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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack Daniel" data-source="post: 8557551" data-attributes="member: 694">And 1 XP was awarded for keeping 1 GP worth of treasure found during the adventure. It's difficult to overstate just how important that is in driving play — with that rule in place, you quite literally never have to "dangle hooks" in front of the players. They'll seek out dungeons on their own, because they want treasure, because they want to level up.As for training to level up, it too served a very important purpose in 1st edition. Lots of people think that it was simply to "drain the coffers" and siphon extra wealth off the PCs, but that's a secondary feature of training — in the same way that each class having its own XP table had the secondary effect of maybe (but not really) balancing out the classes by keeping the powerful classes advancing more slowly than the weaker classes.See, the different XP tables created different leveling up "schedules" for each class, so that at the end of a session, it would eventually be pretty unlikely for the whole party to level up all at once. That meant that the one or two PCs who did level would then have to go off to train — effectively sidelining those characters for one to four game-weeks — and since game weeks were expected to pass 1:1 with real weeks between sessions, that meant that those PCs were sidelined for some number of active play sessions. There was no chance of getting every other player to agree to a mass "time-skip" for the sake of the PCs who needed to train — unless you had a very small home-based group, that simply wasn't on the table, because every PC was in some sense out for themselves.So the players whose characters were unavailable had to roll up additional characters. Which fostered an entirely different play style than the "trad" campaign that most people are used to today. A truly old-school game was one where each player eventually had a whole "troupe" of PCs to choose from each session, generally spread out over many experience levels, which in turn game the DM considerable freedom to run a variety of adventures — a low-level dungeon-crawl this week, a high-level dimension-hop that week, etc. (Player characters could suffer harsh consequences, too — cheap death, loss of experience levels, the non-human PCs hitting level caps — and it wouldn't be regarded as some devastating, horrible flaw in the game-rules that needed "fixing," because you have plenty of other characters to play.) The "story" of such a campaign is the story of all the many disparate, self-interested adventurers running around the setting, crossing paths, gaining or losing wealth and power — a tangle of interwoven threads rather than a single throughline.And you'd have a hard time doing that without both XP and training rules!</blockquote>

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