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?

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