What do you think of games where characters advance at different rates as a balance mechanism?
Let's say that you are playing a game where you are allowed to play as a dragon alongside humans and hobbits and whatnot.
As a dragon, you have great power, but you take a 25% penalty to XP gain, so you level up much more slowly than your friends.
Personally, I don't like the idea.
First off, I think it makes balancing the game more difficult.
Second, I think it's kind of unfun when one person lags behind everybody else in power level.
What are your thoughts on the matter?

What are your thoughts on level caps as a balance for early game power?
Let's say for example that you start out with a character who is initially more powerful than everybody else at level 1, but as it progresses, it reaches a point where it lags behind the other characters in the group.
What are your experiences with mechanics like this?

In AD&D, this approach probably reached its apex with the Barbarian in Unearthed Arcana, though even there it made more of a difference at lower levels. Is this for your heartbreaker? Do you have more context for the question? Why are you interested in using a rule fragment you don't personally like?

Jerry

I think the real question is, what are you looking for in an RPG?

If you want to game, then balance is crucial.  The most extreme form of a gamer is the munchkin or min/maxer.  They will take every advantage they can get.  Think about a game like World of Warcraft.  They have, what, 11 million players?  Very few are dedicated roleplayers, they are far outnumbered by munchkins.  Especially when it comes to player-versus-player combat, balance is in a sense the most important aspect of the game.  Nobody wants to play an "underpowered" character, unless they are specifically looking for a challenge, you know, like beating Final Fantasy 1 with an all White Mage group.  If there is a benefit to one character over another, there must also be a corresponding penalty.  Nobody can be better than anyone else.  In practice, this is impossible to achieve, but you can still get pretty close.

If you want to tell a story, then balance, while important because people still don't want to play "weak" characters, is a little less crucial because players are willing to overlook mechanics in favor of story.  Dragons should be powerful, hence the game mechanics should represent that.  However, good roleplayers will recognize that there are effects beyond those in the rules.  As a dragon you won't have an easy time walking around town or doing pretty much any kind of interaction with humans, except killing them.  An example of this sort of thing is Tzeentch's curse in WFRP.  The gamist looks at the curse chart and says, "If I cast a spell it might make my eyes glow.  Ooh, glowing eyes, I'm so afraid."  The Narrativist (and Simulationist?) looks at it and says, "Glowing eyes could be very bad if I'm standing in the middle of a group of ignorant peasants."  In the same way, while playing a dragon, or a lich, or werewolf, or some similar character, you might be very powerful but there would be disadvantages that go along with it.  Not being able to go near human habitations without someone (or everyone) trying to kill you is a pretty serious handicap.

The conclusion?  Well, dragons are supposed to be strong, so weak dragons would be pretty lame.  Either they shouldn't be playable or they should far outclass human characters, but with any of the disadvantages that come with being a dragon.

Yeah, this is for the OD&D supplement I've been thinking about doing.

Level restrictions and progression rates are a couple of the things I don't like about the system, but I understand that a lot of other fans of the game do like it and expect it. Perhaps if I put this book out, it could include a couple variations of the dragon both for people who want to use different level-up rules and for people who don't.

Slower level progression could be one drawback for dragons for people who want to use such a rule, but I have other ideas to balance them too.
First off, dragons start out as babies at level 1.
Like baby birds, dragons must learn to fly with age. In the earlier levels your dragon is incapable of flight, but it gets better with levels.
Your dragon also grows with age. At level 1 a baby dragon can squeeze through human-sized doors, but takes a penalty when doing so. Larger sized dragons may have to create their own doors and tunnels if they intend to aid in dungeon crawls.
I want to provide rules for using races, including the dragon, without class/race restictions, but for people who chose not to use such rules the dragon may be restricted to a 'Beast' class.
Other than that I'm not sure.
I only want to do this because Men & Magic suggested the possibility of playing as a dragon but didn't really provide any examples of how such a thing could be done.
I mean... I like that the old books encourage houserules and creativity and all, its just that I would have liked to see more advice on how this could be accomplished.

One idea I saw for D&D was that stronger races cost a few levels, eg +2 levels for character creation, BUT later on there was a final XP cost difference that could be paid, and end that. This makes sense in a level based game with levels giving you ever larger gains and needing ever larger xps.

I can see two problems with the levelling speed idea; 1 is that it's pig ugly trying to start a campaign with mid career characters, because you can't just say "level 5 characters". You can say "15000xp characters", but then everyone needs to get their calculators out. It hinders you picking a "teir" of play, as games like unknown armies and now 4e do pretty well.

The other problem has been ranted about elsewhere, which is someone will always be losing out, either the dragon at high levels or the other characters everywhere else. Now this kind of trade-off has been pretty common in rpgs, either on purpose or by accident, so you may be cool with it, but it is impossible to balance those times when the campaign length is unknown.

