So now that I'm trying to make a dungeon more methodically for #dungeon23, the question arises. How much treasure to put in it?
Note that my focus here, since I'm designing for #dungeon23 and this is January, is the first level of a dungeon and how it must bootstrap a campaign by being fairly generous with treasure. I'm also assuming BX (OSE).
I'll start with three data points from experience:
- Level 1 Stonehell grind is a miserable experience. I think that the dungeon does not actually work if you have a PC death rate in line with the supposed OSR theme. After ~8 sessions in Stonehell, where I believe the DM actually upped the treasure amounts somewhat, I projected it would still take ~16 more sessions to level my dwarf. If this is the game -- if you're supposed to survive 24 sessions with a level 1 character to earn level 2 -- that's just not viable.
- In BX/OSE games with satisfactory level advancement speed, characters end up with too much money, with extremely little to spend it on.
- In the strictly-by-the-book 1E game I'm playing, it's very intrusive how 1E tries to claw back low-level wealth with training costs. The system is punishing and not exactly fun, and I don't think it can even work unless you give all the players superb ratings all the time. It's also not fun to be hounded by debt, interest payments, and cost of living. This is supposed to be an adventure game. And on top of all that it's a bit ludicrous how our PCs are dumping thousands and thousands of gp into this little town, paying 2 gp to hire a soldier for a day, but like 4,500gp to pay a trainer for a week -- better to have less wealth to start with, then gain so much of it. To say nothing of Gygax's other encouragements to nickel and dime PCs.
So those are the problems: Through lower levels, there needs to be more experience points than people know to give out, but there needs to be less PC wealth, and giving lots of money then taking it all away through huge fees is annoying.
And let's stipulate I'm interested in true OSR games and don't want to add xp from other sources like exploration or milestones or personal goal achievement.
What's to be done? Carousing rules are a common, simple change. Are they necessary? Are more drastic measures required?
Investigation 1:
A few months ago, Spriggan's Den crunched some numbers on B/X treasure and investigated the BX recommended rate of 75% of treasure coming from experience points by looking at how many monsters you fight. Over 18 rooms, it works out to 8 encounters and 5 treasures. If we say the average encounter is 3.5 orcs, worth 35 xp, then on the level there's 280 monster xp and 840 treasure xp.
So, 1120 xp on the entire level. With a five-person party, that's 224 xp to be gained. Assuming you cleaned the whole thing out, you'd need to actually do ~9 levels like -- 161 rooms! -- to level up your fighter. At six rooms per session, that's 27 sessions to level up, assuming you milked every single experience point from the level (a big assumption).
Most people probably expect 3-10 sessions required to get from level 2, so the OSE base rate of treasure gain is three to ten times too slow.
A more typical OSR dungeon level would be about twice as large -- 36 rooms, 16 encounters, 10 treasures. If this has 35 xp per encounter, that's 560, and we need 9440 treasure to make up for the deficit, so 944 gp per treasure. That's a lot of treasure to be handing out to the PCs.
Investigation 2:Way back in 2014, Delta investigated BX's 75% rule. The ugly truth is that no version of early D&D gives clear, reasonable rules for random stocking of dungeons when it comes to treasure amounts. One option is to ignore monster treasure types entirely and just use the "unguarded" room treasure for all tables. Delta explores this for OD&D but not for BX. In this he discovers that a level of about 50 rooms ~~~kinda~~~ gives an appropriate amount of total experience for the level.
Let's look at BX! BX is a lot like 0E, but it is a little skint with gold pieces at low levels, and its gems and jewelry don't escalate in value. Here are its average treasure yields, and how fast it will level up our five-fighter party.
So if you're expecting to level up your party off vanilla OSE treasures, it's going to be a long campaign. (Though of course you'll be getting xp from monsters as well.)
Using a 50-room dungeon to compare to the 0E values from Delta's post:
Given that OD&D gave ~roughly~ acceptable numbers, this shows an estimate of how much BX/OSE treasure needs to be magnified.
And for most levels, it's pretty close to 2! So carousing (in its full, unrestricted form) is actually a fairly good way to make BX roughly equivalent, but it isn't enough at first level.
Thus a rule of thumb could be: have carousing, but in addition, double the treasure on dungeon level 1.
That may be enough to get on with.
