Random thoughts, not necessarily leading to a conclusion.
I don't plan to start a 3rd PC any time soon. Too busy.
I have some sympathy for the idea that we should be using the creation of 2nd, 3rd, etc. PCs to encourage a wider level spread in L4W. My two PCs now are level 3 and 4; I kind of wish it was more like 2 and 7. I have no real idea how to implement that.
One of the problems here is that we find ourselves with a lot of adventure submissions for characters around level 1, and a shortage of level 1 characters. Making 3rd PCs is not a great solution for that specific problem. The reason we should be allowing 3rd PCs -- if indeed we should (I'm mostly convinced, but not totally) -- is because we want them (clearly we do) and we have the long-term capacity for them (not quite as clear).
That said, I don't think 3rd PCs will sink us. We'll get by. Worst case; some of the 3rd PCs will sit in the tavern for a while, drinking quietly. The first person who mentions 4th PCs, though, had better have at least one epic character to their name. Just sayin'.
The problem of a lack of low-level PCs to team up with newcomers, will come back again. I find myself thinking about this problem more often these days than about 3rd PCs. Solving it in a long-term sense would require some kind of incentive for players to retire high-level PCs and create low-level ones. That's a tough sell. I've got a couple of tentative ideas, but I'm not at all sure they'd work.
[sblock=Off topic: how to get players to give up levels]
People are reluctant to retire a level N character and create one at level N-M, because those M levels represent a substantial investment of time. Any set of rules that would incentivize players to give up that time investment, would have to reward them with something of comparable value.
Idea 1: Heirloom items. In Torchlight, if you retire a mid-to-high level character to create a new one, the new character gets effectively a free skill rank, plus one of the magic items from the old character. What if we did it so that if you create a new character by retiring a higher level one, you get one "heirloom" item that's the same level as the old character's highest level item, plus maybe an extra background or trained skill or something. Possibly even an extra feat. The heirloom item would not be considered part of your character's wealth, so you'd be significantly richer than other characters of your level, up until you got to around the same level as where you retired from.
Pros: Gives the new character a significant boost, without breaking the game (IMO).
Cons: Might not be enough of a boost to compensate players for the loss of level. Not repeatable; retiring a second time doesn't give you any real benefit, so it just postpones the problem again.
Idea 2: When you retire a character to create a new PC at level 1, you can transfer the xp you lost to one of your other characters. I could retire Ikni (3rd, 2250 xp) to bump Quagmire from 4th (3750) to 5th (5500+500 left over).
Pros: Strong incentive to retire and start over at level 1; people would probably actually do it if this were possible. Would really go a long ways towards encouraging a wide spread of levels. Repeatable; people could take advantage of this idea over and over again without "wasting" xp.
Cons: Some people could get a big (one-time) boost in xp. Encourages throwaway characters built just to feed xp to someone else. More character turnover ==> more character reviews to do.
The second idea frightens me more than a little, but I think it will take something like that to get people to start over at level 1 alongside new players.
Anyway, enough of that. This is horribly off-topic.
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