Slowing Character Level Gain
Chapter 7: Rewards of the Dungeon Master’s Guide details the default method for awarding experience points (XP) to player characters. What many DMs don’t realize is that this system isn’t set in stone: you can modify it to reward different character activities, or simply accelerate or decelerate XP gain.
In my campaign, Bloodlines, the PCs are relatively young (generally 17 to 20 years old). When I realized how rapidly these young characters were gaining levels—less than a year of "game time" found most of them 4th or 5th level—I chose to slow down the level gain by halving all XP rewards. This accomplished two effects:
First, it meant that the characters weren’t outstripping their elders quite as quickly as they would normally. I didn’t have to worry about having a group of 20th-level 20-year-olds running around the game. Now in some games, I wouldn’t really care about such rapid progression, but I was aiming for a slightly higher degree of verisimilitude with the Bloodlines campaign.
Second, it let the characters stick around in a range of levels that are particularly rich in encounter variety. Even going back to previous editions, levels 5 through 9 have always been my favorite range to play (though I’m no longer fearful of double-digit levels as I was with older versions of D&D). The Monster Manual is chock full of creatures in the EL 4 to 10 range, and I wanted to have as much access to these interesting encounters as I could.
I made one exception to this rule: Any character who fell more than two levels behind the highest-level PC in the group—whether because of the player’s absence, level losses, or sheer bad luck—would gain full XP rewards until he was again within two levels of the frontrunner. With ten active or semi-active players in the campaign, I knew that we couldn’t (and shouldn’t) hope for full attendance every time. This let those players who couldn’t play as often feel like they wouldn’t fall too far behind for very long.
This illustrates only a couple of reasons for tweaking XP rewards in your D&D game. If you’ve monkeyed with the standard XP system in your game, share your thoughts on our Discussion page!