I agree with you that the creatures and NPCs in the books are barely a challenge for starting PCs (as long as they are combat optimized) while being laughable as a challenge to experienced PCs.
Hence I cooked up some homebrew rules to “level up” NPCs on the fly and put those in this thread.
Also, Talking to your players helps, as FrankF said above. After all, spending doom lets them have fun because they get to roll more dice and have better success levels while also ensuring that the fights will be a challenge… otoh you should assure them that you will be using this doom to make the game more challenging and not kill them outright. It would be easy to spend all the doom in the pile to incapacitate a PC on the first hit, provided he is unarmored, but don’t do that. I usually use doom only to “round up” vigor loss so a single wound is inflicted if it wouldn’t be otherwise.
In addition, use tactics and terrain as much as possible to give the PCs penalties. Defending at D 2 against an attack is bad, but defending at D 3 is almost guaranteed to fail against an opponent of similar strength.
And feel free to fiddle around with the Special abilities of creatures. It’s a way of giving them talents they lack that feel thematically appropriate without having to “climb” skill trees. Basically, every talent is open to them.
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