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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5837195" data-attributes="member: 4937">Sure, but as I explained, the manual triggers are usually both more believable and more useful in these cases.   The kobolds aren't rich, and they have to live in their own death trapped home.  You don't want to fill your own home with a bunch of pressure plates, because sooner or later someone is going to forget and step on one.   Likewise, you don't want to have pits that are delicately balanced so that they go off at exactly 80 lbs of weight, but not less, because sooner or later someone will forget and carry dinner in a sack, or give his neighbor a hug and blammo cousin joe got killed.   And besides, even if that's how you designed it, next year or the next the trigger will have deteriorated and it will go off just when everyone was getting used to the idea that that corridor was safe.   I go for extremely high versimilitude and minimal metagaming in my designs.One of the assumptions here is that the kobolds are 'stock' simple weak kobolds of the sort that would be conventional translations from the original 1e stat block.   The 3e SRD lair description is pretty close save that kobolds, being originally 1/2 HD, should be mostly 1st level commoners and only say 1 in 10 kobolds are actually 1st level warriors.   The kobolds will have a few mid level leaders, and some dangerous pets in the form of dire weasels (good for tracking with, it occurs to me at the moment), but for the most part for the purposes of this excercise, they are supposed to be ordinary and easily slaughtered.   The purpose of the excercise is not to demonstrate that high level characters are dangerous and resourceful.   The purpose is to demonstrate that a bunch of 1st level commoners are dangerous if you provide them with the right sort of resources and defences.What I've been describing so far is a large tribe - roughly 400 kobolds and their leaders - with resources that are on the high end of average.   This is sufficient to challenge 6th-9th level characters.   It's not sufficient to challenge a higher level party, which would require more of a 'capital of kobold culture' - say 3-5 full tribes living in mostly dormant volcano with higher than normal proportions of leader types, suitably evil scaled up defenses (the lake is now boiling, pit traps drop you into pools of boiling mud, porticulus and falling blocks made of razor sharp obsidian, the kobolds don't have coal but they do have tar and gasoline, etc.), more dangerous pets and allies, containing a full temple complex, led by a council of sorcerers and worshipping a dragon, naga, or similarly powerful figure.  Or if not a volcano, then living in the ice caves of massive glacier would also work.   Or if not that, then they live in an underground mushroom swamp and are masters of manipulating their fungal domain - yellow mold bombs away!</blockquote>

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