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.

With 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?