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 adorable critter that followed us home.

So many classes. So many sub classes. Do we need more from WotC’s 2024 DnD or are we good with what we have? That’s the question Ang and Jared ponder on this weeks Thac0 with Advantage. You’re all around fun times D&D Podcast.

When AD&D 2nd edition launched, the Assassin, The Barbarian, The Cavalier, and The Monk were removed from the game. The Dungeon Master’s Guide mentioned that you didn’t “need” these classes, as they could be emulated using existing character classes. By the end of AD&D 2nd edition, Assassins, Barbarians, and Monks were all back, in addition to the Wizard gaining 10 additional specializations, Crusaders, Psionicists, Shaman, Gladiators, Ninja, Berserkers, and Runecasters. That’s a long way away from Original D&D’s Magic-Users, Clerics, and Fighting Men.

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 metaphoric pizza topping we both agree on.

No you can’t play the bunny boy from Final Fantasy XIV in my Curse of Strahd game. That sentence says it all. We’re talking about campaign constraints. We share some of our tools surrounding the topic so you can better collaborate with your game group so everyone gets the experience they want out of the campaign.

In AD&D 2nd Edition, there were several series of books that had leatherette covers. The dark red books were player facing books, the dark blue books were DM facing books, and the black covers were campaign setting specific expansions. There was also a green series of books, the Historical Reference series, that adapted AD&D for running games in a fantasy version of Earth in different eras. HR1, the Vikings Campaign Sourcebook, informed the DM that you couldn’t be a Viking and be a Ranger, but Rangers might come from Finland. I had a friend in High School that was an exchange student from Finland, and he did indeed confirm that between learning to play guitar and going to school for nuclear physics, he was, indeed, a Ranger.

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 lets us take those games into a dark alley and take their stuff.

And take their stuff is exactly what Ang and Jared are doing on this episode as they discuss ways to take mechanics, procedures, and ideologies from other games and bring them to Dungeons and Dragons.

It’s been pretty well documented that D&D’s story elements are strung together from a whole host of sword and sorcery, epic fantasy, science fiction, horror, and folklore stories. It’s a little less documented how much D&D assimilated game rules over the years. Concepts like adding a bonus to a die versus a difficulty class, point buy, story path backgrounds, companion characters, and even advantage were distilled from the prevalent games being played at the time various editions were being designed. Resistance is futile. We will add your narrative and procedural distinctiveness to our own.

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 game that makes us sad when we don’t get to play.

From Tales of the Valiant to the most recent D&D playtest. Our adventurous podcasters delve into the depths of these pages and almost get TPK’d

AD&D 1st Edition introduced weapon specialization in Unearthed Arcana. The only classes that could benefit from this ability were the fighter and the ranger. AD&D 2nd edition scaled this back to only fighters, until the PHBR series, maybe accidentally, extended weapon specialization back to rangers, then also extended it to paladins. But none of this applied to BECMI D&D, where fighters could become Skilled, Experts, Masters, and Grand Masters with weapons. But so could everybody else . . . fighters never get to play with their own toys by themselves.

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 Taco Tuesday of narrative gaming.

How do we get new gamers. WE TEACH THEM!!! Ang and Jared are talking about running new games for players on this weeks installment of Thac0 with Advantage

In 1994, TSR put out a boxed set called First Quest, one of their new line of CD enhanced game accessories. In addition to having a recording of voice actors playing a game of D&D (ahem), there were different tracks to introduce each location in two separate dungeons detailed in the boxed set. A sample version of the product was included with Dragon Magazine. Would it sound really sad and pathetic to say that someone working second shift that couldn’t get a regular group of players together in 1994 might have listened to this over and over again on the way home at night? We didn’t have podcasts back then, okay?

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 cool side of the pillow stuffed with d20s.

There are a large number of genre’s that Dungeons and Dragons says it can emulate. Ang and Jared go through them and provide advice on what they think works, doesn’t work, and some general thoughts on how players and GMs might make them work. They also get into their campaign journal and talk about their Tales of the Valiant playtesting.

