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 wants us to justify all those dice we bought by rolling them at the table.

We’ve talked about how being a better player can be just as important to a good game as being a better DM, but what about combining both of those concepts? How important is it for a DM to understand the player experience, and what can they learn from being on the colorful side of the screen? We’re going to talk about the benefits of being a player on your DMing skills in today’s episode.

The first edition AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide very subtly indicates that Dungeon Masters may not want players to see the contents of the Dungeon Master’s Guide by saying “you must view any non-DM player possessing it as something less than worth of an honorable death.”  It encourages you to address the real world concept of player’s reading what they shouldn’t by applying an in game solution of charging them more gold for sages and taking away magic items. Using this logic, should you come into conflict with your housemates over doing chores, the logical way to address the situation is to replace their BluRays with edited copies that remove the happy endings to all their favorite movies

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’s second edition mining rules has us digging for player input.

Some modern RPG discourse has framed RPGs as a writer’s room, with the PCs being the primary contributor to their character’s story in the collaborative scheme of things. But what if your “writer’s” have broader ideas for the story beyond just the character that they shepherd in the narrative? How can you collect player feedback and input, and how do you incorporate it into your campaigns? We’ll be looking at that in today’s episode.

Until D&D 3rd edition arrived, there was a limited number of ways that your ability scores would change. If you were lucky, you might find a magic item or make a wish to increase them, but even wishes were a little stingy on the personal improvement front, often requiring multiple wishes to raise an ability score more than one point. There were a few ways to lower your ability scores, ranging from monsters to cursed magic items. How long did it take to recover ability score damage? Wait, you think you recovered ability score damage? You may want to sit down before we talk about level drain.

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, but D&D is having us execute Episode 66.

Have you ever had the perfect idea for your campaign, but by the time you made it to a notebook or a computer, you completely forgot what it was? Where do ideas for campaigns come from, and how do we capture them? How do we put the ideas we have into game terms and make them sing for our players? We’re going to look at that today on THAC0 with Advantage.

The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide has a plethora of game related material, but the current edition wasn’t the first one to be in love with worksheets. In 1988, one year before the release of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2e, the Dungeon Master’s Design Kit by RPG industry legend Aaron Allston was released. This was comprised of three booklets, and the Adventure Design, the Forms Book, and the Adventure Cookbook. These included random charts that would direct the reader to parts of the Adventure Cookbook, broadly describing things like villain plots and thematic encounters, and worksheets for planning out flowcharts for adventure developments. There was very little in the book that was mechanically specific, meaning it retained its usefulness as the new edition came out, and arguably, still retains that usability. If you utilized the copier at your first job in 1991 to make a ridiculous number of copies of each of the forms in this book, the statute of limitations for office supply theft should be up now, not that I would know anything about that.

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 knows where we’ve buried the bodies.

Sometimes you run the entire night with the assumption that a spell works the way it did from two editions ago, and some poor PCs pay the price. Sometimes the player characters spend three hours exploring something based on what they thought you said, instead of what you actually said. Or maybe what you actually said, instead of what you meant to say. We’re going to talk about mistakes at the table, what they look like, and how to roll with them.

Sage Advice was a column in Dragon Magazine that first appeared in issue #31, in 1979, with the first author being Jean Wells. TSR hired Jean Wells as an editor in 1978; after editing adventures like White Plume Mountain, they gave her the job of officially clarifying rules—a task she enjoyed because she wanted the game to be accessible to new, younger gamers. One of the best rules clarifications she made was probably in response to a query about the damage caused by a bow. She clarified that the bow itself doesn’t cause damage, but the arrow inflicts 1d6 damage, and then she outlined the damage that would result from hitting someone with a bow and explained what would happen to the bow. I don’t really have much else to say, I’m just going to sit here quietly and listen to heads explode at the notion that a woman was the first Sage of Sage Advice, the go-to column for decades to determine if you were doing D&D right.

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, we keep needing to hit the reset button to get another chance to conquer D&D.

Not every fantasy adventure story ends with a big fight, but many of them do. During major conflicts, it’s typical for fantasy heroes to face a singular embodiment of their antagonists: a dragon, demon lord, lich, or a conceptual representation (thanks JRPGs). We’re going to talk about what makes a boss battle interesting and challenging and explore ways to use the concept in your games.

*The Lost City*, a 1982 Dungeons & Dragons adventure, introduced the entity known as Zargon. Zargon’s description harkens back to pulp mythos stories from the 30s, and an ancient, unique monster living under a lost society is almost like something Robert E. Howard would have put in a Conan story. The adventure names Zargon the story’s “villain,” blaming him for destroying the titular lost city and providing his stats, but it doesn’t directly lead to him. Instead, it advises using information about Zargon to craft a higher-level adventure where player characters are ready to fight him. The 2014 Player’s Handbook offers Zargon as an example of a Great Old One Warlock patron, if you wish to channel your inner Zargon without going to the lost city of Cynidicea. That’s Sin i DEE see ah.

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