Leveling Up the Old School Way

I've discussed this before, but I'm seeing a lot of new folks in the conversation who have no memory of D&D before 3rd Edition/Pathfinder, so I figure it's worth going over again.

Here's an example of how leveling-up worked in AD&D (aka 1st edition, and what the kids in Stranger Things are playing). In order to get to 2nd level as a Fighter, you'd need to accrue 2,001 EXP. Killing the average orc nets you 14.5 EXP. So in order to gain 2nd level, a Fighter would have to slaughter 138 orcs. And they'd have to do it by themselves, because if they have help, the EXP are divided evenly. So if the Fighter has even just three companions (a small party by 1e standards, though considered average in 5e), a total of 552 orcs must be slain. This the equivalent of over 3 average orc tribes (according to the Monster Manual). As a practical example, the classic adventure Keep on the Borderlands has an orc tribe with only 23 "average" orcs plus a bigger, badder chieftain. Your total EXP for slaying all of them would be roughly 400 EXP. But the treasure they have includes 830 GP (and so 830 EXP) in gems and coins. If you sell their weapons and armour, that's another 195 GP. (There's also another 2,500 EXP worth of magic items, but the PCs only get those EXP if they sell the magic items, and they'll probably keep them and use them. So by AD&D rules, they'd get 550 EXP for the magic items, and 100 of those would only go to a character who could actually cast the spell on the scroll.) And here's another wrinkle to the rules from 1e: most encounters didn't result in immediate combat. Unless the adventure dictated otherwise, when the PCs first encounter a monster, the DM would roll a d100. Only on a 5 or less would combat immediately ensue. A roll of 6 to 25 meant "Hostile, immediate action." Which meant combat was only likely (and not even guaranteed) in one out of four encounters before you adjust for a high Charisma score. And the way the Caves of Chaos in Keep on the Borderlands are set up implies the PCs will ally with some tribes against other monsters.

But wait; there's more! Even if a fight did start, it wasn't necessarily to the death. Every monster had a morale score. You'd check morale when 25% of the monsters were slain, when 50% of the monsters were slain, and when a leader was KOed or slain. If the monsters failed their morale check, they might try to retreat or even just surrender. Orcs had a base 50% to keep fighting when morale was checked, so most fights would likely end before more than half of a group of orcs was slain. And orcs who'd failed their morale check would happily part with treasure in exchange for getting to run away. (A note on morale; not everyone played with it. It was an easy rule to miss if you started with AD&D. But it was a big deal in the Basic rules, so you were more likely to use it if you started with that set.) So it's entirely likely that the PCs will kill only enough of one tribe of monsters to extort them to leave the area and surrender some of their treasure, and be paid by another tribe to do it. (There's also a very mercenary ogre in the caves who is willing to fight with others in exchange for gold.) And that would be a much more economical way to earn EXP than just slaughtering everything they came across. This is why many consider combat in TSR-era D&D to be a "fail state." If you're fighting, you're expending resources that are not easily recovered (natural healing only returned 1 to 2 HP per day spent doing nothing but resting, for instance) and for uncertain gain (if you were not in a monster's lair, there likely wasn't much treasure to be had; the orcs mentioned above have only a handful of coins each on them, and none of those coins is a gold piece). This was why wandering monsters were such a pain. They typically had no treasure at all, making them a resource sink rather than an opportunity to earn EXP that they are in 5th edition.

Coins made with Stable Diffusion and GIMP. Sad Manticore by JB Murphy.