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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9384922" data-attributes="member: 7026594">Absolutely.  In practice the advice is easy to miss, especially because AD&D gives almost no guidance on treasure placement in dungeons!  The DMG has sections titled Placement of Monetary Treasure and Placement of Magic Items (p91-93), but they're mostly general essays cautioning you not to overdo it and recommending that you start out with weak items and small treasures, and giving some advice on making monetarily-valuable treasures interesting, plausible, and challenging to identify and transport.  But no guidelines at all on exactly how much treasure to place in a dungeon!I'm not sure if they expected you to have read OD&D or Holmes Basic first, or expected you to use one of the Monster & Treasure Assortments, but the actual DMG gives no guidelines*, unless the reader decides to infer use of the treasure table (p171) from the random dungeon generation rules (appendix A). But that's still random, even if it's a bit more generous than the OD&D random stocking table.But Holmes and even the justly-vaunted Moldvay still overlooked the importance of telling new DMs explicitly, as OD&D does "place multiple REAL treasures- magic items, gems & jewelry- per level before you roll random stocking for the remaining rooms"!  Moldvay drops the ball by giving us an example of dungeon design and stocking (with The Haunted Keep (B55-56)) which relies entirely on random tables for the room contents.When I learned to play it was initially with the Mentzer Basic set, quickly followed by Cook Expert and some AD&D books, and the impression I got was that the monster treasure types were the primary source of treasure, rolled per the treasure tables for lairs and cut down a bit if the monster numbers weren't high.By the time I actually had a regular gaming group it was for 2nd ed AD&D, xp was primarily for monsters and quests/plot goals, and the difficulties of understanding GP for XP and proper treasure placement were left behind under the pretense that GP for XP had never made sense and we were happy to be focusing on "heroics" rather than treasure hunting.Yup.  I bought into those Tough DM Gary editorials when I was learning, but in practice giving paltry treasure means excessively slow advancement and frustrated players.  You're dead right about the tournament modules, and of course Stonehell, for all its virtues, does show indications that Mike Curtis made the mistake of relying on the random stocking tables as his measuring stick.100%.  And this is someplace Moldvay helped so many people, despite his rare fumble on the stocking example, with his advice on page B61 that "If no one has reached 2nd level of experience in three or four adventures, the DM should consider giving more treasure."In running my last (three year) old-school GP for XP campaign, I found that I hit a solid average rate of 1 level of advancement per 3-4 sessions for most characters, at least through the first 3 levels or so, after which rate it slowed a good bit for the next 2-3 levels, and then WAY down after that, though some of that was probably a shift in adventure pacing and how we were playing.  That pace was excellent.  Moldvay was dead-on about the early levels, and having that guideline was really helpful.  Although a huge key for me was that "thoughtfully place" language on p6 of TU&WA.I stumbled on/learned from the blogs a similar rubric that you talk about here- I normally want to place enough treasure on a given level of the dungeon that, at least if it's all recovered, the entire party can expect to gain a level.  And really, I generally want to pad that a bit, to account for missed treasure and deaths causing xp to be lost.  Although I use Carousing for XP and give more generous monster XP (though not as general as in 1974), to help out as well.*(EDIT: I think this is another example of the issue that the AD&D DMG was in significant part a cobbled together set of essays and expanded advice on DMing that was written with the assumption that the reader had already read OD&D.  Which manifests and ways large and small. )</blockquote>

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