the Great Wheel to break into a multiverse. This led to different D&D campaign settings having distinct planar cosmologies, such as the Great Tree arrangement of the Forgotten Realms. We don’t get to see Sigil in 3rd edition, but are instead introduced to another planar metropolis, Union. While a lot of people think of D&D 4e as being the “oddball” of modern D&D, Sigil shows up in the Dungeon Masters Guide II as a location for Paragon Level play. We haven’t seen Union since the Epic Level Handbook, and Sigil showed up in the D&D 5e Dungeon Masters Guide even before the Planescape campaign setting was released. If you made it through all of that, you can now comment on how our esteemed narrator pronounced Sigil after all of those references.
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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 is what we spend most of our segments on.
Time keeps on slipping slipping slipping into the future… and we should probably have some way to track it, some reason for keeping time, and have some interesting holidays and festivals to break up the monotony of the passing of the days. Maybe even put some cool adventures inside those holiday moments. That’s what todays episode is all about.
Fun FactoidThe round is the measure of time that is most often referenced in D&D. In Original D&D, AD&D 1st Edition, and AD&D 2nd Edition, a round was one minute long, however, AD&D 2e makes the point of saying rounds are an abstract, kind of like hit points, not an absolute measure of time. Basic D&D through all versions of the Basic set, and up to the Rules Cyclopedia, has 10 second rounds, but also mentions that combat that takes less than one turn (10 minutes) should be considered to take one turn (10 minutes). That’s because we need to know when your torches burn out. D&D 3rd, 4th, and 5th has six second rounds, most likely because that means 10 rounds equates to one minute. Who uses torches anymore, we all have darkvision or light spells?
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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 haunts our dreams, always lurking just beyond sight . . . in the shadows.
It’s all about those spooky monsters that make us feel that uncomfortable unsettling unnerving waver in the pit of our stomachs when they show up in our games. Ang and Jared talk about the scary monsters, the ones that should be scary, and why those monsters that do scare us make us feel that way.
Fun FactoidWhile a few important NPCs have been granted the descriptor of witch, like Tasha or the Simbul, actual classes have been pretty sparse. There were a few classes in the early days in Dragon Magazine, and a witch kit in AD&D 2e. The third party Mayfair product Role Aids: Witches presented a 2e witch class with nine subclasses. 3e saw five official prestige classes, two based on the Witches of Rashemen from the Forgotten Realms setting. From 3rd parties there was the Quintessential Witch from Mongoose Publishing, and the Witches Handbook from Green Ronin, both presenting witch classes. Pathfinder stepped in with their own core Witch class from the Advanced Player’s Guide. Even in D&D 5th edition, most witch options have been 3rd party offerings, including a wizard subclass from Schwalb Entertainment, and a witch class from Kobold Press’ Deep Magic Volume II. I guess the concept of an official witch class in D&D is just . . . cursed?
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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 is the wraith that haunts all of our pretty, pretty dice.
What do we have here? 2024 D&D rules updates. Now it’s just Unearthed Arcana again and not One D&D. There’s EN Worlds Level Up: Advanced 5E that’s got a starter box coming. Interesting. We got Kobold Press and their Tales of the Vaillant, and there’s the Cubicle 7 D20 RPG. They’ve all been updating we finally got some time to catch up, check them out, and let you know what we think.
Fun FactoidHow tall are elves? Well, they average 5’4” and max out at 5’8” in the D&D Rules Cyclopedia. In AD&D 1st and 2nd edition, as well as 3rd edition they average 5’1” and max out at 5’5”. When it comes to the 2014 Players Handbook they’re all around 5’5” and reach the lofty point guard heights of 6’2”. But if you read your Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance books, they’re the same height or taller than humans, going all the way back to the Old Grey Boxed Set or the Dragonlance Novels. Basically, Gygax wanted us to know that D&D elves weren’t Tolkien elves, unless they were.
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- Therapist Reacts to D&D Honor Among Theives
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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 is encouraging me to buy more dice.
Do you think about your next campaign while running your current one? Do you have a google drive document or folder filled with campaign ideas you’d love to get to the table but just will never have the time for? Is your brain just soup and mush full of campaign ideas floating around just waiting to bubble to the surface? Jared and Ang have all of these things happening to them. Join them to hear how they sort it all out and while your at it, let us know what campaigns ideas you have that you just haven’t gotten to the table yet.
