Bonus Episode - Let’s Chat About Gold for XP in D&D | Black Notebook Podcast
Gold for XP is not just an old rule. It is the engine that drives how the game actually plays.
In this episode, we break down what happens when experience is tied to treasure instead of kills. Players stop chasing fights. They start making smarter calls. They explore with purpose, avoid bad encounters, and focus on getting in and out alive.
You will hear how this one rule shifts pacing, decision making, and the feel of the dungeon without changing anything else. If your table feels stuck in combat loops, this is the fix that might change everything.
There's a drum I'll never get tired of beating. People always think that the goal of old school D&D was "Kill monsters, get treasure." It wasn't. It was "Get treasure."
It's one of those things that should be obvious, but because it wasn't ever really said explicitly, people tended to miss it. Nevertheless, it is encoded in the very xp system.
Consider: a Fighter needed 2000 xp to make it to level 2. Yer garden variety goblin was a 1-1 HD monster, worth all of 10 xp (in 1st ed AD&D). That works out to needing to kill 200 goblins just to get to level 2, single-handed (otherwise, that 10 xp is getting split between the party). Already, it's not looking good. With four people in the group, we're talking about wiping out a couple of villages' worth of goblins, and the magic user is still stuck with his one spell at the end of all of that.
Now, let's think about the specifics of combat. A goblin does 1d6 damage, or by weapon. A 1st level Fighter has 1d10 hit points—somewhere in the region of 5-8, accounting for possible Con bonuses. A one-hit kill isn't impossible. Two hits in a single combat are very likely to be lethal. If our Fighter is equipped with chainmail and a shield, his AC 4. A goblin hits that on a 16.
And all this time we must keep in mind that Joe Fighter doesn't need to get lucky once. He needs to get lucky 200 times!
*But* here's where it gets interesting. A lair of goblins has treasure type C. The expected value of just the coins alone is in the region of 200 xp, not counting gems and jewelry. That's worth 20 goblins, in and of itself. The smart play is obviously to grab the loot rather than fight 20 goblins, each of whom is almost as good a fighter as a PC.
I originally got into AD&D 2ed, where the xp for gold rule was optional, and kinda discouraged, so it took me a while to realize that this was a problem. It basically meant that the DM would have to fudge some sort of additional awards, outside of combat xp, or there was basically no way any player was gonna make it to level 2. Combat experience values were simply much too low in the TSR versions of the game.