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Message: <blockquote data-quote="chriton227" data-source="post: 3661410" data-attributes="member: 33263">I was working on adapting a published adventure to fit my current party and stumbled into a mess in the rules.  The party is a bit large (7 players), so I was going to bump up some of the NPCs by a level or two.  I went to the books to find out what their new gear value should be, and that's where I found the mess.In the Monster Manual, Chapter 4, under "Monsters and Class Levels" (emphesis mine):Also in the Monster Manual, Chapter 4, under "Advancing Monster Challenge Rating" (again, emphesis mine):The way to determing ECL is defined in Chapter 6 of the DMG as:If I'm reading this correctly, NPC Class levels are always considered non-associated, overriding the rule that non-associated class levels become associated class levels once they equal the original HD, otherwise for a 1HD humanoid (like humans, dwarves, orcs, etc) NPC Class levels would never be non-associated, which doesn't match with the MM entries which list Hobgoblin, Dwarf, and Orc Warrior 1s as CR 1/2.If this is the case, then a Hobgoblin (LA+1) Warrior 16 would be a CR 8, would be an ECL 17 (16 HD + 1 LA), and would have gear valued at 100,000 gp (per the NPC Gear Value table 4-23 in the DMG).  A Hobgoblin Fighter 8 would also be a CR 8, but would be an ECL 9 and would have 12,000 gp in gear.   Something there seems really out of whack.  The War16 will have worse ability scores (being on the nonelite array instead of the elite array like a PC classed NPC), but the 88,000gp difference is more than enough to pick up some stat boosters to compensate for that, it will have a BAB of +16 instead of +8, better saves, more HP, but 2 fewer feats. While the War16 would be a bigger threat than the Ftr8, I don't know if it would be enough bigger to warrant getting over 8 times the treasure (and no more xp). The specific occurance that really called this out to me was looking at a Hob War6 (CR3, ECL7) vs. a Hob Ftr5 (CR5, ECL6) and realizing that the warrior "mooks" were going to be better equiped than their fighter leader.My gut instinct to correct this (assuming that it needs correcting) would be to consider NPC Class Levels as only 1/2 HD for the purpose of gear, after all it would make sense that a Fighter 6 would be better equipped than a Warrior 6 (and definitely better than a Commoner 6).</blockquote>

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