AD&D 1E XP Value for Monsters?

[Celebrim]

There. Done!
Hmm… I’m actually not liking all of this at all.

For one, all of it is based on at least two arbitrary decisions.

Many more than that. Regardless of which edition of D&D we are talking about, assigning a "challenge rating" and thus a reward to defeating a monster always involves a ton of arbitrary decisions starting in the 1e AD&D case with the numbers assigned to each line in the table. What you are going for is never objectively true numbers, but rather "good enough" estimates relative to other monsters that exist or you might design. That is, for whatever process you come up with, the only real test is: "If this monster X is by a reasonable standard harder/tougher than this monster Y, does X also yield a suitably larger reward than Y?" And you are never going to get there perfectly. All you can manage is to try to get close enough that any problems are not obvious.

I do appreciate though your attempt at rigor. I'd be interested to see if you could reverse engineer where I'm getting my revised dragons. Speaking of...

For two, calculating dragon xp is gonna be an even bigger headache that it already is, and not only because of the “special defense” mentioned in the red dragon example in the DMG (p. 85).

It's worse than that because dragons break all the rules normally applying to other monsters because of the rule about hit points/hit die. The basis of giving an award for a monster of a particular HD has baked into it an assumption that those hit points probably come in some reasonable range. Normally the hit points of the monster contribute only a relatively small portion of the reward because normally there isn't huge extreme differences in the amount of hit points needed to kill a monster, and the amount of hit points needed to kill a monster don't also determine many of its abilities. But neither of those things is true of 1e AD&D dragons with their special exceptions to all other rules. I would contend that an 10 h.p. monster is a lot easier to kill than an 80 h.p. monster; so much so that the table of rewards don't reflect the difference in this extreme of a case.

Because how many “major breath weapons” do dragons with multiple “major breath weapons” (e.g., gold dragon, silver dragon) have?

In general, because they can only use one at a time, I would tend to say that they only have one.

I can see why Appendix E says that Tiamat has 5 breath weapons, for they all inflict damage and they come from five different heads.

I would say that Tiamat has 5 breath weapons, but it might be a mistake to quintuple count them if you are also already giving her a multi-attack extraordinary ability since attacks are not useable with bites and employing multiple breath weapons might be seen as a parallel to multiple attacks. But then again, though I LOATHE the design of 1e AD&D Tiamat with a burning hatred and strongly suggest no one ever use it; if I were to use it, I might make an exception for Tiamat in that each of her breath weapons hits the rule for single attacks doing at least X damage and thus makes it worthy of an EAXPA x 5.

But then why doesn’t the pyrohydra have “breath weapons”? Because all of them generate the same effect?

No, but rather the same logic I just applied to Tiamat. Breath weapons are an alternative to bites, and the hydra is already getting the power of making multiple attacks counted. "Can make multiple attacks" and "Can do minor breath weapons" are here counting separate things, and recounting each breath weapon would be excessive.

Hydra though is unlike the dragons a really good case because the hydra's reward is intrinsically tied to hit dice so that there is no need to quadruple count a 16HD hydra's multi-attacks (4 instances of 4 or more attacks or 8 instances of a breath weapon or whatever) because the table itself has a built in assumption that most of the difficulty of a monster is intrinsically in its HD and that higher HD monsters generally bring along with them more extreme and powerful abilities and so the rewards of their extraordinary abilities and special abilities and base rewards are all also higher leading to no need to double count a 16HD breath weapon as twice that of a 8HD breath weapon. If the hydras number of heads weren't attached to its HD, then yes, we'd need extra counting to potentially differentiate 4 attacks from 8 or 12 or 16.

So, should they count for the amount of damage a monster can deliver in a single round?

I generally didn't. I saw this as double counting since a major breath weapon to me implied it met that rule or something similarly lethal. But again, this is all going to be subjective at some level. What's not important really is the rules you set, but rather that once you apply your judgment to each monster, you end up with a ranking of rewards that very closely matches a ranking of difficulty.

 

[Moving Pictures]

Back to the table.... you have

Trying to avoid the “splitting” effects territory—and failing miserably

Breath weapon or major breath weapon?
DMG, p. 227: “Breath Weapon — Special attack of certain creatures like dragons, chimerae, etc. causing any of several different effects. For saving throw purposes the “Breath Weapon” category excludes petrification and polymorph results, which have their own category.
So what is a “major breath weapon”? Many things have been said about this, but there’s nothing conclusive in the MM, DMG, and PHB that I can find, with (possibly) two exceptions.

