[ThegreatBen]

I hated how characters not in the party never gained any exp, since the main character is forced on you I figured the easiest way to remedy this is change the pointer for each charcter's current exp (I assume its stored in ram) and have it point to the main character's.

the question is how do I find the location of a ram value and how do I find the pointer for it?

[FAST6191]

If the game gives a current experience value then you can search for that. If you can gain experience then fight, try not to use items, do a scan afterwards to see what increased.

That said assuming you are after the SNES version then someone has already figured out things for you
http://datacrystal.romhacking.net/wiki/Breath_of_Fire_II:RAM_map

The pointer may not be in RAM and may instead be in the ROM somewhere, or read from the ROM. That said as you know the RAM address you would probably tell a debugging emulator to do a break on read and break on write to the experience location. That might not immediately give you it but it will give you the instructions leading up to it and you can go back, trace if you will, up through the code.
Assuming you are indeed using the SNES version though it seems some of the work has already been done
http://datacrystal.romhacking.net/wiki/Breath_of_Fire_II:ROM_map

Were I to hack it on a modern system I would probably do something with a slide code, though with a bit of asm you can probably make it add to each character. Though at the same time if it does do only in active party then 7E:5050 - 7E:5053 and 7E:5054 - 7E:5057 detailing your party might be involved as a middleman.

With that said if a misgiving you have is a forced character then "7E:51E4                    Bit setting for PC availability or Valerie." might be of interest.

[STARWIN]

I'm not familiar with this game, but..

Do they all start at the same level? If not, you'll be rebalancing that part.

These things are usually closely tied with the level up code.. instead of repointing, you could make level ups happen only for the main character and in the level up code go over all characters instead of one. The EXP counts would get messed up for the others though, requiring some simple workaround for cosmetics at least.

[ThegreatBen]

Unfortunately I'm playing the gba version, conveniently all the data is stored exactly the same way as written in the data crystal, though obviously not at the same offsets.

On the snes version you could apparently take Ryu out of the party by editing the 5th byte of his character data in a save file, but on the gba if at least one character doesn't have that byte set to 40 the save won't load, being able to remove Ryu to be able to level evenly would be an acceptable solution, I can probably make a GS code for that.

[ThegreatBen]

So I didn't end up going with the original plan, but the information in the data crystal was immensely useful.

Made a code that let me take Ryu out of the party (really useful)
Made Tiga beatable.
allowed myself multiple tenants in each house.