Fun FactoidWhile D&D has had many published adventures over the decades, most people only think of published campaigns in terms of the 2000s on. While some people point to the original Dragonlance Saga (DL1 to D14) as the first adventure path, when the original Greyhawk adventures were pulled together into compilations, the assumption was that they could serve as a full Greyhawk campaign experience, starting with the Slavelords series, moving on to the Temple of Elemental Evil, then Against the Giants, and finally the Queen of the Demonweb Pits. I’m surprised no DMG has said “If you’re out of ideas for how to end a campaign, just go fight a god.
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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 is encouraging me to buy more dice.
Ah, the Campaign. They start. They proceed. Most fizzle into the nothingness of the astral sea like dead gods floating amongst the crystal sphere’s. But some. Those few. Reach their glorious conclusions, providing that closure and finish we all so enjoy and greatly desire. Ang and Jared talk about all that today and more when it comes to D&D campaigns.
Fun FactoidModern versions of D&D and similar games usually assume the “optimal” party of characters is 4-5 characters, all at the same level. Earlier edition adventures didn’t have exactly the same recommendations for how many characters and what level they should be. Against the Cult of the Reptile God was for 4 to 7 characters levels 1s to 3rd. The original Ravenloft adventure was for 6-8 characters of level 5 to 7. C4 To Find a King was designed for 10 players of levels 4 to 7. So, um, were you suppose to start with 10 friends, and then cut your friend group down to 8, and then 7, or how was that supposed to work?
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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 followed us home, so we kept it.
From sand tables where they busted out the rulers to the squares we've come to know and...deal with? Love? Hate? Whatever you're into. Jared and Ang start at the beginning and work their way from Dungeons & Dragons the original through the trends and ideas from each edition of battle maps to the current day. Then they drop some helpful tips on how people might use battle maps today and some interesting things to think about when choosing them for your game. On this weeks THAC0 with Advantage.
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 is the titan from which the pantheon descended.
A Cleric of Hammers stands at their forge
"Please oh god of hammers. Grant me the power to smite thine foes with this hammer you have bestowed upon me the knowledge to create in my forge with my own hands and the fire from the materials I gathered and turned into this icon of your glorious divinity."
A humanoid stands within the grove of a Fey Queen.
"Hey, umm, fey queen. How about you give me a little juice and I'll get rid of all your enemies for you. Like be your personal assassin on the prime material plane. Sounds good. Deal."
Gods and Patrons. That's the jist but Ang and Jared get more into it along with the evolution of the concept through the years and editions of D&D, I know the show is called Thac0 with Advantage but it's more like from Thac0 to Advantage D&D through the years some episodes.
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 is . . . the old neighborhood where we always love visiting and seeing what’s changed.
The city streets are dark and filled with cut throats and pick pockets. Is that man just selling odd tinctures or is he a dragon in disguise. Can you trust your "friend" with the tip you got about the mayor's husband? All this is to say there are plenty of adventures to be had in the cities of your D&D worlds, be they old or new. Tune in that dial and hear Ang and Jared regale you with the ways your cities can smack your adventuring parties right in the face with adventure.
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 is has provided us something to talk about for a year now.
Dwarfs, Elves, Dragonborn, Githyanki, Giff, Plasmoids, Draconians, Gnomes, Humans, Tieflings, Eladrin, Drow, and more. On this episode we're talking about why people might choose the species they're playing.
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 is the adorable critter that followed us home.
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 is where we rehearse our villain monologues over and over again.
It's time for the Boss Fight!!! That's what Ang and Jared are getting into today. It's all about big bads. You'll get some tips, tools, and tricks for running them, a bit of reminiscing about old ones, and how to get that final fight you've been working up to for the whole story arc.
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 is the adorable critter that followed us home.
So many classes. So many sub classes. Do we need more from WotC's 2024 DnD or are we good with what we have? That's the question Ang and Jared ponder on this weeks Thac0 with Advantage. You're all around fun times D&D Podcast. No you can't play the bunny boy from Final Fantasy XIV in my Curse of Strahd game. That sentence says it all. We're talking about campaign constraints. We share some of our tools surrounding the topic so you can better collaborate with your game group so everyone gets the experience they want out of the campaign.
