NeoGrognard

Lately, roughly once a month, I’ve been playing some 1e AD&D, and having a great time with it. It’s an old and comfortable friend from my youth. It still has that arbitrary and cryptic feel at times, like it did when I was younger. But instead of making me run to the OED with giddy glee, now I just grin and nod. Oh Gary, you old scamp.

Mike Mearls runs the game. We are playing through B1 In Search of the Unknown, or at least a very fun semblance of it filled with Mearlsian flourishes. The other players are Rodney Thompson, Erik Mona, Chris Tulach, and Rob McCreary. This healthy mix of WotC, ex-WotC, and Paizo people would seem blasphemous in some corners of ENWorld, but we are all friends with a healthy sense of nostalgia and, in the cases of Mr. Mona and me, a depraved joy at playing evil characters.

Right now there we are reeling at just how fast you can churn though combats in 1e. Keep in mind, we are 1st level, and have relatively few things to do, comparatively speaking. I’m playing a half-orc assassin, Zorth the Spectre of Cheap Street sent by his guild to recover a poison believed to be somewhere in the Caverns of Quasqueton. “Cultured” (read decadent), tall, and upright for a half-orc, few know his race because he hides it under a tricorn hat and behind a masquerade mask. He throws his daggers (darts are crass and uncivilized but strangely one of the best if not the best ranged weapon in the game), stabs with his sword, and is 2-0 for assassination attempts. He’s fun and dead simple to run. No if-then feats. No stack of power cards. No combat maneuvers.

We do a good job of glossing over the really strange rules of 1e. We go for the basics and the optimal play experience of play, like those occasionally in our youth when someone didn’t decide to gloss poetically or overly strictly over Gygax’s sometimes puzzling prose and take the game off the rails for half the session. It’s easy for some getting-old farts like us, free from the hormones that lend themselves to raging jackassery.

And there is some strangely complicated shit in 1e.

We just leveled. And I’m glad we are not following the strict experience and training rules of the 1e Dungeon Masters Guide.

Since I scored two assassinations, and did a decent amount of fiddling with poisons, searching for traps, and sneaking about, I would rate an E (Excellent, few deviations from norm = 1) for my performance. Or maybe an S (Superior, deviations minimal but noted = 2) if Mike’s feeling a tad uncharitable while performing his ratings. Luckily we have been on the same adventure throughout all of 1st level, so he only has to rate my performance once, and not figure out the aggregate rating of all the adventures Zorth participated in during the course of that level. Then he’ll take the number of the rating, and that’s the number of uninterrupted weeks I must train, at a cost of my level times 1,500 gp per week, before I level.

No. I’m not kidding. That’s how it was done, son. Or that’s how we were supposed to do it.

Back in the day, we usually we did exactly what the DMG told us not to do (and it told us not to do it in all caps!): you get enough x.p. you level. You might have to wait to camp, but that’s it. That’s right, like little satanists we embraced the prohibition rather than the rule. Why did we commit this sin? Because when you are on the second level of the Temple of Elemental Evil and you have Canon Belsornig where you want him, you’re not going to leave to train for a week or two. Fun trumps speed bumps, roadblocks, and bottlenecks. It’s taken RPGs a long time to realize that.

It’s not just the training rules that are overly complicated—and entirely jacked—many of the rules surrounding experience points are. It’s obvious now that the experience points in 1e served two purposes. The first was to impose a particular milieu (as Gary would put it) where rogues advanced fast, and few races could compete with humanity in power gained; a milieu beaten out of the game over time because no one wanted to play the crappy elf. The second was to create an illusion of fairness.

Let me show you what I mean. There are two ways of gaining x.p. in 1e. The first way is by slaying monsters. Here’s the formula (from the 1e DMG page 85)

1. X.p. for the slain monsters are totaled.

2. All surviving character who took part (no matter how insignificant) in slaying the monster are totaled.

3. X.p. total is divided by the number of characters, each getting an extra share

4. Exception: Monsters slain single-handedly – and a magic-user protected by fighters keeping off the enemy so he or she can cast spells which slay monsters is NOT fighting single-handed—accrue x.p. only to the slayer and are not including in steps 1 though 3, above.

Pretty simple, but then when you consider that the exact x.p. for monsters was determined by level and hit points and modified by the number of special and extraordinary abilities it had, and it had a very deliberate rigor that is probably unnecessary, and probably built to tell some jackass to shut the hell up. These days, I just go for the direct approach.

The second way to gain x.p. was through the acquisition of treasure. It came with a note about people who balked at gaining x.p. for treasure, and dismissed their foolishness. The treasure x.p. guidelines (you can’t call them rules) are a prime example of 1e specific vagueness—something that seems to be giving you a concrete rule, but is actually presenting you a framework. Check it out (also DMG 85).

Convert all metal and gems and jewelry to a total value in gold pieces. If the relative value of the monster(s) or guardian device found equals or exceeds that of the party which took the treasure, experience is awarded on a 1 for 1 basis. If the guardian(s) was relatively weaker, award experience on a 5 g.p. to 4 gp., 3 to 2, 2 to 1, 3 to 1, or even for or more to 1 basis according to the relative strengths.

Gee, thanks. To be honest I think most of us just played this by ear as well. I remember conveniently keeping track of XP for all the players and just tell them when they leveled. They leveled when I wanted them to.

To some out there, especially those with OSR leanings, I may be spewing blasphemies. I mean experience points are everywhere in gaming. They are one of those things that D&D created that now is so entrenched as part of gaming that no one really questions why we use them. They are a tool that has worked well for a long time, and through use has found multiple other games.

Humbug. They are strange, abstract, and cumbersome, especially when you consider how people typically play D&D and other roleplaying games and give out experience points. They are even more so when you realize some of the assumptions that go into creating experience point systems.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Till next time.