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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kalendraf" data-source="post: 908798" data-attributes="member: 3433">One of the campaigns I DM is around 11th level.  There have been a few character deaths along the way.  In many cases the characters have been raised/resurrected/reincarnated and the character has kept his equipment and other wealth, even if they've chosen to leave the party for good.  This is fine.The problem I'm running into is when characters die, but the party has no way to raise them.  This leads to the party looting the dead character, taking their items and having the player roll up a new character w/ new equipment for their level.  Our house rule is that new characters come back at a half-level below the level their previous character was at.  So an 11th level character death comes back at level 10.5, etc.  A 10th level character has a suggested wealth of 49,000gp.  So a 10th level character death, the subsequent looting, plus the new replacement character w/ equipment winds up leading to a huge influx of treasure for the party - just like they hit a 50K jackpot, all for doing nothing besides having a character die.  Suddenly the party has way more treasure and equipment then a group of their level should have.  In addition to this, the characters' deaths tend to keep the overall party level lower than would be expected, which makes the problem even worse.   Party levels drop, but party wealth continues to increase.This group has been adventuring long enough to merit the characters all being at least 12th to 13th level, and the rewards (gold, magic, etc) have been in line with what is suggested for that level.  However, due to the character deaths, most of the party is only 10th or 11th level.  If I were to add up the wealth of their gear, I bet the value is more in line with what a 13th to 14th level character should have.  All of this is primarily due to this influx of wealth that happens when old characters die and new ones are brought in.The extra magical equipment floating around is making it much harder to challenge this group.  I can try to toss harder monsters at them, but raising the EL's too high can just as easily backfire and lead to more character deaths.  I've found that most EL's at or below their level are way too easy, but stuff just a little above their level quickly becomes too hard.  I guess this is one of the side-effects of this overly-equipped party.  From a DM standpoint, it makes it very tough to properly challenge them as the line between cakewalk and death is now ultrafine.The problem is the equipment itself, but I'm not sure how to deal with the equipment w/o having a bunch of pissed off players.  Simply destroying or stealing these items seems very heavy-handed, but it may be the only way to truly save the campaign long-term.  One of my other options is to just run with it, and hand out very minimal rewards until the party reaches a level worthy of this amount of wealth, but that could take a while, and as I mentioned, finding the right level of challenges is very hard.  Another option is to just start over, but I would only consider that as a last resort.Does anyone have any suggestions on how to handle this?  I'm especially interested in knowing how other DM's have handled this looting of dead PC's, and how they've avoided the wealth problem that follows.  Tips for saving my campaign would be appreciated as well.</blockquote>

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