THAC0 with Advantage

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.

In Search of the Unknown was an adventure that came out in 1978, and for a while, it was the included adventure in the 1981 Basic Set. This adventure was a little different than other adventures that would be published, because while there was a framing device describing why the PCs would show up, and what they might find, but the adventure itself included rooms and caves without any key. There was advice for the DM to guide them toward what encounters should be placed in those empty spaces. It was meant to be a teaching tool that provided the DM with some momentum. One thing the adventure didn’t do was teach the DM how to pronounce the name of the location where it takes place, Quasqueton.

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 was our training wheels for getting into roleplaying games.

How much experience do your players have? Not their characters, but your players. What do you need to do to run a game for players that don’t think about tactics and how classes complement one another, versus players that know the best collection of abilities to actions to defeat monsters way above their weight class. On the other hand, what about players that are naturally tactically minded, but haven’t quite warmed up to the aspects of D&D that doesn’t revolve around finding the best way to navigate combat? We’re going to look at different levels of player and their ability and appetite for tactics.

According to the D&D 3rd edition Dungeon Master’s Guide, a well constructed adventure will consist of 10% easy encounters, 20% conditionally easy encounters , 50% challenging encounters, i.e. the encounter level is equal to the average party level, 15% very difficult, i.e. 1 to 4 encounter levels above the party average, and 5% overpowering, meaning that the encounter is 4 or more levels above the average party level. Now that we know that part of the equation, if a challenging encounter should use 20% of the party’s resources, and characters should level up after 13.33 encounters equal to their average party level, how many times will the party sleep before they get killed trying to complete City of the Spider Queen?

The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.

Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license

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 is the five page backstory we wrote for our characters.

Characters in our fantasy stories have always had varied and interesting backgrounds. From Conan being born on the battlefield to Raistlin being weak and sickly his entire life. These moments in their lives helped push them into who they were as the characters we’ve enjoyed in fiction. RPG characters can be the same but it’s nice when the game helps us get there. Jared and Ang discuss the history of backgrounds in DnD and then their current implementation in D&D 2024 and other contemporary high fantasy games.

Kits were a concept from AD&D 2e that modified a character class by giving it some minor abilities and a few extra proficiencies. The first appearance of kits was in the Time of the Dragon boxed set, where they were used to portray the standard abilities that people from different cultures would have. These weren’t broad concepts, but more setting-specific, like Minotaur Legionnaire or Gnomish Companion of the Dead. In this version of kits, you had to “pay back” the extra proficiencies you got at 1st level, meaning that by the time you reached a specific level, you had the same number of proficiencies that anyone of that class would have.

Kits continued on into the PHBR series, with PHBR1 The Complete Fighter. Some kits, like the swashbuckler, opened up new abilities and playstyles, and others just penalized you for fun, like the barbarian. But by the time the Complete Book of Elves came around, kits were starting to just add things to make characters better than they were without kits, and some much more so than others.

TSR tried to get the Kit Horses back in the barn with Player’s Options: Skills and Powers, where kits were a minor add on at the end of character creation, that bundled some abilities slightly cheaper when taken as part of the kit than if purchased otherwise. Skills & Powers had to get that power creep under control before it introduced it’s own power creep.

The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.

Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license

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 has almost completed the process of ceremorphosis on us..

Senda and Phil, our beloved Pandas That Talk About Games, were recently discussing nefarious player characters in a campaign and how to handle them, and they just happened to ask “I wonder what Ang and Jared think about this topic in D&D.” Today, we’re going to explore what Ang and Jared think about evil characters in D&D campaign. Does it work, and if it does, how does it work. Join us in our descent into evil.

Back at the dawn of Dungeons & Dragons, no one was evil. Which is to say, the alignment system wasn’t based on a combination of a Chaos/Law axis and a Good/Evil axis. There was only Chaos, Neutrality, and Law. Micheal Moorcock and Poul Anderson were big inspirations on the early game, and the fantasy stories written by those authors arranged the multiverse as a constant conflict between Chaos and Order. In early D&D, Chaos did tend to be the default “evil,” even though it’s really more about entropy and change. It may also have been a wee bit less confusing for alignment arguments across the decades if Order wasn’t translated as Law, but who are we to advocate for fewer arguments that probably ended thousands of D&D groups and friendships?

The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.

Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license

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 has a lot of potential energy.

From 3rd edition forward, when asked, the majority of DMs indicate that they run a homebrew campaign, rather than a published setting. But what does that mean? What goes into that homebrew setting? Where the the inspiration come from? Does this mean that setting material is less valuable than general material? We’re going to pick apart what goes into creating a campaign from the ground up, and look at what gets ground up to make a homebrew setting.

How many official Dungeons & Dragons settings have been published over the years? If official means published by the current owner of D&D, there are more than 35 settings, including some interesting familiar locations from beyond D&D’s IP, like Conan’s Hyperborean Age, the movie version of Red Sonja’s word, and the Blizzard properties of Diablo and Warcraft. But, to be clear, Warcraft was a D&D setting briefly, but World of Warcraft was a d20 game using the 3eSRD. And the Warcraft movie definitely isn’t a D&D setting.

The Heroes of Hovel’s Way is an epic fantasy story about two young heroes, Odie and Eremon. These heroes have the potential to deal with a dire threat from an ancient time that is poised to return to the world. A titan destroyer, Valhalmorris the Mountain Strangler, stirs. The fate of the Barony of Kastakin may be in their hands. We play the game to find out. We invite you to join us on the journey.

Music and Sound effects are from Envato and Storyblocks and are under a royalty free license

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 has followed us into cyberspace.

Time changes all things, including the procedures we engage with when we set up and run our games. We’ve broadly looked at VTTs before, but this time we’ll be examining our time using VTTs, how that’s changed over time, and what other VTT experiences we’ve had to expand our horizons.

Kas the Betrayer is essentially Schroedinger’s Henchmen. Depending on what edition of the game you’re looking at, he was Vecna’s bodyguard, his general, an assassin, or Vecna’s partner. He’s also variously has been a vampire when he first worked for Vecna, got turned into a vampire while he was working for Vecna, or became a vampire after he betrayed Vecna. He has also been accidentally turned into a vampire by spending too much time in the Negative Energy plane, because he was cursed, or because Vecna used an artifact called the Mask of Kas on him. Kas’s backstory has been changed so often that he qualifies for a walk on part in DC Comics next continuity reboot.