D&D has attempted to emulate genre with various settings in the past. One example of this was the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Lankhmar, City of Adventure supplement, which attempted to downplay the effectiveness of D&D style magic for player characters to emulate the more barbarian/fighter/thief focused aspects of the setting. All the spells in the game had their casting time bumped up to the next tier, so rounds became turns (10 rounds) to cast, and hours became days. That all seems like a lot of work compared to just giving the Gray Mouser the Magic Initiate feat.

Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re all friends that have been playing D&D a long time. While we all love lots of other RPGs, D&D is a mass media property that hooks us in even when we aren’t gaming.

We’re talking about the D&D Movie: Honor Among Thieves. That’s its. Full Stop. Strap in. Let’s go.

If you just want the D&D movie stuff head to 32:11 in the Podcast

While the kids from the 1980s D&D cartoon didn’t originally go to the Forgotten Realms (the cartoon debuted 4 years before the first Forgotten Realms boxed set was published), the kids have been portrayed as living out their D&D fantasy in Faerun in various media. In 1996 TSR published a Forgotten Realms: The Grand Tour comic book which featured Presto trying to apprentice himself to Elminster. Baldur’s Gate II contains a brief reference to Hank and Bobby being eaten by Tiamat. I guess the kids learned about resurrection spells before this movie came out.

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 likes to experiment with our emotions.

Take the rules. Learn them. Use them. Report on them. Get revisions. Repeat. It’s the playtesters life. Then there’s playing at 10th level and above which many many people do, right? No, they don’t? Ok, well, for those who do Ang and Jared get into it and some ideas for how to make it fun.

The AD&D adventure Throne of Bloodstone included pregenerated 100th level characters, with notes on running 100th level characters. Some of the advice for running adventures for 100th level characters in that adventure was to focus on endangering the PCs stuff, rather than endangering the PCs, for example, destroying the wizard’s spellbook. That’ll make you a popular DM!

• Write for Gnome Stew
• Dungeon Dudes on spicing up those boss monsters
• Worlds Beyond Number
• Worlds Beyond Number Patreon

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 fried food on a stick in the carnival of our lives.

Dragon Heist, Princes of the Apocalypse, Tales of the Old Margrave, White Plume Mountain, Tales from the Yawning Portal, The Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Curse of Strahd, and Storm Kings Thunder are just a scant few of the adventures that have been published for 5e. We’re taking a varied look at how to utilize these adventures in your games on this weeks Thac0 with Advantage.

The first published adventure for D&D was Temple of the Frog, which was included in the Original D&D supplement Blackmoor. The first stand alone adventure, however, was Palace of the Vampire Queen in 1976, a year after Temple of the Frog, and wasn’t published by TSR. Many of the early adventures were “tournament adventures,” meaning that players were being scored on how well they did in the adventure. No pressure.

• Write for Gnome Stew
• The Legend Of Vox Machina (Amazon Original Series Soundtrack) ‘2 x Zoetrope Picture Discs’
• A D&D TV Show is coming to Paramount Plus!

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 inlaid our neural pathways with mithril.

You don’t want a railroad but you want your PCs to feel like they’re part of the story. How can we do this? Ang and Jared talk all about it in this weeks THAC0 with Advantage

You won’t find Hobbits, Ents, Balrogs, or Wargs in D&D now, but that wasn’t always the case. Early in D&D’s history, it borrowed more directly from it’s inspirational material, but the Saul Zaentz Company, which held the rights to Middle-earth licensing, filed a lawsuit against TSR. The Saul Zaentz Company was apparently a little overzealous, because they also wanted D&D to remove the words dragon, dwarf, elf, goblin, and orc from the game as well. The judge looked at this request and said, “this shall not pass

• Player Versus Player Conflicts – Seth Skorkowski’s YouTube channel
• Dark Knights of Steel