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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mark" data-source="post: 911448" data-attributes="member: 5">How is it that one character has ever gotten ahead of the group in experience points in the first place?  Maybe I am not understanding how you run your game in regard to experience point distribution.  Do you divide experience evenly for the whole party?The ideal situation is not penalizing them from the beginning and keeping the group all at the same level.  If a DM always starts characters out at the level of the lowest level survivor how would it be that the group isn't always balanced?  Perhaps I'm not being clear.  I don't mean to say that a replacement character begins at the start of a level, I mean with the same experience point total of the lowest surviving character.There are a few areas where 3E does present a chance for a difference in experience point levels of characters, such as loss of experience with item creation.  Provided the group (or a player) isn't using their character as an item factory, this should be a huge problem.  If one character loses a few thousand experience through item creation, and a couple of the others die, then a few of the characters ar a few thousand experience behind the others.  That's still not a few level gap.In any event, I'd remove the penalty and try to remove the gap.  It doesn't seem to be them who has to struggle with the gap, it seems to be you.As I said, maybe there's a factor I am not figuring into this.  Do you give out arbitrary roleplaying experience awards to individual players?  I've found that unlike previous editions of the game where a DM could get away with that (all the way back to '78), 3E does not support handing experience to some players but not all.If a DM in 3E is going to give roleplaying experience it is best to give it based on teamwork and divide it amoung the whole party even if it has been earned by a single player for a single act of roleplaying.  If the reward is designed to encourage roleplaying amoung the whole group, it should have the same effect and become less about "this guy did well so he alone benefits" and more about "anyone who does well in roleplaying helps the whole group so it's in everyone's interest to follow the example of those who do well."BTW, Did you not find the suggestions to your wealth problems useful?There may be another problem you are not addressing that I found striking from this last post.  How is it that one character rarely ever gets hurt?  Is that character avoiding dangerous situations even when the group has plunged into them?  Would that character's presense have prevented the deaths of some of the other characters?  I've noticed in some games that an encounter designed for a whole group can sometimes be overwhelming when one character holds back...resulting in the deaths of some, or all, of the others.  It's amazing how much the loss of a character through inaction can harm a group.  I'm not saying this is your situation, but give us an example of and encounter where one character managed to avoid any damage even as another character (or more than one) died.*EDIT* Rel - Good stuff! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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