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.

Sage 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.