[RPG] How to balance gradual character advancement for new players vs. trying to keep the PCs at a similar level

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I've been running an Open Table game this summer and it's going pretty well. I normally favor milestone leveling or other forms of keeping all PCs at the same level so I don't have to deal with level disparities. However, that assumes a pretty steady group with occasional absences. Since this game involves constantly adding new people, with no particular expectation of coming to every session, I had a few unusual requirements:

  1. New players (who are mainly new to DND as well as this campaign) start at level 1 and progress through the levels so they can gradually adjust to new abilities and not get overwhelmed.
  2. On the other hand, low-level characters being exceptionally fragile in DND5e, they should advance relatively rapidly toward the level of PCs who started earlier/attend more often so that everyone in the group is of a similar power level.
  3. People who miss a few sessions don't come back to find their characters suddenly different from how they remember them, or need to rapidly level up before they can start playing again.

The obvious solution, it seemed to me at the time, was to just to follow RAW, award XP during play (only for those present), and use the given XP charts for character advancement – I award it a little differently, but the exponential growth in both XP-per-encounter and XP-to-next-level makes it fairly easy to "catch up."

This worked well when the top players were level 3-4 and I mainly wanted to get people to Level 3 quickly so they'd be full-fledged members of their class and not go down in one hit. However, for the fall I'm expecting more new players, as well as some continuing ones, some of whom are well into level 5, and I see some issues emerging:

  1. Advancing at the same pace we have been (one level every 2-3 sessions for those in the lead) will be far too fast for goal 1 to work well – in the time the senior characters go from 5 to 6, newbies will go from 1 to 5, requiring them to get used to more than one new level in a single session. I'd like them to have more time than that.
  2. At the same time, with CR5+ challenges, it will be really tough to keep the lower-level players alive (goal 2) if things turn violent.

Both of these challenges seem likely get more severe as the level gap between new or infrequent players and more established players increases – and since they're somewhat at odds, simply increasing the amount of XP I give out will exacerbate 1, while decreasing it would exacerbate 2. Has anyone managed DND-ish games with big gaps between PC levels, and if so, how did you do it and how did it work out? (I don't really use XP as a reward, only for advancement, so I'm open to totally different systems of character progression if there's one that can achieve the 3 goals I outlined.)

Best Answer

Give them 'phantom levels'

I ran a game a few years ago, where we had a brand new player (to our table and RPGs in general) join our level 7 party. This was a similar situation to yours, as I had to get them tough enough not to get perma-dead by the first enemy they encountered, but they would have been overwhelmed if I had them make a 7th level character.

What I wish I had done in that situation, and what user T.L.D. has done (for previous editions) was give them the HP, Armor, and Weapons of a level 7 character, with the features of a level 1 character.

My suggestion to you is that they start at level 1, but have the HP that their character would have if they were the same level as your lowest leveled player at the table (or the level of the table if that's how you're doing things).

Then give them any mechanical bonuses commensurate to the party's level that do not increase the complexity of their character. This may include:

  • increased proficiency bonus

  • increased HP

  • better armor (magical if appropriate, limited to +1's and +2's)

  • better weapons (magical if appropriate, limited to +1's and +2's)

  • class features that do not induce choice or increase complexity (e.g. Monk's level 6 feature to overcome resistance to non-magical attacks)

Then, after each session (or two), they replace 1 phantom level with a real one. They do not get more health (you already gave that to them), but they add their class features, feats, spells, etc... that a character of their level would have.

This way, you don't have to be afraid to hit them, but they can still learn the character at a normal pace. Obviously, this works best for more martial classes vs casters.

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