Five Boxes

AD&D is beautiful in its obscure archaic rules and presentation of said rules. Each class has its own experience track which twists and turns relative to others, growing and shrinking at confusing times, sometimes ending, sometimes stretching off forever. The same can be said for saving throw charts and thaco, the patterns they follow never being quite the same, but always telling a story. Watching a Fighter go from being the worst at resisting effects to being able to stand up to Dragon Breath is an exhilarating journey, as is seeing everyone succumb to evil death magic except for the Cleric of the sky daddy. I personally enjoy gazing at the charts and noticing interesting little anomalies and relationships that form and each tell a story. That being said, its pretty shitty design.

Shots Fired

The giant picks up his boulder and hurls it at Freddy the Fighter and ... Does that hit? Wait I think that I'm out of range of a Frost Giant, but not a Stone Giant. Let me look up their thaco, how many hit dice are they? Did I fail that save vs spell? Give me a min to double check my saves for this level, they might have changed.

Holy shit, way to fucking ruin the moment.

Complicated systems are beautiful to look at and think about, but pretty terrible to actually play. Its why Champions can take the amazing prospect of pretending you're a super hero and transform it into a boring night of wasting time double checking what the DCV adjustment due to speed is for traveling 20 meters per second. Its also why no one in their right mind uses weapon speed or to hit adjustments based on weapon vs AC.

This is someones attempt to make the table make more sense.

DCC brings up a brilliant point when it talks about xp, and that is that there are essentially two types of xp systems: Fiddly systems and not so fiddly systems. AD&D has a super fiddly system, tracking each individual monster killed and gold piece earned to add to an ever growing integer which you may or may not add 10% to and then compare to a table of large numbers. For my Hell game I'm going to use a very unfiddly system. Every time you complete something major, difficult, and time consuming, you get an experience point. Once you get 5 (five), you level up. I even have a bar to make it easy to keep track of.

This is the system I intend to use for pretty much any system involving advancement or keeping track of numbers from 1 to 5. Skills/proficiencies have ranks from 1 to 5 that can be leveled up. Your renound for your unique Body, Mind, and Mouth all rank from 1 to 5, along with people's astonishment at your ever increasing trove of treasures. Your secrets will progress from being incredibly useful to worthless as you tell more and more people, again represented by boxes that are filled in. (this time three)

Its really hard to draw consistently sized boxes.

This system will hopefully make keeping track of your progression simple and clean. It will also hopefully tap into the animalistic part of your brain that likes coloring boxes and filling them up, slowly addicting my players to playing my game, after which I will add micro-transactions and pay-to-win elements so I can eat la vics for the rest of my life.