I haven't tried this, yet, but it looks interesting
. From first glance it looks that characters will advance more rapidly now. Which is of course not a bad thing.
One thing that has bothered me always about DO, is that is takes forever to reach high levels (8 and above). I think this has improved much after the 1.06 patch, but now the stagnation seems to set in around levels 12-14. You mod will certainly change this, good job.
But still there is one problem IMO. Everything in DO is nicely balanced by the game against the starting level of the character. Except one thing: experience for quests.
This was one of the reason to make Hack and Slash. Before the 1.06 patch charcters that completed the Crown of Magis were about 8th or 9th level, if I recall correctly. So I set up the quests in HnS according to that. But the problem is that if your characters level is too low, the quests yield too much. And if you start with a high level chracter, say 14th, the quest EXP don't yield enough. Just like with 8th level characters and Crown of Magis before.
I think it would be a great improvment to DO, if experience for quests would be calculated at game start just like everything else. This way modules could be used by any level of character. Along with a smoother curve for levels, like you propose, it would make the game a lot better IMHO.
I guess it would mean a minor change of the data files or maybe 'Experience for Completion :=' in the quest.txt file could be interpreted by the game as 'Experience for Completion per level :=' (starting level of course, just like everything else).
For example that would mean that a character that started the Crown of Magis at 10th level would get 500,000 EXP for completion, instead of the meager 50,000.
What do you think?
Rollo
PS: Have you tried, yet, if old characters can be imported?