You are overthinking this.

The table (table 32 in the DMG) gives +2 dice equivalence to a breath weapon. Do that.
The table gives +1 dice to any singular attack doing more than 20 points damage. I'd argue that includes the breath weapon.
The table gives +2 dice equivalence to a being able to cause more than 30 points damage/round. I'd argue that includes the breath weapon.

 

[Lanefan]

Trying to avoid the “splitting” effects territory—and failing miserably

Breath weapon or major breath weapon?
DMG, p. 227: “Breath Weapon — Special attack of certain creatures like dragons, chimerae, etc. causing any of several different effects. For saving throw purposes the “Breath Weapon” category excludes petrification and polymorph results, which have their own category.
So what is a “major breath weapon”? Many things have been said about this, but there’s nothing conclusive in the MM, DMG, and PHB that I can find, with (possibly) two exceptions.

The first is that “An ancient spell-using red dragon of huge size with 88 hit points (…)” has a major breath weapon (DMG, p. 85), which is obviously a bit of a no-brainer, because it can inflict 88 points of damage in a 5×90×30-ft cone.

The second is that some breath weapons allow for different saving throws. Not sure what to do with this, but this obviously includes the gorgon, which has “breath weapon” in Appendix E instead of something including words like “petrifies” or “turns to stone”, which sucks. And what about the iron golem, which "will breathe out a cloud of poisonous gas" and has “poison gas” in Appendix E?

And then there’s the notion that there are/were “saving throws against dragon breath”; that Tiamat has “breath weapons”, and Bahamut a “breath weapon”; that all other metallic dragons have a “breath weapon”, and that the silver dragon has “breath weapons” in the MM; and that, notably, a pyrohydra also has a “breath weapon”.
So does the latter mean: one monster, one breath weapon? But then only for monsters with multiple mouths for the same effect because Tiamat? And does a metallic dragon just have one breath weapon that can generate different effects? A “weapon” with multiple aspects, as it were?

Unfortunately, the notion that the xp values of monster abilities are based on “effects that cause harm in combat” isn’t much help here, and changing it to “effects that inflict damage in combat” is gonna open up even more cans of worms than I’m already trying to close.

So maybe we should take the category “attacks causing maximum damage greater than 24 singly” being worth an EAXPA as a guideline? As noted earlier, this will make the chimera’s breath weapon (3-24 damage) not a “major breath weapon”, while some younger dragons will not have one either. Not sure if I’d want to treat the chimera’s breath weapon as a “minor breath weapon”, by the way, coz that would mean trouble.

Let’s see which monsters actually breathe out some harmful substance, regardless of whether this ability is defined as a breath weapon or not. And let’s, for reasons, split them into area-affecting “breath weapons” and those that can only affect a single creature.

View attachment 421203

Well, this doesn’t really get me anywhere, except that some dragons and dragon turtles definitely have a “major breath weapon”; that the gold dragon may have two of them; that there’s a saving throw vs dragon breath instead of one vs paralyzation for the silver dragon’s paralyzing breath weapon; that there can be a saving throw vs dragon breath even if a breath weapon can only affect a single individual; and that there’s nothing to prevent an anhkheg’s “squirt acid” ability from being a (major?) breath weapon, unless it is delivered through some other orifice (because skunk).

In any case, all of this suggests that simply going with Appendix E “breath weapon” as the basis for a “major breath weapon” doesn’t seem right. For why would the gorgon’s “breath weapon” be a “major breath weapon” and the iron golem’s “poison gas” not be one—and not even be a breath weapon at that?

I guess I’m stuck.

Main question 1: Does a “breath weapon” in general need to affect an area?
Answer: Probably not.
Main question 2: What defines a “major breath weapon”, other than being able to inflict 88 points of damage?
Answer: No idea.

Decision time the first
Let’s go with the notion that a “major breath weapon” must generate some “major effect” worth an EAXPA. This means at least 25 points of damage (as per the massive damage rule, singly); or instant death (e.g., poison); or paralysis; or system shock (e.g., petrification). And let’s assume, for the moment at least, that it need not be able to affect an area.

This nets us the following:

View attachment 421204
View attachment 421205

Breath weapons that generate spell(-like) effects
Although I’m gonna regret this, I’m gonna say that breath weapons that generate a spell-like effect in an area are typically gonna be “major breath weapons.” Why? Because, in case of metallic dragons, I’d say that the spell-like effects they generate are not not really based on “minor (basically defensive) spells”, therefore putting them on par with “spell use”, which is an EAXPA.

