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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8806128" data-attributes="member: 4937">The Ranger was definitely worth playing, but if we are talking about the 1e version I'm struggling to remember what evasion features it actually had. There are basically three scales of treasure available in published rules and examples for AD&D.The least generous version is strict adherence to the treasure type tables in the Monster Manual.  If you do this, then XP from treasure is about twice that of XP from defeating opponents.  Slightly more generous is the suggested treasure placement in the random dungeon generator in the back of the 1st edition DMG.  Here, treasure is probably four times as much from treasure as defeating opponents (I've never done exact calculations, but that's my sense).By far the most generous placement is in published modules, and that's because published modules were effectively or actually Adventure Paths that needed characters to advance quickly in order to hit the minimum level to survive the necessary plot points and planned encounters.  In those cases, XP from treasure can be ten or even thirty times the XP from monsters because at the end of the module you need to be leveled up enough to face the BBEG or to move on to the next module in the AP.  So effectively, published adventures often power leveled adventurers much faster than the published rules suggested.Quesqueton's observations didn't come as much of a surprise to me because I'd run some of the modules he analyzed, but they did convince me that the treasure placement in those modules was non-arbitrary and very much designed to provide enough XP to level up a party of the suggested level.But the rate of advancement in 1e AD&D very much depended on what guidelines and examples of play the DM was following.  If it was published modules, then yes it would be 3e fast and that probably wasn't a coincidence or arbitrary but also a deliberate choice by the 3e designers.  If it was the MM treasure types and the world expressed by the MM's, then it would have been much slower and magic items much rarer.One reason I don't trust you as an authority on how 1e AD&D plays despite your vast experience, is as far as I can tell you never played by the rules and your house rules have drifted so far from the original published rules that you are practically playing a different game.Absolutely.  It's almost always wrong to assert as an absolute "Old School AD&D played this way" because there was so little consistency in how it was played.  And there are published examples that run contrary to the Munchkin stereotype, particularly coming out of the UK such as UK1 and U2 where combat is almost always wrong.   But then again, U2 shows just how badly the assumptions of the game fall apart if the first order strategy of the players is not combat.  U2 is almost a perfect example of the exception proves the rule in the true sense of that phrase.  The design is based on the assumption that the vast majority of parties will always go into a dungeon like berserk commandos, and the module falls apart and enters a failure state that the designer almost apologetically lacks good options to deal with if the players don't.</blockquote>

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