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 is the metaphoric pizza topping we both agree on.
No you can't play the bunny boy from Final Fantasy XIV in my Curse of Strahd game. That sentence says it all. We're talking about campaign constraints. We share some of our tools surrounding the topic so you can better collaborate with your game group so everyone gets the experience they want out of the campaign.
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 lets us take those games into a dark alley and take their stuff.
And take their stuff is exactly what Ang and Jared are doing on this episode as they discuss ways to take mechanics, procedures, and ideologies from other games and bring them to Dungeons and Dragons.
Fun FactoidIt’s been pretty well documented that D&D’s story elements are strung together from a whole host of sword and sorcery, epic fantasy, science fiction, horror, and folklore stories. It’s a little less documented how much D&D assimilated game rules over the years. Concepts like adding a bonus to a die versus a difficulty class, point buy, story path backgrounds, companion characters, and even advantage were distilled from the prevalent games being played at the time various editions were being designed. Resistance is futile. We will add your narrative and procedural distinctiveness to our own.
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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 is the game that makes us sad when we don’t get to play.
From Tales of the Valiant to the most recent D&D playtest. Our adventurous podcasters delve into the depths of these pages and almost get TPK’d
Fun FactoidAD&D 1st Edition introduced weapon specialization in Unearthed Arcana. The only classes that could benefit from this ability were the fighter and the ranger. AD&D 2nd edition scaled this back to only fighters, until the PHBR series, maybe accidentally, extended weapon specialization back to rangers, then also extended it to paladins. But none of this applied to BECMI D&D, where fighters could become Skilled, Experts, Masters, and Grand Masters with weapons. But so could everybody else . . . fighters never get to play with their own toys by themselves.
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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 is the Taco Tuesday of narrative gaming.
How do we get new gamers. WE TEACH THEM!!! Ang and Jared are talking about running new games for players on this weeks installment of Thac0 with Advantage
Fun FactoidIn 1994, TSR put out a boxed set called First Quest, one of their new line of CD enhanced game accessories. In addition to having a recording of voice actors playing a game of D&D (ahem), there were different tracks to introduce each location in two separate dungeons detailed in the boxed set. A sample version of the product was included with Dragon Magazine. Would it sound really sad and pathetic to say that someone working second shift that couldn’t get a regular group of players together in 1994 might have listened to this over and over again on the way home at night? We didn’t have podcasts back then, okay?
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- Cinema and Sorcery: The Comprehensive Guide to Fantasy Film – Green Ronin Online Store
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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 is the cool side of the pillow stuffed with d20s.
There are a large number of genre’s that Dungeons and Dragons says it can emulate. Ang and Jared go through them and provide advice on what they think works, doesn’t work, and some general thoughts on how players and GMs might make them work. They also get into their campaign journal and talk about their Tales of the Valiant playtesting.
Fun FactoidD&D has attempted to emulate genre with various settings in the past. One example of this was the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Lankhmar, City of Adventure supplement, which attempted to downplay the effectiveness of D&D style magic for player characters to emulate the more barbarian/fighter/thief focused aspects of the setting. All the spells in the game had their casting time bumped up to the next tier, so rounds became turns (10 rounds) to cast, and hours became days. That all seems like a lot of work compared to just giving the Gray Mouser the Magic Initiate feat.
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- Cinema and Sorcery: The Comprehensive Guide to Fantasy Film – Green Ronin Online Store
- Brennan Lee Mulligan’s ‘Rolling with Emphasis’ mechanic via DnD Shorts
Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re all friends that have been playing D&D a long time. While we all love lots of other RPGs, D&D is a mass media property that hooks us in even when we aren’t gaming.
We’re talking about the D&D Movie: Honor Among Thieves. That’s its. Full Stop. Strap in. Let’s go.
If you just want the D&D movie stuff head to 32:11 in the Podcast
Fun FactoidWhile the kids from the 1980s D&D cartoon didn’t originally go to the Forgotten Realms (the cartoon debuted 4 years before the first Forgotten Realms boxed set was published), the kids have been portrayed as living out their D&D fantasy in Faerun in various media. In 1996 TSR published a Forgotten Realms: The Grand Tour comic book which featured Presto trying to apprentice himself to Elminster. Baldur’s Gate II contains a brief reference to Hank and Bobby being eaten by Tiamat. I guess the kids learned about resurrection spells before this movie came out.
