Playing a game, solo, can be a great experience. It is no replacement to playing with a group or within a club, but it can be rewarding and can give the player an in-depth understanding of the system. Though not all aspects of play translate directly to Solo Play, as they sometimes require a Referee to be unbiased but purposeful. This post, will be discussing Treasure & Experience Points for solo play for OD&D. This can translate directly to B/X and AD&D or any game that rewards treasure for experience points similar to those.

OD&D and AD&D makes it abundantly clear that the placement of treasure needs to be thoughtful and purposeful. You should NOT stock an entire dungeon with the treasure tables provided in those games. They are filler – a little extra the players can find until they find the real treasure.

It is a good idea to
thoughtfully place several of the most important treasures, with or without monstrous
guardians, and then switch to a random determination for the balance of the level.
– Dungeons & Dragons Volume Three: The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, 1974, pp. 6

If we were to use the treasure tables found in OD&D for example, we would find very little experience points along our sessions, perhaps we are lucky and roll on jewelry, but this averages out every 50 rooms or so in the upper levels. If you are interesting in running large megadungeon scenarios, then feel free to use the tables. But if we are not interested in megadungeons and would rather explore smaller dungeons with a challenge appropriate for the reward?

In Solo play, it can be difficult to determine this in a way that we can be thoughtful when we are determining our challenges through dice rolls. We could determine the treasure before hand that we consider important along with a monster that offers a challenge for said treasure, but that would take away from the experience of randomly exploring a dungeon and being surprised by our results. The solution would be finding a reward that is fair, unbiased and appropriate for the monsters we randomly determine through dicing – The challenge is random; the reward is consistent. To do so, just do the following.

Determining Treasure

Use any method of determining a room’s content you find consistent. Here we are assuming OD&D distribution of Monsters and Treasure where every 2/6 rooms have a monster, every 3/6 times they are guarding treasure, and every 1/6 times an empty room has treasure.

• If the room is Empty but holds treasure, roll on the treasure table of that level of the dungeon. There is no challenge.
• If the room has a monster but no treasure, determine the monster by randomly rolling on the wandering monster table or create a wandering monster table for this dungeon. The number of monsters encountered correspond to the number of party. As a general rule, they would encounter as many monsters as PCs. With the exception of notably stronger monsters compared to the PCs where they would encounter only one monster. Example, a party of three 3rd level characters would only encounter 1 Troll.
• If the room has treasure and is guarded by a monster, determine the monster same as before. The treasure that is found is 3 times the amount of the monster’s xp value. Using the same example as before, the characters slay the troll in his lair. The troll is considered a 7 HD monster, therefore would reward 700xp for slaying it. The troll would hold in his lair 2,100gp in any shape or form you wish to determine.

This resembles the passage in B/X where it says that players should expect 1/4 of their experience points to come from slaying or outsmarting monsters while the rest comes from treasure. though I’ve opted for a 3:1 ration because it comes closer to Gygax’s expectation of rewards along the course of a year of play.

For those that may have noticed and are far more familiar with AD&D, you know that a single troll does not give out 700xp but something along 350xp. In which case you can either still use the 3:1 ration (it will be considerable less treasure) or just calculate it as if they were using OD&D XP: (HD * 100) x 3

It goes without saying, you can also use this method when considering how much treasure you could reward the players for an encounter, if you are refereeing for a group. Use it as a guideline, not as a hard fact. Be thoughtful about the treasure you give your players and the magic items you give out.