The other night I became obsessed with what the distribution of monster HD was in the Moldvay Basic book. I was thinking that there were way more 3HD creatures than 2HD which seemed strange to me. So I got out a pencil and wrote a list. I got 102 total entries (there was only one that I didn't mark down "NPC Party" because the HD was variable. In cases where the HD was 2+2 I marked it down as a 2HD creature. In cases where a range was included such as 4-6, I would mark it down as a 5HD entry.
Here are the results:
It is a nice distribution with the highest number of 1HD monsters and trailing downward up to 11HD creatures. I'd like to repeat this analysis for the Cook/Marsh expert book and then compare and contrast the two books.
It looks like quite a bit of thought went into the design of how many monsters to include and what ratio of each (approximately) was desired.
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