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*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 likes to experiment with our emotions.*
Take the rules. Learn them. Use them. Report on them. Get revisions. Repeat. It’s the playtesters life. Then there’s playing at 10th level and above which many many people do, right? No, they don’t? Ok, well, for those who do Ang and Jared get into it and some ideas for how to make it fun.
Fun Factoid*The AD&D adventure Throne of Bloodstone included pregenerated 100th level characters, with notes on running 100th level characters. Some of the advice for running adventures for 100th level characters in that adventure was to focus on endangering the PCs stuff, rather than endangering the PCs, for example, destroying the wizard’s spellbook. That’ll make you a popular DM!*
LINKS Write for Gnome Stew* * Dungeon Dudes on spicing up those boss monsters * Worlds Beyond Number * Worlds Beyond Number Patreon
*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 is fried food on a stick in the carnival of our lives.*
Dragon Heist, Princes of the Apocalypse, Tales of the Old Margrave, White Plume Mountain, Tales from the Yawning Portal, The Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Curse of Strahd, and Storm Kings Thunder are just a scant few of the adventures that have been published for 5e. We’re taking a varied look at how to utilize these adventures in your games on this weeks Thac0 with Advantage.
Fun Factoid*The first published adventure for D&D was Temple of the Frog, which was included in the Original D&D supplement Blackmoor. The first stand alone adventure, however, was Palace of the Vampire Queen in 1976, a year after Temple of the Frog, and wasn’t published by TSR. Many of the early adventures were “tournament adventures,” meaning that players were being scored on how well they did in the adventure. No pressure.*
LINKS Write for Gnome Stew* * The Legend Of Vox Machina (Amazon Original Series Soundtrack) ‘2 x Zoetrope Picture Discs’ * A D&D TV Show is coming to Paramount Plus!
*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 inlaid our neural pathways with mithril.*
You don’t want a railroad but you want your PCs to feel like they’re part of the story. How can we do this? Ang and Jared talk all about it in this weeks THAC0 with Advantage
Fun Factoid*You won’t find Hobbits, Ents, Balrogs, or Wargs in D&D now, but that wasn’t always the case. Early in D&D’s history, it borrowed more directly from it’s inspirational material, but the Saul Zaentz Company, which held the rights to Middle-earth licensing, filed a lawsuit against TSR. The Saul Zaentz Company was apparently a little overzealous, because they also wanted D&D to remove the words dragon, dwarf, elf, goblin, and orc from the game as well. The judge looked at this request and said, “this shall not pass*
LINKS* Player Versus Player Conflicts – Seth Skorkowski’s YouTube channel * Dark Knights of Steel
**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 likes to make us drop everything else in the hobby for the last month when we aren’t even playing.****
Have you ever died in a D&D game? No. Not you. Your character. That’s part of what Ang and Jared are talking about on this episode along with healing, resurrection, reincarnation, and everything to do with death and healing in DnD.
Fun Factoid**The first rules that let people survive after they dropped to 0 hit points appeared in the AD&D 1st Edition DMG. If you were at -3 hit points or less, you were still alive, but you kept losing hit points until you hit -10 and died. If you reached -6 or lower, the DM could just decide to maim your character. Plus, your character was incapacitated for a week without being able to get back any hit points. Best case scenario, one of your buddies carries your body out of the dungeon. Worst-case scenario, your friends just watched Weekend at Bernie’s and decide to bring you into that encounter with the local Mind Flayer.****
LINKS* Deep Magic 2 (with some Black Flag compatibility stretch goals) * The Oracle Character Generator for Fantasy RPGs by Nord Games — Kickstarter * Dungeon Denizens by Goodman Games — Kickstarter * Grim Hollow: Valikan Clans by Ghostfire Gaming — Kickstarter * Home-Field Advantage – A Compendium of Lair Actions
*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 is a gaming tradition that transcends whoever owns it at the moment.***
What are your favorite memories from each edition of dungeons and dragons? That’s the question Ang and Jared answer in this episode, plus there might be a bonus song on the end titled My Favorite DnD things.
