I was wondering if someone could help me balance out the base archetypes with the advanced ones.

I understand that advanced archetypes are more powerful and specialized then the base ones. I've read that some folks say that because of this specialization giving the bases classes the full 3600/4600 xp to catch them up isn't really balancing. Plus, not giving them the 1000/500 bonus xp isn't enough.

I've looked over the boards, and now I'm more confused then when I started. Exactly how much xp should I give new characters to catch them up with players choosing the advanced archetypes?

A more general way of asking I guess is how have you other gm's handled reconciling a party of mixed advanced archetype characters and base ones?

Thanks in advance.

So... I'm playing in a game in which there are 5 players, a Renegade (me), a Magos Idolitrex, a Frost Father, a Chem Hunter, and a Chaos Champion. There hasn't been any XP-equalizing in the game. I had 1k xp at character creation, and the Chaos Champion had 500, and the other three had none. So far I don't really feel like we're stepping on each other's toes, and I feel like I do my work in combat. Ironically, among the three characters with a big focus in melee combat, we ran some mock battles while we were waiting for the GM to show up once, and it was a rock paper scissors kind of thing - my Renegade could beat the Frost Father, the Frost Father could beat the Chem Hunter, and the Chem Hunter could beat me. All of us chop up NPC's like so much lunchmeat, however. I guess what matters most is that we don't try to actively step on each other's toes in terms of 'my character could do everything your character does, nyah nyah' kind of behavior, and the roleplaying is kept real and integral.

Fundamentally, if you have players who are set on being dicks to the people they're gaming with, they're going to find a way to be dicks regardless. My suggestion is to put it forth to your gaming group when you sit down for character creation, assuming everyone's familiar enough with the system, and see what people are comfortable with.

And you can also give them less XP (The Advanced Archetypes) or more XP (the normal Archetypes) from the begin with.

My problem is, more or less, that the normal Archetypes only have 1 special ability while the others have 2.

I solved that problem by giving the normal Archetypes one Gift of the Gods from the begin.

Hmm... I didn't think about the special abilities. I'll keep that in mind. I like the idea of lowering the advanced and raising the basic, I'm definitely going to do that. I imagine that since the party will be playing completely different roles (the players usually do in our other games.) Balance won't be a huge issue regardless, that too, was an excellent point. Thank you both!

To balance characters on this matter, i gave human base archetypes the following: 5000 XP, 1000 of which were spent by the player, 4000 were spent by me. On these 4000 XP, i used some to raise Infamy and Corruption on par with advanced characters (arbitrarily costing this 1000 XP), and spent rest on various skills (never above a +10 bonus, generaly only at a +0 level), thus extending the versatility of the characters, and a few talents that would fit the character background.

I used a variation of this for chaos marines.

So far, it works pretty good.

Tristelune - that's hardly balance. To keep up with an advanced archetype, you'd need some talents and characteristic increases.

This is a tricky one because "balance" is a slippery beast at the best of times. I've not played that much BC, but in my experience psykers wipe the floor with pretty much everybody at high power levels *anyway* in most 40KRPGs.

I've seen it suggested elsewhere that 3500 extra XP actually makes "standard" Archetypes *more* powerful than Advanced Archetypes, because the AAs often just aren't that well designed to begin with. I understand, for example, that the Khorne Berserker isn't anywhere near as powerful a melee fighter as a well built Chosen on 3500XP.

As Terraneux suggests, there's an extent to which balance all comes down to niche protection. As long as your characters aren't all stepping on each others' toes, the precise numbers don't matter so much. If your standard Sorcerer is doing more damage in melee than your Khorne Berserker, that might be more cause for concern.

The hard fast rule based on the 'roughly equivalent' guidelines of the Tomes (humans with an additional 4600 xp and csm with an additional 3600 xp) is this:

To bring a Human Core Archetype up to Human Tome Archetype power: 1000 starting xp + 4600 additional xp = 5600 total xp .

To bring a CSM Core Archetype up to CSM Tome Archetype power: 500 starting xp + 3600 additional xp = 4100 total xp .

Not unexpectedly, there are inherent imbalances between the various core archetypes, tome archetypes and races. As mentioned, a khorne berzerker (which doesn't even have swift attack, the hell?) won't be as powerful as a thousand sons sorcerer, and a frost father won't be as powerful as a magister immaterial. Of course, such things differ a bit depending on how you subjectively value different things. In my opinion the night lord and berzerker special abilities are crap, while the magister immaterial and TS sorcerer special abilities are pretty nice. Then there's starting equipment too that differ. A magister immaterial gets a force weapon while a psyker gets scarce items at most.