Experience points in Original Dungeons and Dragons
I like to look at numbers and (despite my colorblindness) at colorful graphs. As an excuse for doing that, I decided to look at how leveling up worked in Dungeons and Dragons in older editions.
My secondary goal is to simplify class conversion between older editions of DnD, but to achieve this, I first need to understand their core mechanics. Join me as we explore this process!
Introduction
When the necessity of telling stories of heroes who would become more powerful with time emerged, DnD's designers (like many others before and after them) decided to encode this growth through a level system. As your character perform actions, they gain a metacurrency called experience, and accumulating more of it increases their level. The higher the level, the stronger the character.
While the rate of experience gain per level could be constant, if stories focus on characters becoming increasingly powerful over time, it's natural for the experience required between levels to grow progressively larger.
Experience points for basic classes
The first version of Dungeons and Dragons (usually denoted as ODnD) comes out in 1974 in the form of a boxset containing three little brown books (3LBB), Man & Magic, Monsters & Treasures and The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures. In this first form, the game only featured the three basic classes of Fighting-Man, Magic-User, and Cleric [1], and the difference between these classes is relatively small, when compared to later editions. While all the numerical values (like saving throws, hit dice or fighting capability/attack matrix) naturally improve as the character levels up, the specific class offers almost no additional skills or abilities to them. Of courese, a higher level Magic-User will be able to use higher level magic, and a Fighting-Man who acquired the title of Lord or more will be able to become a Baron of the land, but not more than that is present in the books.
This means that when we look at the experience needed to level up for each class, the progressions might differ but not substantially. This is easily observed by plotting the experience necessary to level up.
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| Total Experience per Level (ODnD) |
While in the graph we see only the plot until level 8-11 (depending on the class), the text explicitly states that "there is no theoretical limit to how high a character might progress". It then proceeds to neglect any concrete way in which this might be carried on.
It can be useful, however, to look at the experience gap per level, i.e., the graph plotting the specific amounts necessary to advance from one level to the next. In this case we notice that the experience gap reaches a plateau for the Magic-User.
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| Experience per Increment (ODnD) |
This tells us the designers had in mind, at least when 3LBB came out, two things: for low values of experience, some sort of exponential growth should be used, and for higher levels a linear growth, with a constant increment would be the way to go. Interestingly enough, we will see that in the three years in which ODnD received further development, this idea stayed constant, although the span of levels in which the exponential growth would be used became larger and larger. Given that in the expansions we will discuss below higher levels are discussed, it is still worth to make a decision on how to treat higher levels for these three classes.
For the Magic-User the answer is simple, as both from level 9 to 10 as well as 10 to 11 the necessary experience to level up was equal to 100'000 experience points, so we can confidently fix this as the fixed amount to level up further. This also suggests that for the Fighting-Man we can fix 120'000 as the fixed amount, as this was the amount to level up from level 8 to level 9 and it's comparable with the Magic-User's amount. For the Cleric the computation is a bit more ambiguous in principle, as the maximum experience to level up for it was 50'000 (7 to 8). Given that the total experience to get to level 8 is 100'000 and that the experience to level up should be somehow comparable to the other two basic classes, we fix also the cleric at a fixed growth of 100'000 for any further level [2].
Before taking a look at the expansion in the later years, it is interesting [3] to look at a reversed version of our first graph: if the first graph tells us directly how much experience do you need to level up, the inverted graph allows us to compare the level progression between classes while keeping the experience amount fixed. A big difference can be expected (and indeed, observed), for higher levels, so we look at this graph only until a total amount of experience of 50'000 (corresponding to levels 6/7).
| Level per Experience (ODnD) |
Beautiful.
Experience points in the supplements
Between 1975 and 1976, ODnD receives three supplements, expanding the lore for the world, adding additional rules, and overall refining the game that DnD was shaping to be. For our discussion about experience, we see the notable introduction of several new classes, with very different approaches to leveling up.
In the Greyhawk (GH) supplement we see the introduction of the Paladin and the first appearance of the Thief (together with its pesky abilities). While the Paladin just follows the experience table of the Fighting-Man (or better, no alternative experience table is given), the Thief makes explicit how to compute experience necessary to level up at higher levels. Indeed, we observe that the linear growth is there confirmed, with a fixed amount (of 125'000 experience points for each level above the 10th) being added for each level up.
It's in the Blackmoor (BM) supplement that we see new concepts emerge: in BM two classes are introduced, the Monk and the Assassin. For both we now see that the linear behavior emerges way later, with the exponential growth describing the experience distribution also for levels way above the initial ones given in 3LBB. While there we saw explicit values only up to level 11, in the years after the release clearly higher level had started to hit the table, and BM gives explicit values up to level 16.
Moreover, the Assassin showed for the first time a way to get experience related to class features, as in the fact that an Assassin gets extra experience if they manage to complete their assassination tasks successfully. So the concept of experience and what did it mean to level up was clearly being thought through.
Finally, while the concept of maximum attainable level was already introduced for demihumans, it's only with the Assassin as well as with the Druid, introduced in Eldritch Wizardry (EW), that a maximum attainable level is set for classes.
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| Total Experience per Level (ODnD & Supplements) |
Conclusion
It's fascinating for me to look back at how the first attempts at defining a concept which is now core to modern DnD were carried on. From the get-go, there was an idea of exponential growth, mixed with the easy placeholder solution of linear growth after a threshold. The consequences of a system in which the characters are ever-growing is fascinating, letting a referee or a player imagine their characters growing indefinitely, at the price of numbers which make no sense. I doubt anyone ever played a level 100 Fighting-Men, but this version of DnD certainly allowed you, at least theoretically, to find the requirements in experience points for it.
In my opinion, while the necessity for experience came from the requirement of describing characters who could "level up" out of the ordinary into the extra-ordinary, this mixed approach suggests an evolving understanding of the game's ultimate scope. Exponential growth, by its nature, creates an impossibly high ceiling, making it suitable for systems with bounded levels. Conversely, a linear progression aligns better with a system where encounter complexity scales slowly alongside character power. This mix could work only up to a point and it naturally changed in later editions of the game.
The next step will be to conduct a similar analysis for DND B/X, where we will see how the introduction of more complex classess required a more thorough reflection on experience points, but I leave this for a next post!
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