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My players are under WBL... by their own doing, really. But it isn't actually a problem... so far.
They drag several NPC's with them when they go adventuring. It certainly makes certain encounters go better than expected. For example, not long ago, I posted about how my players were going after a quest too soon and I thought I'd have a tpk on my hands. They had one death and had to pay up for a Raise Dead but that's better than a tpk by far.
I refuse to amp the treasure just because they brought an entourage with them. The image of some troll saying, "Guys, we thought we'd only be attacked by 4 but, as it turns out, there are 7. Bust out some more loot or they might find us rude hosts after they kill us." is sorta funny but the result is that the treasure ends up getting split far too many ways. Even with the PC's taking the primo items, they're still way under-funded... which only prompts them to take those NPC's with them even more!
The added NPC's provide me with some extra opportunities to roleplay so I'm really not minding.
Is this situation going to bite me/them on the heiney later on?
Never mind WBL....are they splitting the XP with all of these NPCs? If they're hirelings, that's not an issue, but thatn they'll shortly find that anyone they can drag along as a 'hireling' is simply an expensive way of mass-killing NPCs.
Anyone who can keep up with the party to any great degree should be sucking up XP...and eventually that's going to cause the party to go splat when they go up against something they simply don't have the abilities to deal with.
RPG Superstar Season 9 Top 16, RPG Superstar 2015 Top 32
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Yeah, XP is the bigger issue if that is being split.
Have they started building the kingdom yet? If they have, encourage all of them to start crafting items for themselves. I think it would be alright to even give them a couple free crafting feats to encourage it. The items they make will be at half price, so that would certainly help out a great deal.
You could also insert more quests into your game. Things like gathering a resource or hunting down a specific monster. Have the rewards be money, but be sure the prices are not too inflated. You want them to gain more money but you don't want quests to be the main source of it.
Lastly, you could have some of the NPCs just refuse to go if they start to have too many. Cap the total number of people in that party, both PC and NPC, at a certain number. Six or seven would be about the most you should allow if you want to keep close to WBL.
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If they get too poor, they can always make Treasury withdrawals.
-Kle.
Yeah... they're talking about making those withdrawals. Rather than have the population of the kingdom be completely passive, I've had the Counselor making rolls to figure out things like which buildings the people would like to see built. So while the PC's would prefer a watchtower, for instance, upon hearing the population desired a brewery, they opted to build the brewery. They've been considerate enough about those things that I've been considering letting them take a bit from the treasury before slapping them with unrest.
Oddly, xp hasn't been that big an issue. Granted, we're only in the 2nd book so maybe I've rolled up a few extra random encounters and that's served to equalize them in that regard... but most wandering encounters aren't the treasure generating kind.