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’re still processing our game notes

It’s natural for a GM to wonder if what they presented in the last game session is what their players wanted. Did that section that you spent hours outlining provide the response you were hoping? Is the secret mastermind going to be rewarding for the PCs to uncover? What if I asked for too many ability checks? What if I forgot to ask for the ability checks that one player just put all of their effort into increasing? In today’s episode, we’re going to look at gathering feedback and putting that feedback into action in our games.

In 1976, Lost Caverns of Tsojconth was used as a tournament module at Wintercon V, and wasn’t revised and distributed for sale until 1982, when it came out as S4: The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. Some of the long term D&D elements that showed up in the tournament module were Iggwilv, Graz’zt, and intelligent weapons. The mass market version in 1982 went on to include three more demon lords, the Demonomicon of Iggwilv, the Prison of Xagyg, and all of those summoning and imprisoning spells that eventually showed up in AD&D’s Unearthed Arcana. As part of the marketing for the 2024 anthology Quests from the Infinite Staircase, WotC released a condensed version of Tsojcanth called Descent into the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth which included tournament rules. So you can run this for your players, and tell everyone that doesn’t win that they need to get gud. That will go over well.