Sleep, though but a 1st-level spell, affects creatures of all levels and basically renders them “motionless”, as per “paralysis.”
Fear is a 4th-level spell and sort of forces creatures to act against their will (which will become important later on).
Repulsion is a 6th-level spell and therefore hardly “minor”, while it also prevents creatures from approaching the dragon—and therefore inflict damage on it in melee.
Slow is a 3rd-level spell and curtails creatures’ abilities to inflict damage.
Gaseous form, while not a spell, prevents creatures from acting at all, while it could also be argued that it is a “transformation” effect, and therefore a shock to the system.

Drat. This sounds weaker than I thought it would, for it could easily be argued that these breath weapons are “special defenses”, perhaps like the nightmare’s smoke cloud and the giant squid’s ink cloud. Or maybe not. They’re “breath weapons” after all, and mentioned under “special attacks” rather than under “special defenses.”

View attachment 421206

There. Done!
Hmm… I’m actually not liking all of this at all.

For one, all of it is based on at least two arbitrary decisions.

For two, calculating dragon xp is gonna be an even bigger headache that it already is, and not only because of the “special defense” mentioned in the red dragon example in the DMG (p. 85).
Because how many “major breath weapons” do dragons with multiple “major breath weapons” (e.g., gold dragon, silver dragon) have? I can see why Appendix E says that Tiamat has 5 breath weapons, for they all inflict damage and they come from five different heads. Is that why the gold dragon doesn’t have “breath weapons”? But then why doesn’t the pyrohydra have “breath weapons”? Because all of them generate the same effect?
Does the silver dragon have “breath weapons” in the MM because one of them inflicts massive damage and the other generates and EAXPA effect? Then why doesn’t Bahamut have “breath weapons”?
Mind = blown.

For three, is this going to mean that a “minor breath weapon” is either worth 1×EAXPA as a “special attack”, or that it isn’t worth nothing at all, other than for the massive damage count in a round? Or both? Which would make things even worse.

For four, must the 3-12 hp damage from Juiblex’ slime-spitting be seen as “damage” per round, and must the “near instant death” from the green slime be worth 1×EAXPA? This would mean that one spit would be worth 1×SAXPB, plus 1×EAXPA, at the very least. Still, the miscreant has 47280 xp, so not all may be lost just yet.

For five, does splitting the “breath weapon” of Juiblex as above mean that the breath weapons of the iron golem and the gorgon are now gonna be worth 1×EAXPA for being “major breath weapons”, and 1×EAXPA for their effects? It would still sort of fit, though, for the gorgon has 5×EAXPA in its xp value, which would be 3×EAXPA for its petrification effect (as often seems to be the case), and at least 1×EAXPA for its “major breath weapon”. And the iron golem has 1×SAXPB plus 4×EAXPA making up its xp value, which would be … oh, never mind.
And then what about the silver dragon’s breath weapons? 2×EAXPA for two major breath weapons, plus 1×EAXPA for one of them being paralyzation? Then why not an extra EAXPA for the massive damage inflicted by a huge, ancient version? Because of the red dragon xp example in the DMG? Which adds things up wrongly anyway?

For six…, well, there’s a lot more.

For seven, and most important of all, all of this is probably nothing at all like what they were thinking when they made Appendix E.

Massive damage?
Deciding what “major breath weapons” are has left me with many breath weapons and similar attacks that have not been given an SAXPB or EAXPA. Should they have one? Should there be a special attack called “minor breath weapon”? I’d rather there wasn’t, for why didn’t they think of that?
But they should count for something, if only because at least one of them is listed as a “breath weapon”; most have a saving throw; and many can inflict considerable damage, if not “massive damage”.

So, should they count for the amount of damage a monster can deliver in a single round? Obviously, most of them do not fall into the category “attacks causing maximum damage greater than 24 singly”, and not just because I’ve suggested that this category “pertains only to physical acts and/or “natural weaponry” only … for now.”

So what if we would just forget about that suggestion, which…, um, I’ve already done with diseases? Take into account any and all damaging attacks a monster can unleash in a round? And use the category “attacks causing maximum damage greater than 42 in all combinations possible in 1 round” for moral support?
Nope, not gonna work in most, if not all cases. Most notably, dragons cannot attack and use a breath weapon in the same round, and something like that is probably true for the electric eel (jolt), the ice toad (cold radiation, which is actually a “cold blast”), and the djinni and the air elemental (the whirlwind actually transforms them).

