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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8838577" data-attributes="member: 82106">Stock AD&D makes catching up very easy, by design. Since each new level requires ROUGHLY as much XP as all the levels before it, and XP reward is RawXP * Challenge level/Your level, then basically the higher level guys get N XP, and the 1st level guy gets N * Party Level XP, cut off at level+1 -1 XP. Assuming level up happens whenever you 'return to base', and your average PC levels up in say 4 cycles, then if you were level 1 and the party is level 6, you'd catch up in 3 adventures (I mean, you'd be 1 level behind them, doing that last bit of catching up will take a while, though due to variations in XP tracks for different classes and the breakdown of exponential increase towards name level some PCs may never catch up, and others may even move ahead!). I think, in Gygaxian play, it was also expected that most everyone would die, repeatedly, and thus any level skew would tend to get erased. If you were that one player who managed to survive every delve, well then you got to be a bit higher level than the newbs, right? But yeah, something more akin to modern XP tracks that are less exponential and don't vary by class should mostly lead to predictable rates of catching up, but you will likely never totally catch up.</blockquote>