Fun Factoid*A company called Mayfair Games started making unofficial D&D supplements in a line called Role Aids in the early 80s. TSR threatened to sue them, not for the content of the supplements, but because they said they were compatible with AD&D. In the 90s, they went back to court over how well Mayfair abided by their previous agreement. In some corners, this wasn’t seen as a move to enforce the agreement, so much as a move to force Mayfair out of competition. Thankfully, that was the last such instance in D&D history . . . wait, there seems to be some papers stuck to the back of this . . .***
LINKS* Legal Eagle on OGL 1.1 * Green Ronin’s 3rd Edition Era Megabundle
*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 followed us home and we want to keep it.*
It’s a pile of gold with gems, three swords, a suit of armor, a small cask, 27 gold ingots, a statue of a dragon with a series of gems embedded in it, there’s also a bunch of silver, and a lot of copper on the bottom. Oh, don’t forget to grab that gossamer sheet that looks like it was made out of fairy wings. Hey what’s this? Nope. Put it all back. Treasure is tainted. It’s got Electrum pieces in it.
All jokes aside. this episode is all about treasure and rewards. So let’s grab our dice and begin our adventure with Jared and Ang.
Fun Factoid*From the Bardic College: Electrum is a real thing. No really. It’s a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver, and it was used for coins in Greece, Carthage, and Rome. So when you get 2000 electrum pieces, don’t think “this could have been 1000 gold pieces,” think “people actually used these things.” Then think, “we need to get this converted to 1000 gold pieces.*
LINKS* Shannon Applecline’s year-in-review for 2022 on RPGNet * The Oracle Story Generator
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 is our sanctuary, so you’re only going to hurt us with an area attack.
We’re back with a hefty episode about the One D&D Playtest. Ang and Jared dive into the cleric changes and some new designs surrounding the Ardling and Goliath. That’s right. You can play anthropomorphic animals or a variety of giant types. Also. They included a change log. Thank the gods.
Fun Factoid*D&D was born of a lot of conflicting influences, and the Cleric is a great example of this melting pot of pop culture. It was originally introduced in the game as a class specifically about hunting the undead, but then picked some some limitations based on assumptions from characters like Archbishop Turpin or Odo of Bayeux using clubs or maces in their depictions. Have fun staking a vampire with a blunt stake!*
LINKS* Shard VTT * Empire of Exiles by Erin M. Evans
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 is our favorite pillow, and right now, it’s on the cool side.
Tier’s of Play have been a part of D&D since the inception of the game but never codified until the 4th edition. The hinting at of your character growing in power and scope from titles, box sets, or just in the purchase of a keep we’re all there back in the day. So these tiers matter but how do they matter? Ang and Jared take a deep look at that very topic in this episode of Thac0 with Advantage.
Fun FactoidThe Dungeons & Dragons used to be divided into Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, and the version of D&D that was introduced in 1983 became known as BECMI, because it was divided into different tiers of play by boxed sets: Basic, Expert, Companion, Masters, and Immortal. Because it makes the highest level you can reach is 36th level, before becoming a god, which was a missed opportunity to make the secret of life available at 42nd level.
LINKS* Seth Skorkowsky’s YouTube channel
The digital age is upon us and there's now a bevy of virtual tabletops you can choose from to play games on. Join Ang and Jared for this information packed and educational look at a variety of VTs they're experienced with.
Today we’re going to start looking at the latest One D&D Playtest Unearthed Arcana, for Expert Classes. We’re not going to be done with this in one episode, so today, we’ll start with the updates to the Rules Glossary and feats, and in a later show, we’ll start looking at the classes.
Today we’re going to start looking at the latest One D&D Playtest Unearthed Arcana, for Expert Classes. We’re not going to be done with this in one episode, so today, we’ll start with the updates to the Rules Glossary and feats, and in a later show, we’ll start looking at the classes.
Today we’re going to start looking at the latest One D&D Playtest Unearthed Arcana, for Expert Classes. We’re not going to be done with this in one episode, so today, we’ll start with the updates to the Rules Glossary and feats, and in a later show, we’ll start looking at the classes.
Today we're talking about Appendix N and what we think would be in the new Appendix N but that's after we let you know what's been going on in our games. If you could only include one new item in an Appendix N for D&D what would it be?
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 is like […]
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 is our […]
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 is our […]