Another problem would be that they cannot really be counted as an “additional attack” as far as the number of attacks per round is concerned, because that’s a fixed number in both Appendix E and the MM.

The “Attacks affecting an area” angle
Considering all of the above, it’s probably not worth even trying to go into this.

Or is it?
Maybe the fact that breath weapons do affect an area makes them a special attack in their own right? And since they’re not “major breath weapons”, are they just “special attacks” worth 1×EAXPA? So would that lift the “pertains only to physical acts and/or “natural weaponry” only … for now”-limit on special attacks?
And yet, though that’s probably inevitable anyway for many other reasons, I’m still gonna hold back on that, mostly because the “special attacks” category in the monster xp value table in the DMG involving “physical attacks” solely* is just about the only thing in it that is consistent.

Which leaves the non-“major breath weapons” up in the air… for now.

View attachment 421207

Blinding spittle is just another form of missile discharge, only with an effect other than damage. That said, blindness maps to an offensive spell effect and thus could count as EAXPB. Tough call.

For squirt acid and low-end breath weapons the easiest answer is a maximum-damage cutoff: if it can potentially do more than 30 points to a single target or more than 15 points to multiple targets, it's EAXPB. Fail to meet either of those thresholds and it's SAXPB. Thus, the "squirt acid" that can do up to 32 points damage is EAXPB as it hits the 30-point threshold.

Disease is an oddball and probably best handled case by case. Cutoff for me would be fatal = EAXPB and non-fatal = SAXPB.

Other than that, I'd bundle strength loss, strength drain, feeblemind, etc. into a catch-all "ability loss" category and just make them all EAXPB; which makes it easier to design one's own monsters that affect abilities.

In your previous list I didn't see psionics mentioned, and it's not in the original DMG list either. How would you fit psionic use in for calculating xp for Mind Flayers, Demons, and so forth?

 

[ilgatto]

Many more than that. Regardless of which edition of D&D we are talking about, assigning a "challenge rating" and thus a reward to defeating a monster always involves a ton of arbitrary decisions starting in the 1e AD&D case with the numbers assigned to each line in the table. What you are going for is never objectively true numbers, but rather "good enough" estimates relative to other monsters that exist or you might design. That is, for whatever process you come up with, the only real test is: "If this monster X is by a reasonable standard harder/tougher than this monster Y, does X also yield a suitably larger reward than Y?" And you are never going to get there perfectly. All you can manage is to try to get close enough that any problems are not obvious.

Agreed. There’s a lot going on in Appendix E, and virtually nothing of it makes any sense. In fact, there’s only about two dozen monsters in it with an xp value that corresponds to the “rules” laid out in the EXPERIENCE POINTS VALUE FOR MONSTERS table on p. 85—and the vast majority of these are monsters without any special/exceptional abilities. And even then, of those very few that do have them, the final xp value corresponding to the rules on p. 85 seems to be a coincidence rather than anything else (e.g., efreeti, wyvern).

I suppose your “reasonable standard” is where, eventually, the elusive subject of “monster levels” comes into play. I’ve heard it argued that the DUNGEON RANDOM MONSTER TABLES in the DMG (p. 175 and on) are to be the guideline for this, which seems fair enough, but that brings many problems with it. For one, it may be based on OD&D and then misunderstood from the get-go, and for two, “monsters” can have also “levels”, character classes, and “abilities as” levels (which are the worst), and then some.

I do appreciate though your attempt at rigor. I'd be interested to see if you could reverse engineer where I'm getting my revised dragons.

Heh. So am I.

Speaking of...

It's worse than that because dragons break all the rules normally applying to other monsters because of the rule about hit points/hit die. The basis of giving an award for a monster of a particular HD has baked into it an assumption that those hit points probably come in some reasonable range. Normally the hit points of the monster contribute only a relatively small portion of the reward because normally there isn't huge extreme differences in the amount of hit points needed to kill a monster, and the amount of hit points needed to kill a monster don't also determine many of its abilities. But neither of those things is true of 1e AD&D dragons with their special exceptions to all other rules. I would contend that an 10 h.p. monster is a lot easier to kill than an 80 h.p. monster; so much so that the table of rewards don't reflect the difference in this extreme of a case.

Yup. The whole “hit points per hit die” thing is a bit of an issue. And not only for dragons, for there’s also the demon lords/princes and arch-devils, where the matter becomes even more complicated because of their 10-, 12-, and 20-sided Hit Dice in OD&D (well, for demons in any case).

