Play Unearthed Arcana rules and you can start your Cavalier at level -2 for maximum good times 
A fascinating concept, and I don’t see any reason it couldn’t be applied to other games.
Well obviously you tailor the actual levelling speed to where you want/need it. It’s perfectly OK to have the group go through several large plot points and/or axing multiple SemiBig Bads without levelling up once they’re in the teen/high levels ; whereas at very low levels you might want to hand out one You Feel Stronger! per session.
Doing more in what way ?
There are plenty of ways to reward e.g. roleplaying effort or good ideas beyond “you get to level up fifteen whole minutes before everyone else !” :), be it in the form of social bonuses (“that guy now owes you a favour”, “you’ve made a fast friend” etc…), sneaking a little magical trinket tailored to their character in the next loot pile, fudging a handful of dicerolls in their favour unbeknownst to them or granting them one-time rerolls… you know, Roleplay Karma ! 
3D6 and you get to place the numbers in what abilities you want. People should be able to play the class they want to play.
Unless of course, you don’t play these games for the “sense of accomplishment” of somehow “defeating” an “opponent” who can literally kill you at any time or set up an unwinnable situation, etc.
Actually, this much is incorrect. The primary way of getting XP in older versions of D&D was loot. Yes, you got XP for killing stuff, but in general, the great majority of your XP was from that old, weird chestnut of “1 GP = 1 XP”. Oldschool D&D was basically a heist game (Though I don’t think many people realized it) - the objective was to go in, get as much money as possible, and get out while engaging with the minimum possible amount of stuff (and that includes “while engaging the actual game rules as little as possible.”). Which, frankly, to me, sounds like the most awful and uninteresting way to play a game ever, but that’s what the original encouraged.
This is ridiculous. If you’re going to say “Just keep rolling characters and have the ones you don’t want stay in town!” then why not just let everyone bloody well pick their stats? This is like playing those old roguelikes like Angband where your stats were random, but you could push “reroll” as many times as you wanted until you got the stats you wanted. It’s a complete busywork waste of time.
There is a game called Tenra Bansho Zero which essentially bases the entire “advancement” scheme of the game on a principle like this. It has a few checks (though I hestitate to the call them “balances”) and it is completely awesome. It is, however, so completely and fundamentally different from D&D nearly ever possible respect that it’s not really worth trying to compare them.
Sure, but in the early game a kobold might be worth 10xp (or whatever) but has 3 copper pieces in his wallet. Or you’re fighting vermin that has no loot. Unless your DM was in the practice of putting 1,000gp gems in the goblin’s sock drawer or was extremely generous in the resale value of rusty daggers and splintered clubs, most of your early xp came from killing things until you advanced far enough that the loot portion outweighed the “10xp per sword fodder” portion.
This is a fairly meta discussion at this point. I never played old-school D&D this way, despite countless misspent hours engaged in the game; nor did I ever hear of anyone else playing this way; nor did anything in any of the many manuals and splatbooks I purchased encourage this sort of behavior; nor did I ever read an article in Dragon magazine recommending this style of play.
You’re correct that this would be a way to play that might lead to rapid advancement, but I don’t think it’s correct to call it the “objective” of the game if almost nobody played the game that way. Especially since nobody would have enjoyed the game that way, and since a DM who saw players attempting to play this way could easily put a stop to it within the rules in order to have a more fun play experience.
There was a 1gp = 1xp rule although most groups I played in ignored it because it led to too rapid advancement and was pretty nonsensical (“Hey, we found an ivory statue so now we’re all better at fighting!”). But it was the stated rule. I’m sure someone turned that into “Steal all the loot without hurting the monsters”.
However, at lower levels you weren’t getting anywhere near 1gp for every experience point worth of rat, bat, goblin, kobold and giant centipede killed unless you had an usually generous DM. At 200cp = 1gp (1st Ed AD&D) you had to collect a lot of Treasure Type Suck to make progress that way.
Why would they recommend it if the assumption was that is how the game was played? It would be like a Monopoly magazine suggesting that “maybe you should try to earn more money that the other players.” or something.
And besides, if you’re talking about Dragon Magazine (As opposed to “The Dragon”) you’re already pretty much past the period under discussion. In fact, if you’re talking about “Splatbooks” you are WAY past this era. But this is the time period when everyone is talking about when they talk about this “Old School Renaissance” of playing “The way Gary intended”. The fact that you never heard of anyone playing this way really doesn’t mean anything, because D&D through the 80s was full of isolated communities who were practically playing completely different games. There was no internet to get everyone on anything approaching the same page, and lets face it, the rules were pretty ass and more or less told GMs to do whatever anyway. The fact that a given group ignored rule X has no impact on how the game was “supposed” to be played.
