RChu1982: When you have dead characters, it ruins their experience. They're not all on the same experience track anymore.
That's only true if they're dead at the end of the battle. If you revive the character *before* the battle ends, they'll still get the XP.
(It's a shame there's no full revive, or revive at high HP, spell in this game, however.)
Also, I believe you can cure draining without an item or limited-use fountain by letting the character die on purpose and then reviving them with a spell. If the death occurs outside of combat (for example, using the fire in Arnika via the spaceshipwreck), then there's no XP loss.
It's also worth noting that one strategy that I've come up with, creating a temporary character to make reaching Arnika easier (like a Speed/Senses Mage or possibly a Fighter) then replacing them with the character I want to use long-term (like a Gadgeteer), will necessarily result in an XP differene.
(Also, I wish games would award XP (or equivalent) to characters who die during battle. SaGa Frontier 2, which I've been playing lately, does the equivalent (like most SaGa games, there's no XP). Dragon Quest 9 awards XP to characters who die, though they can't level up (in fact, when I beat the final boss, my main character was dead, but she gained enough XP to level up; had to win another fight for her to actually gain the level); unfortunately DQ9 also awards higher level characters more XP and lower level characters less, exacerbating any level differences, especially at levels 45+.)
RChu1982: The same can be said if you let Crock kidnap one of your characters. Even if you whack him, the kidnapped character loses experience. I always whack Crock when I buy what I need from him.
Personally, I think that, if I play Wizardry 8 to that point again, I'm going to use a trick I saw in a speedrun that allows you to prevent this. (I think it involves something like quick-saving as soon as you get it before the kidnapping occurs, then quick-reloading immediately afterwords.)
