Normalizing Treasure and XP Progression

This a follow up for my other post thinking about experience points and design considerations about them. 

Normalizing Treasure and XP Progression

I find most XP charts used in the OSR seem to be largely copied and pasted from older versions of the game without a lot of thought into why the are the way they are, or the progression of advancement they provide. 

Based on my experience as a Referee I find most XP charts for level advancement require an absurd amount of gold if you're using a XP-for-treasure rule. So much so, that characters either don't really make it past the first couple of levels, or after a while I just begin levelling them every couple of sessions or adventures.

I think both treasure values and XP progression needs to be normalized. My first solution is to first come up with a standardized value for treasure and then come up with a revised XP chart based off of this. 

This is the chart I'm going to use. If the players found any treasure in an adventure I'd probably ignore it's written value and just roll on the below chart when they go to sell it. I find adventures tend to vary wildly in the value of treasure they have so having a chart like this that calibrates treasure to XP progression in your game is necessary.

I also find keeping track of the worth of treasure during an adventure to be kind of tedious and don't like just telling the players the worth of the treasure when they find it as I think they should have to try and figure out what to keep and what to leave behind on their own. As a result I'd just roll on this chart when it came time to sell.

It has 4 general tiers of treasure. 

 

Name	Description	Value	Average Value (d10 = 5.5)
Equipment and Coins	Pretty much all of the standard equipment players can buy themselves and whatever small pocket change that would be on someone or in their trunk. This treasure is rarely hidden well.	1d10 * 10	55
Treasure	All non-descript treasure items. Things such as gems, silver goblets, bolts of fine silk, golden necklaces, exquisite painting. Things that aren’t unique, but are generally recognizable as being valuable. This treasure is often hidden and takes some effort to find.	1d10 * 100	550
Exquisite Items	Items that are of a particular unique nature. Either in their craftsmanship or material. They immediately strike one as one of a kind or something you don’t often come across. May or may not be magical. Things such as ebony bow with strange wire bowstring, silver gong with ancient runes and echoing boom, blood red opal that burns from within. This treasure is almost always hidden and often very dangers to recover.	1d10 * 1000	5500
Legendary Items	Items that are legendary. You often hear about them before you find them. Typically highly magical in nature in a way that could break the campaign/setting. If you do find them without hearing about them first, they're probably really, really hard to remove from the area and will often cause trouble. Once found, the question is often, not how do we sell this, but what do we do about this.	1d10 * 10,000	55,000

I'm not going to factor in the Equipment and Coins type treasure into my XP calculations. I always kind of consider it kind of an upkeep cost where the players are probably going to spend around the same amount of what they find to rest up and restock after the adventure.

I'm also going to leave out legendary items as they'd be the goal of some kind of grand quest. They're not found very often or randomly.

So, in a given adventure I'm probably going to assume about 20 rooms or so. This would be something that in my experience would probably take 2 or 3 sessions to cover. If you assume one third to half those rooms have treasure, but only about 25% of it is probably found by the players, that gives you approximately 5 treasure caches. This seems like a good amount of an average adventure.

Now I'm going to assume 3 of those caches have Treasure Items in them, and 2 also have Exquisite Items. Given the average value of all this it works out to be this grants a total of 12,650.

Split five ways for an adventuring party of 5 this equals 2530 coins at the end of the first adventure. Rounded to 2500, I think this is a reasonable amount and all the numbers I've used so far in these calculations kind of reasonable in the sense that the players aren't finding goblets worth 1000 or giant gold statues only worth 100 coins or some such thing. There feels like there is a proportionality to things and the numbers make sense given our modern understanding of money. 2500 coins kind of feels like a good amount for the average 'paycheck' for a dungeon crawl. Nothing that's going to let you retire but enough to let you live the high life for a bit before becoming desperate enough to go on another adventure.

I'm going to use this baseline of 2500 coins for what it takes to go from level 1 to 2 as I think characters should advance to 2nd level after their first adventure. I'm using a standard adventuring party of 5. Most of my players frequently begin a campaign with two characters but I find they'll tend to gravitate to one of their characters over the other so it's up to them if they want to level one faster than the other.

From here I'm going to increase the amount required each level but also pay attention to how many sessions of adventure it would take to gather that much if :

2500 individual share = 20 rooms = 3 sessions.

Worked out this grants the following:

Level	Total XP	Diff. XP	Diff. Sessions	Total Sessions
1	0	0	0	0
2	2,500	2,500	3	3
3	5,000	2,500	3	6
4	7,500	2,500	3	9
5	12,500	5,000	6	15
6	17,500	5,000	6	21
7	22,500	5,000	6	27
8	30,000	7,500	9	36
9	37,500	7,500	9	45
10	44,500	7,500	9	54

So, to reach level 10 one character would need 44,500 coins and a party of 5 adventurers 222,500 coins. While this doesn't seem like an astronomical amount the main way for players to get it is from dungeon crawling not from domain level play (which I dislike). Doing so, would take them approximately 54 sessions. Assuming 1 session per week this whole process would take a little over 1 year. The first 5 levels in three months and three weeks, the remaining 5 levels the rest of the year. 

All this is also assuming that the players do not get XP and their treasure. They get it for their treasure. In my games they have the choice of either spending their money on buying things like hirelings and equipment and other bigger ticket stuff like gypsy wagons or horses, or converting it to XP. This would further slow XP gain a bit as there are probably times when they are going to want to spend 5k or so on some elaborate scheme or another. There would also be wasted XP invested in characters who die, or if players choose to level multiple characters at once.

I have not tested any of these presented rules and all my calculations are kind of back of the envelope and rough, but overall I think most of my assumptions are fair and it all kind of ensures that players can reach higher levels through actual play in a reasonable number of sessions and not just DM fiat. 

I also think having five major caches per 3 session adventure is fair and an easy thing to remember. For most rooms the players will be finding small amounts of coin and equipment. But then once or twice a session they find a major cache of treasure. They have to try and discern what 'tier' it's in (fake treasure like glass gems could pose a further challenge) and right before they go to sell it, I randomly roll to ascertain it's true worth.