Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends who have been playing D&D for a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D keeps us trying to find new ways to start over again.

We’ve talked about starting campaigns from the perspective of setting expectations, getting buy-in, and incorporating information from your session zero, but what about one step beyond that? What does the actual beginning of the campaign look like, and how can you frame your beginnings in new and different ways? That’s what we’re going to look at today on the show.

The original Dark Sun campaign setting boxed set suggested that at the beginning of the campaign, players make character trees. AD&D 2e didn’t actually want you to play plants–character trees were a group of four characters that the player managed, which they could swap out between adventures or when one of the characters died. Each time the active character gained a level, they could pick one of the other characters in that tree for an additional level, which also encouraged you to rotate active characters. While AD&D 1e didn’t want you to share items with other party members, AD&D 2e didn’t want you to share with yourself. I wonder if characters in a character tree need followers to protect them from the other characters of the same player.

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 has taught us to fill empty voids with creative material

It has become almost standard for gamemaster guides to discuss player types. It’s important to identify what your players want from the game and how to balance the expectations of the table. But how many people fit into these categories? Can you mix and match player types in the same individual? Is someone always the same player type? That’s what we’re going to look at today.

In most editions of Dungeons & Dragons, there has been “A” Player’s Handbook and “A” Dungeon Master’s Guide, but two editions of D&D bucked this trend. D&D 3e had a Dungeon Master’s Guide II and a Player’s Handbook II, and D&D 4e had a Dungeon Master’s Guide II as well as a Player’s Handbook II and a Player’s Handbook III. But isn’t every book actually an iteration of the Rules Compendium, from a certain point of view? I’m going to start calling the 2024 Player’s Handbook the Rules Compendium XXIII.

Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends who have been playing D&D for a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D is a funhouse that has a mind of its own.

Have you ever had that feeling that you just walked into a dangerous area, where at any moment, something bad could happen, you just don’t know what? We’re going to be talking about mechanizing that feeling for your D&D campaigns with lair actions. This episode will start playing on initiative count 20, losing initiative ties!

In D&D 4e, traps and hazards had stat blocks similar to monsters. They often had a series of skill difficulties listed, which had to be met to navigate or disarm the hazard or trap. In some ways, hazards and traps hybridized monsters and skill challenges. When hazards and traps appeared in encounters, they could roll initiative and be slotted into the initiative order. That means in the 4e version of the Tomb of Horrors, your whole party might actually get to act before the Tomb tries to kill them.

Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends who have been playing D&D for a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D 

This past year was a busy, chaotic thing, even if you just look at RPG gaming. Today’s episode will look at what fantasy gaming looked like over this past year, both in the broader industry and in all our gaming groups. We’re set to recap 2024 in fantasy gaming, and talk a little about 2025.

This year saw the most recent update to the D&D core rules after D&D 5e was published in 2014. Ten years before 2014, we were just a year past the 3.5 version of D&D 3rd edition. Ten years before that, TSR was getting ready to publish the revised version of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition rulebooks in 1995. Ten years before that, the final episode of the D&D Saturday morning cartoon aired, which I feel compelled to mention because the D&D cartoon characters are EVERYWHERE in the 2024 rulebooks.

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 let us be so many people different from ourselves. 

When we imagine the tropes of Dungeons & Dragons, it’s easy to default to images of medieval Europe. While the game’s creators were undoubtedly influenced by European folklore, they were also influenced by pulp stories, cosmic horror, and television series. D&D has always had influences from beyond Europe and cultures that intentionally avoid being based on real-world equivalents, but it hasn’t always done all of that well. We will look at the cultures reflected in the game, what D&D and other fantasy games have gotten wrong, and how it’s changed over time.

At the intersection of D&D’s introduction of anthropomorphic animals and its attempt to model fantasy cultures on real-world influences, the Known World, the Mystara setting, had dog people, the lupin, and cat people, the Rakasta—not to be confused with Rakshasha, which the game also had. Mystara’s cat people had cultures based on imperfect implementations of tropes from India and Japan, while lupins were French. One of the Rakasta cultures lived on the moon. While this predates the dogs and cats of the Realms of Pugmire, the post-apocalyptic setting of Pugmire, where humanity has disappeared, probably makes a little more sense, especially in the direction we’re heading.

Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends who have been playing D&D for a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D keeps us company on the long roads we travel.

Sometimes, when an adventuring party loves an NPC very much, they start traveling together and setting common goals. We’re going to talk about the companion characters, those NPCs with their own goals and sidequests, that we love from CRPGs, why you might want them in your campaign, why you might not, and how to make a standard NPC feel like a companion character.

The Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition Dungeon Master’s Guide distinguished between henchmen and hirelings. Hirelings were paid a set rate to do a specific job, while henchmen were somewhat like apprentice adventurers who were given a lesser cut of all treasure found. One of the things your character was expected to spend gold on was recruiting henchmen or hirelings for dangerous situations to make it less likely that the player characters would die. An additional purpose listed for henchmen was to act as a bodyguard for the player character against the plans of the other player characters. AD&D 1st edition dungeoneering sounds like a hostile workplace.

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

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.

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?