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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AaronOfBarbaria" data-source="post: 7030107" data-attributes="member: 6701872">I would say "What Darkness said", but I feel like elaborating because I'm not ready to trundle off to bed just yet... so here goes:In most games (both meaning systems and campaigns/stories) I prefer to keep all the characters at the same point of progression. Not for any real reason beyond a lack of intentionally creating a disparity, and because I don't generally think that things that cause experience disparity like missing out on a session need to have more of an impact on the player's experience than that they weren't at the table having fun that night.In certain systems, however, level disparity happens naturally and I don't worry about it (i.e. AD&D, where even if I keep all the characters at the same experience total, they might differ in level by 1-3 levels or so).But only in very rare cases do I intentionally allow or create disparity in characters' advancement. The only ones I can think of currently are Call of Cthulhu (where advancement is all about what your character did well during a scenario, and luck of the dice) and HackMaster (where there are different strategies a player is in control of choosing, such as having 100% of the earned experience applied to their active character and just hoping they never end up dying, or splitting some earned experience off to a protege so that if their active character does die their next character will already have more than 0 experience). The reason why being that I feel the advancement style is a significant part of the flavor of the system, and the reason I run more than one system in the first place is because I like a variety of flavors, but not when they are all blended together.</blockquote>

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