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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5850192" data-attributes="member: 4937">Your intent may have been correct but your scale was off.  It makes your point much more strongly to say, "In 3e orcs are worth 300 XP but in 1e they are only worth 18.5 XP each."  Unfortunately, the strength of that point depends on several problems.   A 1e ghoul is worth on average 84 XP each, so the ratio here is less than 4:1 rather than the 30:1 of your original flawed assertion.  That still seems like a really big number that makes your point strongly though; however, we must also note that in 1e you also got XP for treasure and I happen to know (because I did the math long ago) that on average each ghoul has this much treasure:173 cp, 67 sp, 48 ep, 38 gp, 10% chance of 1 gem, 4% chance of 1 jewelry, 0.7% chance of 1 magic weapon, 9.6% chance of 1 scroll.That seems really minor, but if you work it out it turns out that that's on average more than 250 g.p. worth of treasure.  So once we add that into the equation, it turns out that on average the PC's in 1st edition expect to realize (in the long haul) more than 334 XP per ghoul slain.  Granted the standard deviation on ghouls and even ghoul lairs in 1e is huge, when we put in all the numbers your really strong point about how much more XP 3e provides turns out to be not so strong or at the very least, something reasonable people can question (unlike your original highly flawed math, which would leave people wondering how in the world I was such an idiot to disagree).So you are left with your point about how it took more XP to get from say 5th level to 6th level in 1e AD&D than it does in 3e D&D.  But it turns out that there is a problem there as well.   The amount of treasure recommended to DMs to put in dungeons (per the DMG) or by the examples in published modules is well more than the amount above which is calculated from the MM.  In published modules from the 1e era, it turns out that they provide ample treasure to ensure that - if you play modules at least - you'll level just as quickly as in 3e D&D. Indeed this probably isn't an accident, but something Monte probably play tested and worked the math out on.As for your power leveling through first level by winning encounters with 4 ghouls, I suspect that the outcome of that would be rather similar than the similar encountered described in the example of play in the 1e DMG (gnomes are chewy).  Likewise, if four 1st level 3e characters go up against 4 orcs on any sort of regular basis, your going to end up with a PC being critical'd for 18 or so damage and it being a really short campaign.  If I remember correctly the examples of play in the 3e DMG make that rather clear as well.Anyway, so if all of that is true, how is it that many people remember 1e leveling very slowly?  The answer is at least in part that many of us had DMs who kept very tight rein on treasure, and largely placed it to make sure that too much magic didn't fall into party hands and that too much XP was earned to quickly and 'easily'.</blockquote>

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