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 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.

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 who have been playing D&D a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D lets us practice our diplomacy skills.

Dungeons & Dragons is a game that requires social interaction. It is a game that can inspire strong emotions and great feelings of satisfaction. It is also prone to miscommunications and mistakes, just like any other social interaction. This episode we’re going to look at when there are problems at the table, and what we can do when those problems come up.

In the “Handling Troublesome Players” section of the 1st edition Dungeon Master’s Guide, one of the bits of advice the book gives to curtail metagaming is to tell the players that they expressly can’t do something that a metagaming character suggested, so the metagaming player quits talking. Nothing in D&D says that Gygax played some of his first games of D&D with his kids more than a rule that is the equivalent of “I will turn this car around right now.”

Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends that have been playing D&D a long time, and podcasting for two years as of this episode! While we both love lots of other RPGs, D&D speaks our language.

Many fantasy stories revolve around lost and arcane languages, or characters that can speak for their party when they encounter creatures that don’t share a language with anyone else. One of the most consistent elements of character creation in D&D has been determining what languages a character knows, but what does that mean at the game table. We’ll be talking about language and seeing if we share a gaming dialect.

In AD&D 1e, in addition to other languages, each character knew the alignment language that matched their alignment. That means that if you were Lawful Good, you know a language known as Lawful Good. The 1e Dungeon Master’s Guide proceeds to explain that people are socially stigmatized for speaking alignment languages in public, and no one will risk using their alignment language with people that aren’t their alignment around them, which explains why later editions no longer had alignment languages. If you can only speak to people that you know already speak your language, but you can’t speak your language to ask them, I’m sure the gods of logic babelled them since they were completely unusable.