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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4634311" data-attributes="member: 4937">That's all true, but in my experience its mainly true at the low to medium character levels.  At higher levels, what I tend to see is abusing +EL templates and races (for non-casters) and prestige classes (for all classes).   At lower levels, neither of these is that bad, but at higher levels because +EL is a flat penalty and often adds a non-linear advantage its often the equivalent of being a level or two higher as well as adding relevant advantages stock non-caster classes wouldn't have.  But the biggest problem I've seen is PrC's, and in particular dabbling in multiple PrC's.  Most PrC's that I've seen which are in practice taken are clearly stronger than an equivalent non-PrC build, and alot of PrC's (like alot of classes) are heavily front loaded.  So what I see alot of from people that say CR and EL's are way off is alot of dabbling in either full BAB progression PrC's, or else dabbling in full caster level progression PrC's.  The result of this at higher levels is generally equivalent to being a level or two higher than a non PrC build.  End result, if you start at 35 point buy, have alot of supplements, dabble in alot of unbalanced broken PrC's, start your characters off at 10th level (or higher) so as to open up some of the more broken +EL races and templates, then your higher level characters are going to find equivalent CR level challenges to be cake walks.  Your 18th level party isn't even going to start being challenged by an encounter until the CR hits about 22.  Plus, parties that do this tend to tactically optimize as well, so that alot of their adventuring tends to be of the scry-port-go nova variaty where they expend all of their resources very quickly and then retreat to recover.  In my opinion, that put them in a death spiral of CR escalation where DMs had to throw bigger and bigger challenges at the characters to keep up.  If the party was fighting primarily humanoids, then this tended to mean an excessive amount of magic items (which were easily liquidable) so that in practice the party also tended to have higher than the suggested wealth per level guidelines.I've been there.  I've been in this exact situation in a campaign in first edition where the party was composed of characters that had used a very lenient attribute generation method, had access to alot of variant classes, used alot of optional perks rules, and had excessive wealth and played a humanoid centered campaign.  They ginsu knived through just about everything.  It's fun for a while to play in that high heroic style, but its extremely challenging on the DM to present something that actually represents a challenge that isn't just over the top lethal.</blockquote>

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