Even without that, things are also made worse by the fact that the #hp/HD is was “addressed” in 2E, which sort of suggests that it was a factor of at least some importance in 1E. Or perhaps in OD&D and then bleeding over into 1E?

In general, because they can only use one at a time, I would tend to say that they only have one.

I would say that Tiamat has 5 breath weapons, but it might be a mistake to quintuple count them if you are also already giving her a multi-attack extraordinary ability since attacks are not useable with bites and employing multiple breath weapons might be seen as a parallel to multiple attacks. But then again, though I LOATHE the design of 1e AD&D Tiamat with a burning hatred and strongly suggest no one ever use it; if I were to use it, I might make an exception for Tiamat in that each of her breath weapons hits the rule for single attacks doing at least X damage and thus makes it worthy of an EAXPA x 5.

No, but rather the same logic I just applied to Tiamat. Breath weapons are an alternative to bites, and the hydra is already getting the power of making multiple attacks counted. "Can make multiple attacks" and "Can do minor breath weapons" are here counting separate things, and recounting each breath weapon would be excessive.

I have to say that the notion of breath weapons being an alternative bite is actually quite an interesting thought, which hadn’t crossed my mind. It would solve some issues, such as the iron golem not having a breath weapon and the gorgon having one, and it gets at least some way into the “hydra problem”. Hmm… but it doesn’t address the problem of breath weapon vs breath weapons—and then there’s the silver dragon...

Hydra though is unlike the dragons a really good case because the hydra's reward is intrinsically tied to hit dice so that there is no need to quadruple count a 16HD hydra's multi-attacks (4 instances of 4 or more attacks or 8 instances of a breath weapon or whatever) because the table itself has a built in assumption that most of the difficulty of a monster is intrinsically in its HD and that higher HD monsters generally bring along with them more extreme and powerful abilities and so the rewards of their extraordinary abilities and special abilities and base rewards are all also higher leading to no need to double count a 16HD breath weapon as twice that of a 8HD breath weapon. If the hydras number of heads weren't attached to its HD, then yes, we'd need extra counting to potentially differentiate 4 attacks from 8 or 12 or 16.

Not sure what you mean here. Are you suggesting that, say, a five-headed hydra should be treated as “five monsters with 1 Hit Die each” instead of one with 5 HD?

I generally didn't. I saw this as double counting since a major breath weapon to me implied it met that rule or something similarly lethal. But again, this is all going to be subjective at some level. What's not important really is the rules you set, but rather that once you apply your judgment to each monster, you end up with a ranking of rewards that very closely matches a ranking of difficulty.

Yeah, I’d agree with the notion that massive damage counts should probably not really apply to breath weapon damage. Although they still might. If we assume that a breath weapon is a “special attack”, as it says in Appendix E, and therefore worth 1×SAXPB in its own right (although DMG p. 85 doesn’t list a breath weapon in its bracketed examples after “special attacks”), then the massive damage count (which is an Exceptional Ability X.P. Addition) might still come into play. But that’s probably another rabbit hole.

 

[ilgatto]

Blinding spittle is just another form of missile discharge, only with an effect other than damage. That said, blindness maps to an offensive spell effect and thus could count as EAXPB. Tough call.

eah, I’d also go for the spittle being a missile discharge. In which case it wouldn’t be a “breath weapon” (well, dammit, it might, as @Celebrim suggests with his notion of a breath weapon being an alternative to a bite attack). If it isn’t, I’d say its effect would start counting, as it arguably does with the manticore’s tail spikes (missile discharge, massive damage count).

But then the problem is gonna be how to value a “blinding attack” and an attack (or, dammit, defense) causing lasting “blindness” (e.g., nymph). And then there’s the notion of “helplessness”. Yeah, blinding/blindness is a really tough cookie, though there’s a chance that things may become easier when the subject of spells/spell-like effects comes up—which it probably won’t.

For squirt acid and low-end breath weapons the easiest answer is a maximum-damage cutoff: if it can potentially do more than 30 points to a single target or more than 15 points to multiple targets, it's EAXPB. Fail to meet either of those thresholds and it's SAXPB. Thus, the "squirt acid" that can do up to 32 points damage is EAXPB as it hits the 30-point threshold.

I’m curious. Where do you get the 30/15 thresholds from?

Disease is an oddball and probably best handled case by case. Cutoff for me would be fatal = EAXPB and non-fatal = SAXPB.

