How to balance lower level characters

[Blackbrrd]

My current group has 5-7 players, with and attendance of 70-100%. The campaign is mostly hack'n'slash on Tuesdays after work so I don't want anybody to feel they are lagging too much in power compared to the other characters. For this I have made two house rules:

To keep them at roughly the same level I found that giving a 100% xp bonus to the ones that lagged worked out very well. (Capped at the max xp for the party)

• It's very easy to calculate
• No extra book keeping
• Lets lower level characters level about once per session

The second rule is that I give them a bonus to-hit/defenses to bring them up to a comparable level with the rest of the group.

The lower level characters don't have the same amount of powers that the rest has, but hit just as often and won't really feel they are lagging particularly much. On the other hand, they see that they are catching up quite fast, but have to work for the XP.

Alternatively I could just have all the characters at the same level, but it's much more satisfying to level in-game than out-of-game.

 

[the Jester]

I found using "catchup" xp worked pretty well: at the start of every session, any pcs that were lower level than the highest level pc present got bonus xp equal to one monster of that pc's level (so if you're 4th level and the high level guy in the party is 5th, you get a bonus of 200 xp right off the bat). Then, whenever there was a "new high" in the party, people got catchup xp again. (So if your buddy hits 5th, nothing happens, as there's already a 5th level guy; but then when the top dog catches 6th level, everyone else gets catchup xp again.)

Your way sounds easier, though.

 

[Mythlore]

I saw a concept that, since you'll eventually end up with 4 different daily powers for use (3 if you don't count the Par/Epic path powers), you can give a first-level character 4 uses of their daily power (or 3) -- but only once per encounter.

I thought about the same concept applying at level 1 for encounter powers -- select two encounter powers, you can use them once or twice per encounter. At level 3, you trade one of those powers out, but can still use it once or twice per encounter. When you have three powers, only the lowest-level one can be used twice per encounter.

However, as for experience, I guess it's a different discussion, now isn't it?