Campaign Balance: New vs. Veteran Bands

[Etienne de Beaugard]

Of the various campaigns I've played, almost all have died when two or three of the senior warbands became dominantly powerful. New players would quickly get squashed.

The underdogs rule helps a little, but in many games with an extreme imbalance, the heroes of the lesser warband are often put out of action, leaving the struggling band cash poor and with maimed or dead heroes. The dominant warband, by comparison, gets a bunch of kill XP and bunches of wyrdstone. Both warbands move up in power, leaving the young warband at a roughly equal, if not greater, comparative disadvantage.

The optional underdog rule from Town Cryer was a touch better (that's the one where the underdog gets an army of poorly armed henchmen), but even then, the dominant warband still usually wins, and gets a ton of kill XP in the process.

So, what methods have people come up with to improve on the situation?

On a related note, what do you think is a good rating for a warband to hit mandatory retirement?

[unwanted]

Set 2 beginner-warbands on the throat of a big player?

Haven't actually played in ages, bu with the rules for multiplayer-battles and all, it could be possible to even the odds.

[StefDa]

My cousin and I are working on a rule to fix just that issue.
You get 2d6*X gold after the battle for being an underdog, X being the number of which you are an underdog. If you get +4 experience points for fighting your opponnent, you get 2d6*4 gold crowns. My cousin suggests it should be 3d6 instead, but we'll experiment with it tuesday.

[Boehm]

well without having having playtested it yet ...being only 4 games into our campaign ...we have allowed smaller bands to make joint-attacks vs. more powerful guys ...

edit: Naturally I dont expect to need to make any joint-operations *muhahahah* .. ;)

[Fastforward rlz]

I do think this has been covered in an earlier thread