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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kibo" data-source="post: 445762" data-attributes="member: 5451">Making some baseless assumptions I've got two comments which you may find to be of dubious usefulness.1.  Shift the burden of rolling the dice.  If it's just Hall->door->"Who's there"->"goblins"->senseless slaughter how much opportunity for success and failure is there?  Simple traps, that alert the goblins, simple obsticles, things to spot, listen for that change the encounter.  Naturally stupid behavior can trump good rolls, just and brilliant ideas can trump bad rolls.  A large forewarned contingent of goblins with short bows and light crossbows, you've got a lot of rolls to average your dice ugliness over.  Let the goblins make a common knowledge check to determine if they know what a caster divine or arcane looks like.   Maybe DC 10 fingers someone as a caster, but DC 15 can discriminate between the powerful and the novices.  Likewise if the PC's are clever, they might end up facing a smaller number of goblins and possibly get a surprise round.  Then there are pets.  Goblins might keep mean ferral animals that have been abused and kept hungry.  Wolves have trip among their feats, and decent speed.  That barbarian might be quite the terror in combat.  But should your wolf be the one who gets lucky, that same barbarian on his back probably isn't as effective.  And I'll just mention it, but I'd probably avoid it as it is such a cliche, you could always have a carrion crawler in a garbage pile, and 8 paralyzing attacks around, with reach, well that almost demands you roll crappy to avoid a TPK.2. It's all about the flavor right?  I describe low rolls (particularly by PC's) from the perspective that they are quite competent.  So a low roll is the result of a particularly competent opposed action which isn't rolled, the enemy nimbly dodges in some sweet cinematic fashion, or its the circumstances turn against them in some way.  They don't suck, something causes them to suck.  Now for goblins, they actually do suck.  So this might not apply to them, but your NPC on the other hand.  I just picture what the combat would look like as a movie with the results dictated by the dice.  Seems to work ok.As a postscript, if you don't have anything planned for the NPC story wise, I would be inclined to kill him off.  There basically isn't a good way to do it, since his death wouldn't establish anything since the PC's wouldn't miss him.  If you have him killed by a sweet trap, then he's the dumbass that facillitated our DM telling the story and pulling punches.  If you have an encounter where he draws all the fire, then it's weird and the PC's get a pass.  I might be inclined to introduce an encounter with two buffer advanced goblins with poisoned shortbows, and support troops.  This would just happen to be the time your elf was walking point, and I would lie and say who ever was first was going to eat it, roll for the hit like always, if you set it up so that the elf is flat footed, perhaps so much the better.  The elf automagicly fails his fort save and coincidently you roll two and change 6's for the con damage assuming both hit.  Now, if the players for what ever reason insist they go first into the ambush, I'd probably just run it as if those guys were the elf.  But that's me.  Why be encumbered by something which isn't serving your story.</blockquote>

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