The game gets harder

Some controversy in the Table-Time discord server. When you play old-school D&D, does the game get harder as you progress? Do you need to do more adventuring for the same reward? Is that good, or bad?

I don't intend to answer the evaluative questions here. But I can definitively answer the purely quantitative question: the game gets harder, and you do need to do more adventuring for the same reward.

Let's assume you have a party of 6 thieves at level X. They each need about 1500 * 2^(X - 2) points to progress to the next level. They collect all their XP from treasure rooms in dungeons. These treasure rooms are generated using the procedures in the 1974 D&D publication. How many treasure rooms do they need to get to the next level?

Treasure rooms per level up by level
 

Between 6 and 400, my math says, and the number goes up as you level up. Here's the same data in number form, with a bit more context.

 


Note that these values are really swingy at low levels. Most of the XP comes from jewelry and gems, which are rare but worth tons of money. So it's likely that you'll need many more than 6 rooms to get your first level up.

To calculate this, I used a spreadsheet from Dan "Delta" Collins. It had a few bugs, which I have fixed. Here's my copy of the spreadsheet.

If you try to generate treasure by, god help you, actually modelling an economy, things will be even tougher. Nevertheless that's my dream for my dungeon-free fantasy heartbreaker. Who knows if anyone will ever reach level 2 in that game.

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