From the Basic D&D Companion set (1984):

When designing adventures to fit the needs of the characters, you don’t need to guess the proper amount of treasure to place; a bit of simple math will help. Use 125,000 XP as the average needed per level. If you want a group of 4 characters, all level 12-25, to advance 1 level after completing 5 successful adventures, then they will need a total of 500,000 XP to do so. They should earn about 1/5 of it (100,000) by defeating monsters and another 1/8 (62,500) by reaching their goal and performance; subtracting that, the remaining 337,500 must be from treasure. Divide that by the number of adventures (5) and you find that each adventure should bring them 55,000 gp-if they play well.

In both 1e and basic, the vast majority of XP comes from treasure. It’s mentioned in the Basic Red Book and again here: 2/3 or more of XP is from treasure. So almost by definition, an adventurer of level X has earned Y amount of money.

Still, this “wealth by adventure” advice from the Companion set, published a year before Unearthed Arcana, is reminiscent of the 3e “wealth-by-level” calculations. The reason for the advice, though, is far different. In 3e (and 4e), you need to have a certain amount of money to make sure your magical gear isn’t over- or underpowered for your level. In Basic, a massive amount of cash doesn’t make you overpowered for your level – it makes you higher level. These “wealth by adventure” guidelines are for pacing.

Basic D&D decided that one level should be 5 “adventures” long. In contrast, 4e says that one level should be 10 encounters long. I know what an “encounter” is, but I wonder how long an “adventure” is? One prepublished module? One dungeon location? One quest? I’d imagine there’s a lot of variation in exactly how much fighting there is in a single “adventure”; a game session with, say, 3 battles might count, as might a 20-encounter clearing of a dungeon. Therefore, since treasure is doled out by adventure, you could say that the vast majority (80%) of XP in the Basic game is “quest XP”: it’s given to you based on how many objectives you’ve solved, not the difficulty in doing so nor in how many enemies you killed along the way.

If you want to see a hilarious list of bad things that happen to a D&D character, look through the 1e DMG for the word “cumulative”. Gary invented the peculiar mechanic, which as far as I know wasn’t widely imitated in other editions and games, of the “cumulative chance”. If something had a 1% cumulative chance of happening, there was a 1% chance the first time, 2% the second, 3% the third, etc. The cumulative chance was invariably used for calculating the odds of something terrible happening to a PC.

It seems logical to have a bad event become more likely the more times you do something stupid, but “cumulative chance” is strange because normal chance is already cumulative. If there’s a regular old 1% chance of a bad outcome of an action, and you do it 50 times, your odds of triggering the outcome are reasonably close to 50%. (Actually 40%.) If you have a 10% chance of the event, it takes between 5 and 6 times to bring you to 50%.

Cumulative chances accelerate the process in a startling way. A cumulative 1% chance has a 50% chance of having triggered after only 11 uses; a cumulative 10% chance after 3 uses. Cumulative chances give you a pretty good chance to survive a handful of repetitions of a dangerous activity: then, WHAM! Brutal punishment is almost inevitable. Of course, all this is tracked secretly by the referee: the PC’s only clue is the fact that the DM makes a note and maybe gets a pokerface every time he uses the Horn of Blasting. Typical arbitrary cruelty that makes old-school gaming so hilarious.

For your enjoyment, here are some of the appearances of the cumulative chance mechanic from the 1e DMG:

-There always exists a chance of discovery, no matter how simple the mission. The base chance to be discovered is a cumulative 1% per day of time spent spying, subject to a maximum of 10%, minus the level of the spy. Even if the latter brings chance of discovery to a negative percentage, there is always a 1% chance.
[This one is peculiar: seems like a lot of calculation for something that is happening offscreen, and a good argument to hire a level-9 spy. And never shell out extra for a level-10 spy.]

-If continually provoked and irritated in order to get a response, there is a 1% cumulative chance per round that the insane individual will react with homicidal mania.

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