Time as a Game-Balancer

Finally, remember that time can be used quite effectively to balance a campaign. With it, a DM can prevent an adventuring party from achieving too wide a spread of character levels. If one character is advancing faster than the others, that person's progress can be slowed a little by carefully enforcing the rules for researching, training, and healing. If several people are outpacing the rest of the group, they can be required to go on longer adventures, ones that take more game time (but not playing time) to complete.

At the same time, characters who are lagging in level can have time restrictions relaxed a little. The day-to-day drudgeries go a little quicker for these characters, and their adventures require shorter amounts of game time. This will allow them to undertake several adventures to the other group's one or two, giving the lower level characters a chance to catch up.

Although on the surface such things look unfair, most players will realize the DM is doing this for the best of all players involved.

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