Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
Its still more gradual than the 5e boom at level 5.
Blending the D&Ds
Its still more gradual than the 5e boom at level 5.
Zardnaar
Legend
If you play a lot of OSR adventures this is basically it. Tomb of Horrors for example is an exception not the rule. The other thing was Wizards did not get to choose their spells when they leveled up so where not guaranteed to get fireball. Page count bloat has also come up- AD&D had more spells than B/X, then they added UA, then some of those spells got added to AD&D 2E PHB and the PHB have been similar in size ever since.
The other context was in AD&D the magic items were heavily slanted towards warrior types and something like a +3-+5 sword that could cast spells were not unusual level 6-10. Since things like that were not restricted to higher level. Clerics and Wizards could not use swords either, not much in the way of intelligent daggers or maces. Beats me why people think high level PCs woh are powerful already should be the only ones getting powerful loot.
You also get a lot of magic items in OSR adventures, after playing later D&Ds they kinda feel a bit sterile there. You had a bit of incentive to share the stuff you couldn't use with NPC's/henchman. Unless the DM screwed you over RAI you would have a lot of magic items so a high level fighter was far from useless especially in the context of how magic resistance worked (esp in 2E).
2E did change the formula with xp (none for gold), and the adventures were generally quite bad, very narrative heavily, railroaded,, DMPCs type adventures (this started with Dragonlance). It was not really late into the 2E era good adventures started to get published again at least outside Dungeon magazines. Probably explains the old "adventures don't sell" idea, at the time they did not because they sucked and/or were setting specific (and sucked see most of the Darksun ones). So 2E had slower advancement, less gold, less magic items key things which kind of made old D&D fun at least when you play it now. My modern fighter player got that +3 flamebrand that could cast spells in the ToEE playing ACKs- at level 5 or so.
2E gold for xp variant was for the Rogue IIRC, and the suggested story awards did not make the difference up so an AD&D adventure that took 15-30 hours to get through might gain you 3 or 4 levels which is not to bad relative to modern D&D advancement rates. But in 2E the going was a lot slower.
People trying to force modern interpretations of balance onto OSR games are barking up the wrong tree. You have to look at it in the context of that environment (and there thieves do suck, along with lvl 1 clerics in B/X). For one the game won't go to level 20, level 10 is effectively epic levels. And D&D has never had perfect class balance in any edition anyway even 4E, 5E is still struggling with this so having different xp rates is legit as any other method of balancing classes, as long as those rates make sense IMHO (BECMI). AD&D got the xp rates wrong (in 1E and 2E). 5E and, 4E rewrote the spells and classes, both still had/have issues. 3E failed in that regard having 2E spells in a very different environment and buffing a lot of spells or adding new ones that wrecked the game (compare 3E buff spells to AD&D ones).
2E is mostly about the settings, probably why there are few 2E clones, B/X is to easy to clone, 1E has a lot to do with Gary's writing so a lot of 1E clones don't stray to far from 1E material.
A side effect of gp for magic items was it killed off a lot of equipment and lead you to 2 or 3 types of armor as only the + and any other effect mattered. Why would you use +5 chainmail when you could buy +5 full plate instead. In AD&D you would use it because it was +5 chainmail, +5 Full Plate basically did not exist and +5 platemail was very rare.
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Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
I saw wizards getting the entire contents of a levels worth of spells in one treasure taken from an npc wizard ... and arm bands giving them plate armor caliber armor class.
And not particularly any more weaponry or armor for fighting types
The lack of expected treasure except maybe random treasure tables for me was always a negative thing note the above was he result of a DM trying to be REALISTIC.
Trying to have the treasure be APPROPRIATE to the enemy.
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Zardnaar
Legend
Magic armor was more plentiful than magic armbands generally. I did have a level 12 Druid (1E) with a -5 or so armor class due to things like that but it wasn't exactly normal over a fighter -in +2 platemail and a +2 shield. And the +2 was conservative and was probably level 4-6 or so not level 12.
A wizard in fighter level AC was not a massive problem by itself though as there were still lots of ways to bypass it and a level 10 wizard with 25 hp on average was a glass cannon.
The wizard thing can be true but you were not guaranteed to learn any of the spells and under normal circumstances know all of them.
Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
Well no its still the same as paragon because you don't get the epic gonzo stuff at level 10. (And you arent fighting Demogorgon and the like at level 6 just because the campaigns end at 10.) People still do campaigns which are all within 1 tier.
Yes the context included embarrassing monty haulisms and people being ultra conservative with magic items and not so with spells for the mage, and not providing interesting magic items for the fighter or others with prevalent swords of sharpness at 6th level and holy avengers left right and center and all kinds of things which no didnt help but exacerbated sense of imbalance.
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Dessert Nomad
Adventurer
It's overall flatter, but actually less gradual. The fighters maximum number of attacks is half as much in 1e PHB as in 5e (2 vs 4), but the jump to halfway, then max happens at levels 6 and 13 in 1e. In 5e they're spread between 5, 11, and 20.
Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
ummm jump from 1 to 2 attacks is a big jump its a jarring dramatic bump in ability and its not even after a significantly larger numbers of levels 5 vs 4? however I remember being at low levels an excruciatingly long time in ADnD compared to modern games so that is even stretched out more in terms of player experience (which is to my mind the fair measurement) anyone got a scale that measures the difference? based on how long it typically took to advance.
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Zardnaar
Legend
There is no typical amount of time. Dungeon hack you level up faster, Gygaxan module he wrote is generous with treasure.
Generally though a module (X1, B2 etc) might take 20-30 ours to play right through it. One of them will get you from level 1-3 or 1-4 and it kinda slows down a bit around level 5 and you might get 1-2 levels each one.
I have read apparently Gygax expected around 1 year to get ot level 10, then 2/levels a year after that. If you played for 4 hours a week most weeks its probably not to far off.
We played though one of the B series and an X series and it took around 2 sessions a level I think (we played through kinda quick though) and ToEE you level up sorta fast. 2HD Ghoul had a 8000gp necklace (and 8k xp carried).
B2 Keep on the Borderlands IIRC has around 40k worth of treasure in it. You might not get it all but that is level 3 (4 for a thief) for 8 players, smaller group level 4.
That was with a clone come to think of it and fighter types get 1/cleave a level so a 5th level fighter could potentially get 6 attacks. 2E we use weapon specialisation and Fighters Handbook so might 3/2 was the number at lvl 1, maybe 5/2 for a dual wielder.
Generally AD&D levelled up faster, followed by B/X, with 2E in last place. Mages in B/X were always behind they did not get funky xp tables in the mid levels. Mid level AD&D adventures often have more loot than the X series hexcrawls.
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Garthanos
Arcadian Knight
Thanks for the analysis that isn't as divergent as I remember, I am going with your thinking. Also sorry about wandering significantly off topic into dredgeville on this thread I think that is my fault.
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