OD&D OD&D Monsters and experience points?

[Mezuka]

May sound like a silly question, but I have this guy who claims at the origin D&D monsters didn't give XPs when killed. I never read OD&D. I have Holmes and they do give XPs when killed or subdued.

 

[DeviousDVS]

I can't remember the rules exactly, but I do remember only getting gold as a reward and I think we got xp equal to gold. When I think about it, it's quite elegant, as long as you have loot as your goal.

 

[Jack Daniel]

Killing monsters is absolutely worth XP in original D&D. Too much, in fact: in the original booklets, slain monsters are worth 100 XP per hit die (though this is multiplied by a fraction if the monster is slain by a stronger party: a troll is considered to be worth 700 XP if slain by 7th level characters on dungeon level seven, but it can be more or less than that depending on the circumstances; the actual details are convoluted). As soon as Supplement I: Greyhawk was out, the original system was deemed to be "ridiculous," and an exponential table of monster XP values that should look familiar to anyone who has played Basic or AD&D is implemented instead.

 

[jdrakeh]

What Egon said. It's part of why I use goal-oriented leveling instead of XP when playing OD&D. The relevant text from Front Range Warlock:

When creating a character, you should define three short-term goals (e.g, earn enough money to buy that fancy hat, slay the bear eating Uncle Grumpus’ prize goats) for your character and one long-term goal (e.g. find and kill the man who murdered my father, recover the artifact sword from the ancient treasure vault of the Sorcerer King).

As a rule of thumb, short-term goals are things that can be achieved in a game session or three, while long-term goals should take weeks or months of actual play to achieve. Goals should be about what you, as a player, want out of the game for your character, signaling such to the referee. The referee should do their best to work these goals into the campaign.

Instead of characters leveling by gaining experience points (XP) as explained at length in Rule Book One, characters created using these house rules level when they achieve their goals as defined in character creation (see Character Goals on page four of this document). When a character achieves three of their short-term goals, they gain a level. Likewise, when one long-term goal is achieved, a character gains a level.

Whenever a character achieves a short-term goal, their player needs to define a new short-term goal to take its place. Similarly, when a character achieves a long-term goal, their player needs to define a new long-term goal to take its place.

 

[TerraDave]

This gamer myth is probably originating in the fact that most XPs came from treasure (1 gp = 1 xp) in B/X and AD&D. Maybe by a wide margin.

One reason that early modules had lots of treasure.

 

[Mannahnin]

Egon covered it exactly. I've never seen anyone really make the half-described ratio system based on level disparity work, though.

Personally I find the 100xp/HD figure to be quite decent for playing 1974-1975 style. It only becomes "ridiculous" if you're playing with more frequency than grownup gamers generally get to. If I was in college and playing the same campaign 4+ days a week, including marathon weekend sessions, that would no doubt be excessive. As it stands, in the OD&D games I've been playing online since the pandemic, 100xp/HD has worked pretty well to give a decent level of reward for the high risk and likely fatality rates, and give a certain amount of "consolation" xp for delves where a significant treasure haul is not found. Which is a pretty substantial percentage of the time, especially on dungeon level 1, IME. *

In my own 5TD & B/X mashup I've been running for almost two years now, I adopted a baseline of 50xp/HD, modified up or down for special abilities or weaknesses, and it's served the same purpose. It helps ensure that surviving PCs get SOME xp if they get in fights, even if they miss out on a big treasure score. But treasure remains a large majority of the total xp, and serves a fun "intermittent reinforcement" function, where players generally feel a big reward when they make a big score, and have their appetites whetted when they have a lean session.

Edit to add: *(or a huge percentage of the time if your DM undershoots on the advice to "thoughtfully place" multiple substantial hoards from Monsters & Treasure, or, gods forbid, ONLY uses the random dungeon stocking tables instead of deliberately placing substantial treasure stashes of gems and magic items on each level).

 

[Thomas Shey]

This gamer myth is probably originating in the fact that most XPs came from treasure (1 gp = 1 xp) in B/X and AD&D. Maybe by a wide margin.

One reason that early modules had lots of treasure.

Post Greyhawk it worked out that way in OD&D most of the time, too; only exceptions were encounters with monsters that had little or no treasure normally, but were relatively high yield in experience themselves.

 

[kenada]

What Egon said. It's part of why I use goal-oriented leveling instead of XP when playing OD&D. The relevant text from Front Range Warlock:

I do the same thing in my OSE/WWN hybrid. Because it’s still focused on specified objectives, goal-oriented XP feels like a natural evolution of XP for gold, but instead of presuming they’re all about delving for treasure, it let lets the PCs define their own ones.