Thac0 with Advantage 54. Range of Player Skill

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.

Thac0 with Advantage 53. Backgrounds

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.

Thac0 with Advantage 45. A Valiant Effort to Look at a New 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, 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.

TwA 20. Stealing from other games

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.