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.

In 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.