THAC0 with Advantage

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.

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, the multiverse may come unraveled if we don’t play D&D.

Published adventures are often juggling a lot of objectives. The adventure may be trying to illustrate a specific style of campaign, it may be highlighting a certain type of creature or opponent. And sometimes, it may be trying to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons. In this episode, we’re going to look at Vecna: Eve of Ruin, and see what kind of fine tuning you might want to explore when engaging with this plane hopping epic adventure.

The Hand and Eye of Vecna first appeared in the Eldritch Wizardry supplement in 1976. Back then, all we knew about Vecna was that he was a lich that left some body parts behind. Vecna’s name is an anagram of Vance, in honor of author Jack Vance. The idea of a matched hand and eye set of artifacts comes from Micheal Moorcock, where the Corum stories introduced the Hand of Kwll and the Eye of Rhynn. Vecna has had a resurgence in modern times, at least in part due to Stranger Things using Vecna for the name of its most recent season’s villain. If you still can’t get enough Vecna, you can put your life in Vecna’s hands by using Vecna Healthcare’s online health portals. No, really, that’s a thing.

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 coterminous to our gaming reality.

Fantasy stories abound with places beyond the mortal realms. Fae domains, magical islands outside of time, and the lands of the dead, among others. How can you instill this kind of otherworldly adventure into your game? How do you make a realm outside of mortal existence feel different, memorable, and distinct? What are some of the pitfalls of taking your mortal adventurers and placing them beyond? We’re going to example these questions in today’s episode, as we pass beyond the veil.

How many adventurers make up an adventuring party? According to the 1980 Basic set, parties should be made up of 6 to 8 adventurers. Ideally, everyone only has one character, but if you want to make sure you are in that 6 to 8 range, some people may have more than one character. But the most important thing to remember is . . . your characters shouldn’t like each other that much. If they like each other, they might share stuff. We know players won’t share stuff with each other, right? Sure, we all need to work together to survive, but not if the +2 dagger I had before I found my +3 longsword needs to be shared with someone. Can you imagine the uproar if D&D taught people about Satanism AND Communism?

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, a whole lot of them have a family resemblance to D&D.

In 2008, Wizards of the Coast released the extremely restrictive GSL, making it unattractive to develop for the 4th edition of the game, which led to the creation of Pathfinder, a game that effectively allowed gamers to continue using the familiar structure of D&D 3rd edition in a familiar fantasy roleplaying game. In 2023, Wizards of the Coast attempted to assert that they could revoke the OGL and issue an amended one that gave them more control over creators, which resulted in a lot of creators building their own games. Today, we’re looking at one of those games, Tales of the Valiant, built on the Black Flag System Reference.

Cavaliers first appeared in AD&D 1st Edition in Unearthed Arcana, and like many wealthy nepo babies, were probably more trouble than they were worth. That said, they were the first class that had a built-in way to advance their ability scores when they gained levels, with all of their physical abilities having a percentile score that went up by 2d10 when they leveled. By the time 3rd edition came around, everybody started getting ability score boosts at set levels. Thank goodness we’re not still trying to make a class whose main abilities are about mounted combat work in an adventure game where mounted combat is pretty rare. We save that for a subclass 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 keeps coming up on the random encounter charts.

What happens when player characters come in contact with non-player characters? That interaction in D&D is called an encounter, and its where much of the game takes place. Some encounters happen in a set place in time, some happen at random, and some emerge from play. With all of this variability and versatility, what’s the best way to make encounters sing? We’ll take a look at that on today’s THAC0 with Advantage.

Earlier editions of D&D, especially Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st and 2nd edition, included a monster rarity in the monster stat block. Encounter tables in those editions placed monsters in encounter tables based on their rarity. Unique entities were often listed as Very Rare (Unique), and some encounter tables abused math quite a bit by putting things like demon lords and archdevils in those “very rare” slots. That means that deep gnomes would use the same slot on those charts as Demogorgon. One of those is a much nastier surprise than the other. Unless you really like tentacles. No judgment.

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 cast a temporal loop spell over us that we can’t escape.

There are a thousand stories you can tell with Dungeons & Dragons, but what if you really want to tell the same story more than once? Because roleplaying games present players with so many choices, sometimes it can be fascinating to go back and see if your current players will take the road less traveled, or if some mistakes are built to last. We’re going to explore running the same adventure more than once, and how to get the most out of the experience.

Adventure I6 Ravenloft came out in 1983, and in addition to being the origin of the famous vampire antagonist Strahd Von Zarovich, the adventure also featured a unique structure that allowed for the cards drawn by a fortune teller during a reading to randomize elements of the game, making I6 a natural adventure to play multiple times. On top of all of this, Konami completely stole the image of Strahd Von Zarovich as a stand-in for Dracula on the cover of 1987’s Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest.