AD&D 1E XP Value for Monsters?

Been there, did that. Should have printed out the t-shirt.

I had at one time hand-written notes for redoing many of the games monster entries to bring everything up to the MM2 standard and my own house rules. This included big updates to two things correcting XP entries and correcting/improving how AC was recorded in the MM. I had started using the "To Weapon vs. AC" tables in the Unearthed Arcana (with some minor tweaks, like making axes a bit heavier hitting just to bring some variety) and the problem was I wanted to extend this to all monsters. The entries and rules seemed to imply that monsters had armor equivalent to humanoid armor, but with the same modifiers for dexterity or magic or whatever. So I set about separating the AC of all monsters into two numbers, actual "Armor Class" (like '5' equivalent to chainmail) and the monsters "Armor Bonus" the adjustment to the AC up or down. This would be written as like 5(+2) or 2(-2) or whatever. AC 5(+2) differed from AC 3 in that you used a different column in the "Weapon vs. AC" table. I soon noticed that functionally this was giving me Dexterity values, which I also adopted because I wanted more monsters with bonuses to initiative owing to the fact that if the party on average tended to go first the fight was a rout and generally over before the monster could really react.

I handled all this extra complexity by making "to hit" tables for each player character for each weapon they commonly used. The result of this was my game actually sped up, because they could just report the number they rolled unmodified and the math was built into the table - no more losing 3-5 seconds each attack adding the fiddly bits.
:ROFLMAO: You win!

Me? I'm just working on the "List all monsters ever published for D&D up to and including AD&D (in TSR products and then some) list"--currently at 21,157 unique entries but side-lined for the xp project--and the "List all wizard spells ever published for D&D up to and including AD&D (in TSR products and then some) list".
 

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:ROFLMAO: You win!

Me? I'm just working on the "List all monsters ever published for D&D up to and including AD&D (in TSR products and then some) list"--currently at 21,157 unique entries but side-lined for the xp project--and the "List all wizard spells ever published for D&D up to and including AD&D (in TSR products and then some) list".

Oh no, I think you "win" - though I question whether that's a prize or a white elephant.

I doubt I've used more than 300 published monsters in 40+ years of running games. When I was writing my 3e house rules one of my projects was looking at published spells from the 1e/2e era to see if any of them needed to be ported forward. The answer was pretty much "no".
 

Absolutely. Just try and calculate the xp for a band of 100+ hobgoblins and their leaders, some of which will have missile weapons and others won't -- not to mention witch doctors (DMG, p. 40), which is a wholly different headache. o_O
For that, for the 100 regulars I'd just take a rough average of their hit points (let's say it's 8 each and they're 2 HD) and calculate their base xp 100 x (20 + 16) then if 40 of them had missile weapons I'd add 40 x the SA bonus. Quick and easy.

The leaders, witch doctors, etc. probably have to be worked out individually. That's the tedious part. :)
Heh. And to think that "special saving throws" and "immunities" and "resistances" (other than "magic resistance") aren't even in the SAXPB/EAXPA list in the DMG...
Immunities and resistances aren't listed but reverse-engineering some Appendix E numbers tells me they count. Iron Golems are a good example - at first glance their App-E xp value looks stupidly high, but when you stop and realize that they're immune to just about everything the number starts making more sense. (relevant to me currently as I just DMed 3 of them last session)
 

I just gave up when I was running 1e and used the XP totals for a monster they assigned in 2e. Modules for 2e sometimes have xp values for NPCs so I would crib those for a 5th level wizard or something.
Quite a few of the later 1e modules also give xp values right in the monster stats, and I also use those when they're given.
I know that doesn't help, but I didn't have the patience to math everything out and took the cowards path.
I'll math it out if I have to but if someone else has done the work for me, I'm fine with that too. :)
 

For that, for the 100 regulars I'd just take a rough average of their hit points (let's say it's 8 each and they're 2 HD) and calculate their base xp 100 x (20 + 16) then if 40 of them had missile weapons I'd add 40 x the SA bonus. Quick and easy.

The leaders, witch doctors, etc. probably have to be worked out individually. That's the tedious part. :)
Yup. Something like that. Still, I was running a completely randomly rolled 1E dungeon a while ago, and I had the xp for all encounters neatly worked out--as far as possible (had some time because of the COVID thing). Just crossed out what ended up dead and then added up all of their xp values at the end of the session. Worked like a dream. That was actually the main reason that I had to start looking seriously into 1E xp values for monsters--and noticed the problems with them.

Immunities and resistances aren't listed but reverse-engineering some Appendix E numbers tells me they count. Iron Golems are a good example - at first glance their App-E xp value looks stupidly high, but when you stop and realize that they're immune to just about everything the number starts making more sense. (relevant to me currently as I just DMed 3 of them last session)
True that. There are lots of special attacks and special defenses that are not listed in the SAXPB/EAXPA examples that seem to get xp in Appendix E. Surprise (and surprised on a 1 only) being another of them that is on that list and seems to be gettig xp in many cases. Was later referred to and included in the list by Lakofka and Moore in their Dragon articles on xp, by the way.

The baboon's special defense "Climbing" seems to have slipped through their mazes, though!
 

It doesn't help that the lists of abilities that provide SA and EA bonuses are incomplete. [....]

For purposes of calculating xp values, it gets a bit messy. Somewhere in the DMG (I think) there's a stray note suggesting that each extra class a creature has beyond the first effectively adds a hit die. Thus, your C/A 7/7 would start as a 7+1 to 8 (because of the Cleric class) then add a die for the Assassin class which puts it as 8+1 to 9.

I think the spreadsheet I mangled would handle this well enough.

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Note, this is kinda-doubled to represent not giving XP for gold. But this logic is built right from the DMG.
 
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