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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5082308" data-attributes="member: 4937">It's not a decent point, it's the only point.  I could make a long list of ways to take treasure from the PC's.  And, the 1st ed. DMG has pages and pages on removing excess treasure from the PC's.  However, if that is your primary approach to the problem of treasure, you are heading toward a highly antagonistic game because the players will rightly percieve you as continually trying to screw them over.  If your primary approach to treasure is to think of every possible way to take it from the players, then your game is already off the rails.  No, not really.  You can get away with it somewhat, but unless you up HD without adjusting the CR upward then all you are doing is increasing the experience point reward relative to the threat.  You can also up the attributes of the NPC's, but this tends to result in making the PC's below average in their attributes.  Generally, I tend to use relatively low amounts of equipment and adjust CR down to compensate, then increase the number of threats to bring the EL back up.When using NPCs to challenge the players the primary way to increase the challenge is to note that the PC's are almost always the agressors and the NPC's are almost always fighting on their home ground.   The primary way to deal with the PC's is through a combination of good teamwork, good tactics, and well prepared terrain.  You want to make sure that the NPC's have a good combination of archers behind cover, brutes that can stall the PC's advance, and low level spellcasters that can debuff and harass the players.The basic tactic(s) for medium sized humanoids is archers behind 90% cover preferably at an elevation, leave some of the archers to ready actions to fire on spell-casters, armored brutes with defensive feats who fight defensively, and low level spell casters harassing the players with spells that steal actions from the players either by forcing save or stun, counterspelling, or by creating difficult terrain between the players and where they want to get.  Augmenting these tactics with basic grenade weapons - acid, vials of flaming oil, etc. - or with seige weapons or traps (that might partially bypass AC), or with low CR tame monsters who have level invariant attacks (attacks that bypass AC like touch attack, or which still have an effect like half-damage even on a save) can give you more umph for a given CR.I would also suggest that if you are going to start fiddling with anything, you are better off fiddling with the CR/EL system than anything else.  In particular, it is my belief that for creatures with very low CR relative to the PC level, adding +2 to the EL for each doubling generates excessively high EL's relative to the actual threat posed.  This is made worse by the fact that NPC's tend to have CR's vastly in excess of the threat that they actually pose.  In particularly, many classes do not in fact have a good level = CR relationship.  Classes like rogue and monk tend to have a relationship closer to CR = level -1.  Even cleric is more like CR = level -1 if the cleric isn't primarily built out for combat.  NPC classes are worse.  I know at one time the suggestion was the CR of a warrior was level - 1.  The real number is closer to level / 2, and for a commoner its more like level/4.  And single NPC's tend to go down hard almost without regard to level.  I tend to be more fond of 2 NPC's at level - 2 per PC if you are going for a climatic fight.  If you have a party of 8th level characters, 32 1st level warriors or rogues isn't really twice as hard as 16, nor is it really even close to being an equivalent challenge to to fighting a CR 11 monster.  It's much closer to a CR 6 monster, because you can expect the party to wipe the floor with them without expending signfiicant resources.Keep that very much in mind when appraising published encounters or in designing your own.</blockquote>

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