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 presents us with irresistible conundrums.

Sometimes information is its own reward. Sometimes its exciting to learn new things, or to string together some facts and learn a greater truth. If you’ve ever wanted to run a mystery in your fantasy TTRPG games, or if you’ve run one, but you want to reexamine how to do it for the next time, we’ve got an episode for you. We’re going to look at running mysteries in your fantasy games. Time to conjure some clues.

The Assassins Knot, an AD&D adventure from 1983, presented a murder mystery for the PCs to solve. It specifically mentions that the adventure may be less challenging due to the resources and abilities available to characters 6th level or higher. It contains a timeline of events that will happen each day, as well as reactions that happen when characters take various actions. It’s not a bad blueprint for a D&D adventure. But it feels a little unwieldy to have a suggested party of 6 to 10 characters of levels 2 to 5. 

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 collects stray fantasy elements the way English accumulates unrelated words. 

The lore of D&D was pieced together from a ton of fantasy and folklore. But what if you took that approach to the mechanics and procedures of your game? What can you steal from Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark games that will help you run your D&D games, or any other fantasy RPG? We’re going to podcast to find out.

With the Vancian Magic system, you prepare spells and then forget them until you have a chance to prepare more spells. This has been foundational to D&D from the beginning…aaaand almost immediately fans were attempting to create alternate systems. One notable example was the spell point system. Fan publications like Alarums & Excursions circulated some of these systems, and when the RPG Tunnels & Trolls came out, it relied on a spell point system. Gygax was very normal about all of this and called these alternate rules “beneath contempt,” but in 1996 (after Gygax was no longer at TSR) Player’s Option: Spells and Magic presented D&D players with the worst of both worlds–a spell point system that you used to determine what you could memorize, not what you could cast. In the 3.5 Unearthed Arcana sourcebook, there was another shot at spell point implementation, but with Sorcerers still relatively young, the system stepped on that classes’ strength by giving wizards similar flexibility with a wider range of spells. The 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide also has a spell point system, which adds a limitation of one spell per day each from 6th level or higher. That said, the 5e spellcasting is way less “Vancian” than previous editions, with characters able to use their spell slots to cast whatever they have prepared. So does that mean the system has become above contempt?

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 our computer’s eternal desktop theme.

Once again, we’ve rolled high enough to have an encounter, and this time we’re going to talk about what goes into making a thematic encounter. How do you tailor your encounters to fit the theme of your campaign and communicate the wider story you want to work toward? We’re going to look at the building blocks that go into creating thematic encounters.

The Mind Flayer first showed up in TSR’s Strategic Review publication, the precursor to Dragon Magazine, in 1975. If you had a really low intelligence, their mind blast would kill you outright, and if you had a really high intelligence, you risked permanent insanity, so its best to be just kind of mediocre around a mind flayer. In the Ecology of the Mind Flayer in Dragon Magazine #78, in 1983, Mind Flayer’s alternate name, Illithid, courtesy of a Githyanki hired to provide information on them. Apparently Illithids aren’t willing to eat the brains of lycanthropes or Grimlocks. So the safest person to interact with a mind flayer is a Grimlock wererat with average intelligence. I wonder if there’s a Baldur’s Gate III mod to add one into the game.

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 cast Guards and Wards and it makes it really hard to leave.

Now that we’ve talked about what living in a dungeon is like, this time around we’re going to look at how to design a dungeon that doesn’t eat up your life for months at a time. We’re going to look at five room dungeons, and how to use them in your games. Make those rooms count.

Saving Throw categories have changed a bit over time in D&D. Instead of saves based on ability scores, the saving throw categories were obviously logical Death Rays and Poison, Wands, Turn to Stone, Dragon’s Breath, and Spells and Staffs. This certainly didn’t lead to long discussions at the table about what happens if a wand casts a spell, or a spell creates a death ray, or a dragon’s breath causes petrification. Thank goodness we never get confused of what saves are logical now.

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 gives us a closed set of places to explore.

What is a dungeon? Well, that depends on what kind of podcast you’re listening to. But since this is D&D, a dungeon is a closed location with a limited set of options to explore, usually containing traps and monsters. We’re going to look at how dungeons function, and how far you can push that suspension of disbelief when beholders, a dragon, some kobolds, and a whole mess of grimlocks share the same address.

While they were presented in the same manner of locations like the Caves of Chaos or the Tomb of Horrors, many early dungeon adventures in D&D were actually about exploring various locations in ruined cities. The aptly named The Lost City and Dwellers of the Forbidden City are both examples, and even some adventures set in the ever expanding new campaign worlds of Dragonlance and the Forgotten Realms, in Dragons of Despair and Ruins of Adventure, continue that tradition. The presentation often remained the same, a map with various locations marked with a lettered or number key, but with fewer moments of wondering where monsters get their food. Or go to the restroom. Don’t think about monsters going to the restroom. It just brings up all the wrong questions. 

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 regeneration and we forgot to use fire.

We’ve talked about making sure you use iconic elements of epic fantasy in your games, going big so that your players will get what they want from the kind of game they signed up for. Today we’re going to talk about doing that early in the campaign. How do you introduce those big iconic elements of epic fantasy without overwhelming or annihilating new player characters just starting their career?

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, someone told us that if we stuck with D&D everything would turn out okay.

We’re talking about news in this non evergreen episode. We hit Perkins and Crawford going to Darrington Press, Daggerheart in general, some state of the industry stuff, and the laying off of Todd Kenreck.

Heck, we missed Ivan Van Norman leaving Darrington Press, Jess Lanzillo leaving Wizards of the Coast, Daggerheart selling out their second printing of the core game, the leaked video of the cancelled DnD video game, and the Horrified D&D board game coming out soon.

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, someone told us that if we stuck with D&D everything would turn out okay.

Once upon a time, one of the greatest sins you could commit was to perpetrate the iniquity of metagaming. Thou shalt not act on information you know, but your character wouldn’t. But is that always a bad thing? Why do we assume that every time we act on information our players don’t have, that we would do it in a way that would be detrimental to the game? We’re going to look at metagaming and why you may not need to be banished to the depths of Nesus for participating in the activity.

In 1977 the first Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set came out. This was intended to be the introduction to the hardcover Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks. From 1983 until 1993, Dungeons & Dragons had multiple boxed sets that took characters from 1st to 36th level, included rules for divine ascension, and provided an extremely detailed setting, Mystara. Unlike Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, it often used rules introduced in earlier supplements, like the skill system, using the same system in later products instead of recreating the wheel every time similar rules came up in later products. Setting material was standardized, including a player’s section letting players know what their characters would know about where they come from. In many ways D&D was more intuitive than AD&D, and was just as mechanically robust. One of the strangest things that D&D hung on to for its entire existence was presenting species as classes, meaning that Fighter and Magic-Users were classes as were Elf and Halfling. D&D was more Advanced than AD&D at biological determinism. Which isn’t a compliment.