I started my gaming career with the red D&D Basic boxed set but AD&D 2nd Edition is where I spent most of my time as a gamer.

Under 2nd Edition rules, a Fighter requires 2000 Experience Points to reach 2nd Level. A Kobold slain in one-on-one combat is worth 7 Experience Points, meaning that a 1st Level Fighter acting alone would have to slay 285.7 Kobolds to level up.

Compare those figures to Dungeons & Dragons 3.5: our Kobold-killing Fighter needs 1000 Experience Points to reach 2nd Level, and his tiny, reptilian prey of choice is worth 300 XP if slain in one-on-one combat. That’s 3.3 dead Kobolds to reach 2nd Level, or 282.4 less Kobolds than it would have taken him to level up in AD&D 2nd Edition.

I’ll always have a soft spot for AD&D, but the insane amount of effort that goes into gaining levels under that system is just one of many game elements that I’m glad WotC has fixed in the later editions. Those who played any PC games in the Baldur’s Gate or Icewind Dale series were given a clinic on the slow pace of 2nd Edition level advancement: arbitrary story-related experience awards were the only means of making those games–and our 2nd Edition campaigns–playable.

4th Edition D&D boasts a finely tuned system. Wizards of the Coast must have tapped some MIT-level talent during the development of this latest edition because the numbers don’t crunch so much as they click. The downside to such a finely-tuned tabletop engine is that it makes it hard to work under the hood without screwing something up (although plenty of third party publishers are putting out fine 4E rules supplements).

I like the cohesive, clockwork nature of 4th Edition mechanics. It helps me focus more on the game setting and the action at hand. Characters in my 2nd Edition campaigns didn’t level up the hard way–there were no 285+ Kobold body counts–but the players probably would have enjoyed themselves more had their characters leveled up with greater regularity. 3rd Edition fixed that problem, along with many others, and 4th Edition has built the entire game system around a model of mathematical consistency.

Gaining levels still isn’t easy, but at least it’s no longer needlessly hard.