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[Nonlethal Force]

Originally Posted by Sylrae

Why are you catching up? I mean, I can see you catching up in terms of levels but still being behind in XP.

Well, because a player down a level gains more for group experiences than their fellow mates who are a level higher.

Originally Posted by Sylrae

We were finding people in our games tend to run off and do encounters by themselves, or with one person missing, so the level spread was getting too big between players. Now we award session XP, but not combat XP (when I run it or when other people run it.

Well, that is unique for your games and cannot be assumed by your OP. As for how that balances your system, its kind of a moot point since you don't award XP according to the industry standard. Note, I'm not judging how you do it, just pointing out that it is a variant from how 3.x was set up to run.

Originally Posted by Sylrae

and I should note, having your +2 LA character start at -3000 xp would still catch up pretty fast if they started receiving higher xp for things. When everyone was level 1 they'd get the same xp, but eventually they'd be facing CR 3 monsters and only being level 1, they would catch up fairly quickly in that respect.

If youwere to do as you suggest, then I would even moreso prefer the UA method. If a character who is powered as a 3rd level character is gaining XP as a 1st level character they will catch up very quickly. Too quickly. They will catch up well before their LA isn't really making them all that more powerful. Under that system, you'd be stupid to not take an LA race so long as there was someone in the party that didn't have an LA. It's like getting your cake and being able to not only eat it but somther it in ice cream too.

Originally Posted by Sylrae

And I've played things with an LA +6 and like 6HD before (Succubus - but this is from memory i may be off). youre totally crippled in terms of classes, and it really hard to advance. And the UA rules you'd never work that off. Especially since our campaigns have never gone epic.My Idea, would make the Succubus a level 6 character with 16000 experience debt(assuming youre using them in a 6th level party), and you could have picked up the abilities gradually with savage progressions if you started the game at a lower level.

Yeah, you would never work that off. However, allowing an LA +6 character with one class level to gain XP as a 1st level character would also be unbalancing. They'd make up the gap really fast, and at that point they wouldn't be experiencing much of a penalty for their LA at all. {And I am assuming you meant 15,000 instead of 16,000, right?}

Even if you don't let them gain XP faster than usual, I still think it is a bit unbalanced. Take a level 15 party with one character who has an LA of +6. So they have a 15,000 XP debt. At that level, they are exactly 1 level's worth of XP behind. But what that means is that forevery level above 15 they are going to get to te level of the party before the party gets to the next level. Sure, it is delayed a good bit (like 10 - 13 encounter's worth of XP). But the reality is that you are saying a character with an LA +6 is less than 1 ECL different than a character with an LA +0 at level 15 and above. I'm not sure that's balanced. In fact, I'm pretty confident that it isn't balanced.