It's annoying to me because I wanted to build a semi-freeform-char-gen game that allows various races, and I just couldn't work out how to do races with big natural advantages, except to give up balance and make them better! Ironically, the way my system is constructed put exactly the penalty you have described on such characters, and it just popped out of there like it or not! I've come to see this problem very similarly to Egonblaidd.

If your doing an OD&D suppliment, and it's not AD&D, I wouldn't put in that fuss, especially if you don't like it!
In a D&D game we played I combined the level adjustment rules with the npc rules, balanced as if they were of PC-class power, which basically played like your idea. Loads of people have done this, not least WotC themselves, you can probably find quite a bit of stuff on their forums!

I seriously doubt screwing with the level progression is the right answer. I'd think other forms of limits, such as the aforementioned social problems, or just having a weaker dragon who's still feared would be better solutions.

There seems to be two different questions being discussed: one regarding “level caps” and “rate of advancement” and one specifically pertaining to dragons as character classes.

OD&D and AD&D are the only games I can think of, off-hand that had BOTH level caps and advancement rates as factors in game balance (Palladium games all have the same level cap, though it uses different advancement rates).  For AD&D, game “balance” (relating to both in-game effectiveness and “spotlight” time) was often thrown off by other factors: use and accumulation of magic items, cleverness of players, social contract issues, etc. It became a non-factor in most of our long-term games because classes were so specific in their role that it didn’t matter what level cleric you had, for example, but simply “do we have a cleric at all?!”  However…and I may be wrong here…I never thought of the differing XP tables and level caps in AD&D to be attempts at modeling game balance…instead they were trying to model a particular game world.  For example:

- Both dark elf clerics and grey elf magic users have a higher level cap than their high elf cousin…despite having additional extra abilities.  This is not “oh, they have all these weaknesses so they need to get more levels.” No…this is they are already BETTER and can achieve a HIGHER LEVEL because they are better.  Humans (as default) are the most versatile and thus have unlimited level in classes.
- Druids, assassins, and monks all have maximum level…is this because a 14th level druid is better than an 18th or level cleric or because a 17th level monk stands up to a 24th level fighter? Not really…but it models that each of these classes have a limited number of elite (high level) members, with only ONE “grand master” type at the highest level.  This models a particular set of game world assumptions (based on real world martial arts masters, or the Grandfather of Assassins, or the Druidic Hierophant).  If there’s no level cap you can’t have a “one, supreme” dude.

OD&D, on the other hand seems closer to its war-gaming roots, and thus level restrictions are more intended for “balance” purpose. For example, and Elf has all the abilities of a fighter AND magic-user…and so has basically double the XP to raise a level. Dwarves and Halflings (with better saves and some special abilities) likewise have higher level requirements until they start getting out-classed…but then they top out in their ability.

In practice, I have found the balance in OD&D to be pretty darn good, though it can be a bummer for the dude playing an elf still struggling to hit level 2 when others have got to level 3 (but then, clerics, who advance the fastest, don’t get their first spell till level 2).  However, for adding additional class/races to OD&D (and I’d suggest the Pandius Vault for examples) it makes balancing a bit tricky, although not impossible.

With specific regard to dragons: what exactly do you want the class to model?  Personally I always hated the “baby Dragon RCC” in Rifts (though some players loved the idea) specifically because it’s a fairly lame attempt (IMO) at modeling how a dragon gains power.  Dragons scale in power based on age…older ones are more powerful (and singly are more powerful than most any individual character class, save perhaps a very powerful magic-user).  If you want players to have the opportunity of playing a dragon, do you really want them to advance in class levels at all?  Certainly a dragon may get wilier with XP, but would that translate into bigger claws, faster flight, stronger armor, more powerful breath weapons?  And if so, won’t that kind of upstage all the other characters?  Doesn’t it kind of upstage them already (and thus interfere with “play balance” if not “game balance”).

If I was modeling a dragon class, I would probably make the XP rate very high for little rate of return…unless you wanted to consider a 1st level dragon to be a weaker version of the normal “monster” and requiring XP to “grow into” its full potential.  If playing an OD&D game, you’d give it an XP scale 4 or 5 times the average (really necessitating the accumulation of that treasure horde!) and have levels limited by age/size as well…so a young dragon might have a level cap of 5, and no allowance for higher advancement until reaching a certain age. Dragons' spells might be a function of XP/level in addition to age and each level would add +1 HD until the dragon reaches something like “normal monster scale +2” at maximum level (5) for its age category.

[One more note re OD&D and "lagging behind:" again, I find the rules as presented (especially with additional weapon classes in the Companion Rules and Weapon Specialties in the Master Rules) can make any 8th level halfling a doughty warrior...and certainly, they have a quicker road to Immortality as well!]