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.

In 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.