One thing I’ve always found funny in D&D, and other games with strict, linear progression is the idea that your adventuring party is a perfectly levelled squad. Five heroes, all level 3. Then all level 4. Then all level 5. Like a wee adventuring choir, harmonising their XP totals.
But that’s not how characters should develop. Think about your own tables:
- Someone’s character dies and the player rolls up a replacement.
- Someone misses a session.
- Someone nearly dies and plays more cautiously.
- Someone hoovers up every side quest.
- Someone roleplays like a maniac and gets bonus XP.
- Someone is new and joins the campaign late.
In any game that tracks XP individually, you get divergence almost immediately. The only reason you don’t see it in most D&D tables is because groups tacitly agree to ignore it. They use milestone levelling, or they hand out XP evenly, or they just say “everyone levels up” because the alternative is a balancing nightmare.
Think about everything it affects. If one character is Level 7 and the rest are Level 4, the game really starts to creak. First, encounter difficulty becomes a mess. When you do get into fights, the high-level character trivialises them whilst the low-level characters get flattened. Treasure feels weirdly distributed. Spotlight time gets lopsided.
We’re not having a good time.
The system is built around the assumption that the party is a single unit. It’s not designed for the natural chaos of individual growth. So tables flatten progression to keep the engine running.
Many other games don’t have this problem. Look at Vampire: the Masquerade, FATE, Blades in the Dark, Call of Cthulhu, Traveller, Coriolis, Dungeon World, Mörk Borg, SHIVER, whatever. These games don’t care if characters progress unevenly because their mechanics aren’t ladders, they’re toolkits.
In Vampire, your coterie might include:
- a neonate with two dots in Potence
- a 200-year-old monster with Dominate 5
- a socialite who’s spent all their XP on Contacts
- a Nosferatu with Obfuscate 2 and a terrifying reputation
That’s normal. The game doesn’t break. The story gets better. We’re having a good time.
Same with Blades: one character might have three dots in Skirmish while another has none. One might have a special ability that changes the whole crew’s tactics. One might be a walking disaster. It’s fine. The system expects it.
I like this, and am a big believer in non-linear progression that allows player characters to grow at different speed, or just start from a different place. It opens so many narrative options, including mentorship, rivalry, resentment, pride, fear, responsibility, and actual stakes.
Let’s consider the story beats that might arise from this approach: a veteran fighter travelling with a green apprentice is so much more interesting than two Level 5 fighters who ding at the same time because they passed a certain story milestone together. Likewise, a Tremere neonate terrified of their elder is more interesting than two vampires who coincidentally bought the same number of dots this month. A Blades crew where the Cutter is an experienced monster and the Slide is a fragile, up-and-coming schemer is more interesting than a perfectly balanced squad.
Think about any job you’ve ever had, and, for better or worse, you’ll understand where I’m coming from on this. Mixed-level parties are normal. They’re more realistic. They’re more dramatic. They’re more fun.
D&D-esque systems just aren’t really set up to accommodate this kind of individual growth due to their largely linear character progression systems. At best, it’s a flowchart, and it does become obvious very quickly when someone is a couple of levels removed from their peers.
Other games embrace this with point-buy systems and other methods of progression that give more flexibility, more freedom, and less of a general, sweeping uplift from one level to the next.
I know which approach I prefer.
I’ve always sought to vary party level in D&D, and never regretted it. I do think it’s important to ensure that lower level characters can catch up when doing so, but there are lots of ways to do that. One way to ensure balance between players is to run multiple characters with a set level total that players can allocate as they see fit (e.g. everyone plays 2-3 characters with a total of 8 levels between them).