And unlike most of the rules, 1GP=1XP was pretty clear.
Once again, I don’t really think you have any data on how most people played.
Wow, now you are just making stuff up. o.o I mean really. You are SURE that NOBODY would enjoy a game about using their wits to get money instead of risking getting killed for it? Really? Because there are tons of people playing that way RIGHT NOW (See the aforementioned “OSR”) apparently of their own free will.
The idea that somehow this play experience is not fun remains baffling to me. Why would the GM deliberately try to squash this playstyle? So that they could kill more level 1 characters that happened to get into a fight with a goblin and get hit for d6 damage? The game ENCOURAGES this. You SUCK at level 1, and the only way to avoid the consequences for sucking is to avoid engaging with the game mechanics.
I mean, look at Tomb of Horrors, or White Plume Mountain. They are basically exercises in not engaging with the rules, because if you do, it will kill you. It’s all about being “smart”.
I think lots of people are having trouble thinking of this from the perspective of the era.
Again, the point isn’t “without hurting the monsters” the point is “Without giving the monsters a chance to hurt you, because they hurt you, you are probably going to die, and a dead character gains no XP.”
I dunno. If there’s a couple hundred GP worth of loot at the end of the entire dungeon and you’ve managed to mostly avoid fighting stuff to get there (which would have killed half the party, because lets face it, getting hit for d4 damage when you have d6 hitpoints is a fast way to die) then that’s a lot better than risking getting killed for 10XP. I mean, if you look at Keep on the Borderlands, which is pretty much the archetypical adventure from the era, being Gygax and all, the EXAMPLE for how to divide XP is:
It’s especially telling if you keep reading that example, and you discover that this party, in the course of recovering their (apparently, I’m not checking the math here) 340 XP (each) worth of non-magical treasure, apparently is supposed to have earned 117 XP for killing monsters.
This D&D as Gary wrote it, folks. Horse’s mouth and all that.
Edit: Boy, this module is FULL of stuff that proves this point. The “leader rat” (you can’t make this stuff up) in room 2 of the kobold lair has a “necklace” worth 400gp.
Hold up–I was taking as given a lot of stuff you said. Now you’re questioning it when I say it. FOr example, I don’t think YOU believe that was the assumption about how the game is played, given that you said,
I was reading Dragon Magazine for many years of 1E play. That’s the period under discussion. You’re right about the splatbooks, though.
Again, you’re the one who said that not many people realized the game’s objective; I was taking it as given that you believed not many people played that way.
Okay, if data is necessary, where’s yours?
You’re being far too literal here. I don’t mean that not a single human being would have enjoyed the game that way, and I’m pretty sure you know that’s not what I mean. I mean that most people, like you, would think that the game played that way would be
What? If it’s baffling, why the hell would you say that you thought it was the most awful and uninteresting way to play a game ever?
I’m having no trouble at all thinking of it from that perspective, because I gamed in that era, and I have a lot of friends who gamed in that era. We never treated the game that way (well, except in a very few specifically heist scenarios I can think of). We always played the game as a primarily combat game. I spent a decade moderating ENWorld, and spent a fair amount of time talking with folks about their gaming backgrounds. I never heard of anyone playing 1E in the way you’re describing–that is, treating the game at low levels as an exercise in avoiding combat in order to gain loot.
This is a remarkable claim you’re making, if you’re actually saying that a significant number of people played that way. Did you play that way? Did your entire group play that way? Have you talked with others who have played that way?
If your only claim is that this is an unintended consequence of the rules and was generally ignored, I agree. But your claim now appears to be much stronger, and I think it’s a fairly silly one, if you claim that a significant number of people played in order to take advantage of this aspect of the rules.
Indeed, I apparently was not clear, because you are conflating “what the game was supposed to do” with “how people played it.” I am not saying that tons and tons of people played it this way - though it’s certainly possible, because neither you nor I have any perspective on how it WAS played by “most people.” But if you look AT THE GAME, the gameplay it creates, if you play it as written, discourages fighting. It’s just that simple. The game has evolved into a combat game, but early D&D A) Did not reward combat as much as getting loot and B) Was exceptionally lethal if you engaged in combat. As a result, it’s a bad vehicle for heroic fantasy, and a good vehicle for fantasy heists. As written by Gary Gygax, the game is, therefore, ABOUT and DESIGNED FOR fantasy heists (or Gary was an *incredibly *bad game designer). It’s not an “unintended consequence” it is an intended consequence that most people never clued in on. Because Gary Gygax *was *a crap writer of game rules. 
