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[Sylrae]

Hmm. While you make a good point, I'm still not persuaded that the UA variant makes LA much less crappy at higher levels.To do a good job of it I'd have to stat out some different characters With LA & class levels and compare them to non LA characters, then play with numbers.

and of course, the hard part is that a melee LA race stacks better with melee classes than a caster LA race stacks with caster classes.

And nope, I meant 16000, cause I was going to make them pay 1000xp for their level 1.

They wouldnt have been getting a higher amount of XP per encounter, they'd just be gaining levels as if they were a lower level.

Maybe instead of having them start at 1, have them start at like 1/2 their LA, and give them an experience debt for the rest... I'll have to play with some character stats and see what I come up with.

But yeah, as for encounter XP, while its the standard, we dropped it so long ago that I forgot most people use it completely. It's great for when the party is always working together on the same encounters.

But when they make regular stops and run off doing their own thing, then getting back together, you end up with characters who get in more combat than others, and those characters end up being a higher level.

Then you get someone who skips games once in a while..

and a Party with a 5th level, 8th level, 9th level, and 13th level character can end up as the result. Now that is hard to DM. lol

In fact, I'm actually shocked that that's not how most games end up, because I've had this happen with 4 groups of entirely different players. Maybe it's because I dont actively discourage it, or that the players have alot of choice in what they do - I think my games might be more open before. Once the players decided NOT to fight the evil marauding orcs attacking a town. They went to the orcs, got a payoff, and left. None of the players in that group had an alignment of good, they were mostly neutral, but I was shocked by it. Then a while later, they attacked the next villains. For whatever reason, they decided not to fight the marauding orcs.

Theyre always adventurers, but unless I tell them they cant be, they tend to come out more as selfish treasure hunters and mercenaries than heroes. That also means the group cohesion tends to be more flexible, and there have been occasions where one player decided they would benefit from another player's death, then carefully plotted it and made it look like an accident...