Getting Hit with the Nerf Bat (D&D)

Yesterday the DM for our weekly D&D Game with Team Heroes expressed concerns about the apparent power level of our group as whole as well as the power level of Lomak. It was after my 15 ECL Goliath did 154 points of damage with one hit without a crit. That's deceptive but true, he was using steadfast boots which double the damage dealt to a charging creature.

We discussed the issues and pointed out the fact that our 3 12th level, 2 13th level, and 1 15th level character's have the gold of a typical 17th level character each with one exception. We got to thinking about it and decided to Nerf our character's down to our level or get closer to our level in gold. And in the future we should take total gold value into account to figure for ECL.

The results of our attempted nurfing were not as inspiring as I had hoped. I dropped a ring that was very expensive but may have been broken anyway. That by itself brought my gold level down to my level since I am 15th it was easier for me than the other member's of the group.

We ran another fight in Moore Castle where we continued to level everything. We ran into a demon prince 18 ECL and in a matter of 2 rounds we dropped him. I was in shock, one of my buddies was insistent that this is just how it goes in high level games. If one of us go down it will be the same way he did quite a bit of damage in but by a fluke because of a magic Item that was not removed but thought would never get used the Demon Prince's attempt to heal himself healed my character instead. On the surface it did not look like a challenge but up until we stole his heal spell my character was well down past half and went from half to full hit points.

Then we decided to do some real testing. Our character's are specifically designed to fight "evil" and "Demons or Devils" So the results might be a little skewed in Moore Castle with the large number of fiends and evil in general. We ran a test run of 4 Iron Golems to see what would happen. Sure enough, the 4 Iron Golems lasted 7 to 8 rounds, the difference in how long the enemy lasted was stark. Individually the Golems were a CR of 13 but a total of 17 together. It was a really telling experience, we were really in no danger until the end when I started screwing around but the point had already been made clearly that the neutral golems were lasting far longer than the demons of Castle Moore even with thier lower CR. The important thing was they were not evil or demons.

So now I'm going to take my character's Gold to a 16th Character level, since I'm 800 XP away from leveling.