When you keep one member of your party at level one, so as not to get an experience reduction, does that party member need to be alive? Is the experience reduction based on the average level of your party members, or just of your living party members? Can you just drag a corpse behind you, like a character from a Sergio Leone film, and get the same effect? What's a cleric? Do you think I ask to many questions?

Reading my post, it seems like a bit of an insane rant, so I'm going to clarify what I meant:

It is possible to avoid getting a reduction in experience from weaker opponents by keeping one member of your party at a lower level than the rest. Will this still work if the low level character is dead?

You will get more xp, but I'm not sure if he's dead.

I kept two level 1 with me, I just left them at entrances.

They'd have to be kept alive, wouldn't they? If you could avoid XP reduction by carrying dead characters, I'd think we'd have heard about it from some smartypants going solo but carrying 5 dead lvl 1 characters along.

Are you certain, or is that an educated guess? Do you know for sure that is how it works?
I stupidly deleted my old games, so I can't experiment to find out. If someone could find or direct me to a table of experience gained relative to level of party/level of enemies I would be much appreciative.

Nope, just a guess by me. I can't believe that if that tactic was exploitable we wouldn't have heard about it by now.

I discovered an infinite exp bug in the first IWD which I've never seen in any walkthrough, so its not impossible that we wouldn't have heard of it. Anyway, I think I once read somewhere that you could use dead lvl 1 characters to get more exp, so I started a game with 3 dead people. (well they didn't start out dead... *evil laugh*). I'm not sure if it's working because I don't know how much experience I'm supposed to get. Should a level 7 party get full exp for killing an orc?

Experimented by bringing one of my dead peeps back to life. They need to be alive.

That would make sense. A fallen commerade doesn't earn any xp so your party level would be higher with a dead level 1 character.