a rulset to handle multilevel partys.

[marli]

There are two reasons for this system.
1. The everybody starts at 1st level feel.
2. The feeling players get of safety, he punish me for my stupidy. As ill just get the same character back with a different name.
3players can join or leave a campaign at will.thier character is put on ice without becoming unusable Later.
I believe this would work with a 50/50 split of XP.

The reason lower characters fail is a core issue of hitting, you can't hit monster s and monsters always hit you. This negates that issue.
Also the way XP curves over time means they catch up.

 

[Noctos]

The reason lower characters fail is a core issue of hitting, you can't hit monster s and monsters always hit you. This negates that issue.
Also the way XP curves over time means they catch up.

what a??
yeah some times dice are broken and should to tosssed out and new one bought.

but my v3eiw is never shouyld a new player start at the lvl of the highest person if that is so then why not kill all week players off and then everyone reroll until we are all lvl 15

no new players should start 2 lvls behind the weakest person. if i was a player been in your game for months and a new guy joined and was stronger than me i wouyld quit

 

[marli]

When I say lower level I mean 4 or more levels.
And characters would not be more powerful tha the original characters.
Lack of powers, kit,feats and surges would ensure that.
The curving XP chart was there for a reason, else encounters would have the same XP no matter your level, just the level differencial would matter

 

[Arlough]

There is already punishment built into the system in the form of lost wealth.
If you create a character at higher level, and do it by the book when it comes to gear (L-1, L, L+1, 100gp), you are behind everybody else in wealth by upper-mid Heroic, and way behind everybody else in paragon.
Even if you were to loot the character, unless the new character is exactly the same, you will need to sell much of the gear at an 80% loss to buy new character appropriate gear, still putting the new character behind the rest of the party. And if the new character is a clone of the old character, or anything else that makes the DM feel that the player is trying to game the system, then you should:

• start having situations where retrieving the gear is either costly or impossible (lava pit, belly of a purple worm, etc.) or
• talk to the player about how "the gods" (you) cause heart attacks in characters who "work the system" followed up by a series of unfortunate cardiac arrests.

I mean, seriously, if the gear is readily retrieveable, then so is the body, and why didn't they just resurrect the character?

Aside from to hit and damage, the effect difference of a level 1 power vs a level 7 power is pretty big, and the difference of a level 1 and level 13+ power is tremendous, from a tactical standpoint. So, if you are keeping someone at level 1 powers for any length of time, you are punishing the whole party. It would be similar to sending a squad of marines into combat, but the medic only gets a raincoat and a revolver cause he is the new guy.

Also, if a character who is, effectively, heroic tries to play with the paragons, he will get chewed up. The paragon path features and powers were accounted for when they calculated the paragon monsters. There is a distinct threshold in power that is crossed.

Finally, if a character is restricted to level 1 items, that means level 1 enhancement bonuses. This means that the character's attack and defenses are still lagging behind the party, making him a liability again. And if you play at all in paragon, the difference in feats is very large.

Now, if you want to create the low level feel for reasons other than punishment, maybe just make it so the character only gets 1 normal encounter power slot and 1 normal daily power slot to begin with (let them keep any Paragon Path and Epic Destiny powers, to offset the tier power difference), and can add an additional encounter and daily slot each level until s/he has the full compliment. It keeps the math simpler, and the powers relevant.
I don't really like this option, but it is less punishing to the party than restricting powers to low level powers.

 

[eriktheguy]

I'm a much bigger fan of the '-1 penalty to everything for one level and some weaker starting equipment' school of thought than the 'different level' school.

 

[Badwe]

I recommend gutting the Living forgotten realms guidelines, but for use in your own campaign.

If you read the guidelines on creating LFR adventures, you can get an idea for how LFR handles things in it's system, where players within a 4 level wide band can journey together. Of course, the item system puts some additional restrictions on players (can only get 1 item per level, can't use items more than 4 levels higher than you), but it basically "solves" level inequity by putting the wealth into the adventures instead of into the players and their levels.

As for level imbalance, the nature of the levels is that the differences between players will quickly evaporate. ie: if every adventure grants 560 xp (the 1-4 high range in LFR) it will take just 2 of those adventures to bump a level 1 character but will take quite a few more for a level 4 to go to 5. You could potentially also create a series of 1-time quests that are often completeable as part of an adventure to give the start-overs a chance to catch up. For example, if your campaign regularly skirmishes with orcs, every PC created could have a 1-time opportunity to collect your traditional "10 orc heads". essentially, for however much XP you allocate to these quests, it will be a static amount of XP that eventually all PCs will have regardless of how many more adventures they've done than someone who died and re-rolled.

 

[marli]

Lfr fails to do what you say. The 4 level wide option gap is actually innate within the balance of 4e.

The reason I think this will work is because it uses the XP slope to allow lower level characters to catch up while giving those lower level characters a survivable build.