B/X XP Table Percentages

In earlier editions of D&D, characters level at different rates. A 2nd level Magic User is more powerful than a 2nd level Fighter, and so requires more XP to become level 2. According to the tables, a 2nd level Elf is almost twice as powerful as a 2nd level Fighter.

I’m not here to argue if this is good design or not or if these numbers are good. I simply wanted to take the XP tables, extract the numbers, and see what percentage each was worth. How much more % XP does a given class require?

I used the Fighter as the baseline, of course, because they’re even and middle of the pack.

Might replace this with a table insert later.

Some of them move around, like the cleric and thief. Others are fairly consistent. But if you wanted a simple modifier, here’s one:

Magic User: 125%
Cleric: 75%
Thief: 60%
Dwarf: 110%
Elf: 200%
Halfling: 100%

Using these percentages, you can very easily make your own XP tables. No longer are we chained to the exact progression Gygax made. For example, here’s a fun experiment: Let’s take the 5e XP values (up to level 14), apply them to the Fighter, and extrapolate from there:

The next step would be, of course, to figure out what percentage the Fighter table is between levels, as it’s mostly variations of doubling. Once we do that, it’s trivial to simply take the amount the Fighter needs to level up to level 2, and from there, we can literally extract the entire level up table. Like so:

Entire XP tables based off the Fighter needing 100xp to level up to level 2.

Now, probably shouldn’t be that low, for a proper B/X or OD&D game, especially if you’re using 100xp per HD base for monsters. (In the future this will probably link to an article; I’ve got some words to say!) But, if you’re only awarding XP for gold, or XP in some other fashion where you are as arbitrary as you want to be, maybe these numbers look pretty good?

Wanna play around with it yourself? Here’s a link to the Google Sheet. Copy for your own reference. Place the XP value to level up to level 2 in cell B3 (the green one) and the entire list will auto-populate. If you’d like more hands-on control of between levels, just put them in column B and the rest will autopopulate.