I’d agree in principle, though there’s a lot of buts. One of which being that—if one were to use that rule—a fatal disease doesn’t really qualify as “near instant death with regard for hit points”.
And then there’s the question on how one should interpret the fact that the giant rat gets minimal xp for its minimal chance of causing a (non-fatal) disease.
And the notion that the giant tick gets 5×SAXPB plus 1×EAXPA for just being abilities to drain some blood and have a 50% chance to inflict a disease fatal in 2-8 days, especially because being able to drain blood is sometimes awarded an EAXPA (e.g., giant lamprey). My guess so far is that draining blood at a rate of “more than one die per round”—i.e., 1d6—may somehow be worth an EAXPA, but the evidence is too weak for a final conclusion.

Other than that, I'd bundle strength loss, strength drain, feeblemind, etc. into a catch-all "ability loss" category and just make them all EAXPB; which makes it easier to design one's own monsters that affect abilities.

Absolutely. And I’d add Demogorgon’s “insanity gaze attack” to that. Though there’s caveats there as well. For, if special/exceptional abilities are based on “the potential to inflict damage”, then strength drain is a thing, but “temporarily” losing a couple of points of Intelligence isn’t really that much of an issue, although the magic-user in question might disagree.

The main problem with stat losses is that the xp values of monsters than can cause them are pretty hard to analyze (e.g., lamia, quasit, intellect devourer).

In your previous list I didn't see psionics mentioned, and it's not in the original DMG list either. How would you fit psionic use in for calculating xp for Mind Flayers, Demons, and so forth?

I'm not sure at all, and I was rather pleased it didn’t feature in the xp table for monsters on p. 85, for xp-wise there’s a lot of problems with psionics.

If one were to treat them in much the same way as the DMG does “use of minor (basically defensive) spells” and “spell use”, or as suggested in Dragon #89 (p. 49), then where’s the cut-off? Also, there’s huge problems with monsters being able to use (minor) spells, spell-like effects, or whatever else Appendix E might call them. For one, there’s some evidence that “spell use” means “being able to use spells as PC spell-casters can”.

And then there’s this: I’ve never used, or studied the subject of, psionics to any great extent, but IIRC psionic attacks are only relevant against other psionics, with the exception of psionic blast—and whatever the mind flayer’s “mind blast” and “mind blast of psionic power” is (which isn’t psionic blast coz it doesn’t have that). And the mind flayer having this weird ability likely being the result of it originally having “Mind Blast, a wave PSI force” (The Strategic Review, Vol. 1, No. 1) doesn’t really solve the problem in a meaningful way.

So far, whenever I had to allocate xp to a psionic monster the PCs could encounter in a session (they never actually did), I’d just use whatever Appendix E says, or give it another EAXPA (e.g., bandit magic-user) and quickly forget about.

Here’s to hoping that trying to analyze the xp values of spells, et al.. will shed some light on the psionics situation—hope springs eternal and all that.

 

[Celebrim]

Not sure what you mean here. Are you suggesting that, say, a five-headed hydra should be treated as “five monsters with 1 Hit Die each” instead of one with 5 HD?

No, I mean rather that since all hydra powers scale with HD, the system in the table on page 85 works well (and indeed 10 headed hydra is given as an example on the page) whether or not it was consistently applied in Appendix E. There is no need to count the hydras 10 heads as 2 multiple attacks compared to 5HD hydras (and the example doesn't) because having 10HD means the reward for having multiple attacks already is scaled to higher value. This contrasts strongly with how well it works for dragons because dragon power scales with hit points and not HD. The example on the page cherry picks the best case of an ancient dragon when showing off the system and neglects the worst case of a wyrmling of the same HD which would receive nearly the same reward as its ancient counterpart despite the fact that at 11 h.p. (and a correspondingly smaller breath weapon) its a much easier foe.

I suppose your “reasonable standard” is where, eventually, the elusive subject of “monster levels” comes into play. I’ve heard it argued that the DUNGEON RANDOM MONSTER TABLES in the DMG (p. 175 and on) are to be the guideline for this, which seems fair enough, but that brings many problems with it.

It's been forever, but I believe somewhere there is a table that classifies a monster level by the range of XP values that monsters of that level are to have. This is another reason why XP assigned to monsters needs to pass the basic test that if a monster X is tougher than monster Y, it also needs to merit a higher reward since that reward is used to give guidelines to the DM as to when the monster is an appropriate challenge - something TSR itself breaks IMO when its assigns recommended levels to its adventure modules that don't always correspond to the DMG's own recommendations for when to encounter the levels of the monsters that are in that module.