I'll get the obious out of the way, EVERYONE, myself included, loves to level up. We all want to get that next ability, feat, spell, ect. With leveling every 3 mods, we get this.
I've also read and heard from other players that they prefer to level very quickly at lower levels, but would prefer to slow down some at higher levels.
The problem starting to arise with my group is the incresing gap between players' levels. With a core group of about 7 players, we almost always have a full party for our weekly session. With these 7 players, there is about 2 who are present EVERY week. We also picked up a NEW player last week. While the previous 2 are at lvl 5, the newbie starts at 1. This newbie will never catch up to the others and is having a difficult time maintaining a positive attitude when he must hang back from the party and avoid combat in order to simply survive.
I know a common suggestion is to have the higher level players create another character, but they love their characters and don't want to start over since their characters are starting to get interesting. I don't blame them.
My suggestion is this, instead of leveling every 3 mods, any given character could level after completing thier level in mods. (i.e. a level 4 character would level after 4 mods, a level 15 character would level after 15 mods.) I think this would still allow for leveling fast at lower levels and slow it at higher levels, while also allowing for lower level (newer) party members to close the gap. It also allows those who want multiple characters to continue playing with the characters who prefer only one.
While I know this probably has mechanical drawbacks or problems, I know my gaming group would like to see this or a similar system created, or at least considered. I'm sure we are not the only group out there experiencing this "problem".
Thank you for your comments and suggestions.
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If you run most of the adventures there should be opportunities for low-level characters to play simply because some of the adventures are for tier 1-5.
I imagine the players you have that are at every session have characters that are perhaps level 8 or 9 by now? If you run some of the tier 1-5 adventures they would need to make new characters which provides opportunity for others at the lower level.
Also, keep in mind the level cap of 12. There definitely should be enough people thinking about starting a second character by now. If they haven't yet, well there will be a time when those lower level main characters will be the stars of future games when people realize they need to start a fresh character because they are capped.