Subsequent editions realized that a lot of people to whom this objective had, in fact, never really been communicated (because early D&D basically assumed you already somehow knew how to play - see the earlier comment about G.Gygax being really bad at writing rules. I still don’t understand how the hell this hobby got off the ground.) wanted to play a game that was more like all the other fantasy stories in existence, and thus, later editions started to become more a game about heroic fantasy combat. Which is why you see stuff like “3d6 in order” dropping off the map…until you find all these people today realizing that they actually LIKE playing “fantasy heist” the way the game was written to work.
There’s nothing at all remarkable about this claim. All you need to do is look at what the game and any materials for it from the time period ACTUALLY SAY as opposed to how people tried to use them.
Most “adventuring” is, if we’re being honest. A PC party is basically a bunch of vagrants* breaking into other people’s property, murdering everybody in sight who offends their personal moral code and nicking all of their stuff :p.
- a popular dysphemism for adventurers on another forum I enjoy is “murderhobo”
Doing more in the way of solving the character’s and party’s problems, reaching objectives, and gaining knowledge and exercising skills relevant to the particular character’s class/profession.
Agreed, more or less… although in our case the leveling up disparity might have been more like days of IRL gaming time, many weeks of character time.
I’m not really a fan, because I feel like this is a self-perpetuating cycle. Someone figures out a few good ways to use their character’s abilities to defeat some obstacles, and now they’re ahead of the rest of the party, and have more abilities, so they defeat more obstacles, and so on. I don’t think this kind of thing is a good idea in a level-based game. In a game with more granular advancement, it’s less of a big deal if someone else is 10% ahead of you, but as soon as that becomes “a level” people start feeling like they are playing at a disadvantage.
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Even if players are allowed infinite rerolling, certain character types end up being far rarer than others. Hardly anybody wants to play a paladin badly enough to keep rolling 3d6-in-order long enough to qualify. So we only ever had one paladin. And this was awesome in a bunch of ways. There was also only ever one illusionist, one bard, one barbarian.
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Characters that “stay in town,” as I put it, were actually there in our game (in the game world, if not actually in a particular base town), as NPCs, if no player takes them. They had back stories written (and why waste that?), and relationships and often end up interacting with or influencing the PCs, directly or indirectly. Some became NPC party members/henchmen, or hirelings (on or off expedition). A couple eventually transitioned to being PCs well after being known to the party as NPCs. This was also really fun, and took some of the sting out of the loss of the beloved PCs they effectively replaced.
Uh, just in the interest of clarity–if there are any readers interested in the style of play I’m describing–the characters in points 1 and 2 above are different sets: 1 being from-scratch player-rolled characters (who got their back stories in GM/player collaboration, after their basic stats and facts were established), 2 being GM-generated characters. We always kept a handful of these ready to go on a moment’s notice, mainly for the use of people who had no prior RPG experience and were less interested in game mechanics than character acting (drama students, for example).
Well, first of all, in a very-long-running campaign, involving real risk to characters, it’s almost unavoidable that there should eventually be stronger veteran characters as the leaders and heroes of the extended party. This seemed a realistic and fun dynamic to us.
Also, when there are weaker/less-advanced party members with the potential of gaining rare abilities or filling unique roles, getting those characters what they need can become a party objective itself.
Supposed by whom? Gygax? Arneson?
Simply wrong. I could easily design a game system that discourages fighting. It would look nothing like D&D or AD&D. The game evolved from a tactical mini game, as you know.
Excluded middle. Gygax was a great game designer, a revolutionary game designer. Later designers have built on his shoulders and made games far superior to what he created, but to deny him his due is like criticzing Edison for how inefficient his light bulb was. It’s like saying his light bulb was intended as a cooking element.
This makes no sense. If he was a crap designer, then surely he did not intend this consequence.
This, I think, is true.
As **LHoD **noted earlier, in cases where such large discrepancies happen it can become a self-perpetuating imbalance : characters who hog the spotlight (or are better built than the others, allowing them to do more cool things more often) become more powerful than their mates, which allows them to hog the spotlight or do more cool things more often, etc… which obviously is not much fun for everyone else at the table.