Experience Rewards

When I started as a DM, I ignored experience rewards and handed out levels as rewards for accomplishing tasks in my railroads.  I then discovered the OSR and the whole world of online RPG blogging, and my perspective changed, especially after reading this post.  I use a variant of it for my LotFP games, and it has worked very well.

The crux of the rule is that it takes 10 experience to level up, and each encounter (which I define as in a situation in which the character might die) is worth 1, 2, or 3 experience correlating with the difficulty of the encounter (and I have given larger rewards for accomplishing larger goals in the world).

I had to add a caveat to this, however, as it seemed unfair that level 1 and level 5 characters would progress at the same rate.  And that is, at the beginning of each session, I calculate the average character level.  Characters at that level need 10 experience points to level up.  For every level a character is above this average, they require 2 additional experience points to level up, and for every level a character is below this average, they require 2 fewer experience points to level up.

The logic behind this is that the challenges a higher-level party will face is typically greater than that of a lower-level party, so low-level characters who survive such an encounter ought to receive more benefit from it.  Similarly, because they are mentoring and protecting the lower-level characters, higher leveled characters receive less benefit from an encounter, requiring them to get more experience to level up.

The rule has worked very well so far - as my game is often quite lethal, new characters are constantly being introduced and then rushed to a power level more in line with the rest of the group, while the longer-lived characters, who have more experience, don't outpace the rest of the group.