Interesting experience playing KotS

[OchreJelly]

My only fear is that it could wear off. If you start a new 1st level campaign, you already know the Goblin, Rat and Kobold tactics. You're prepared. I think this one can still work, though. Now you get to use your "rules mastery" (damn, it's still there!) and show off how you have mastered the art of fighting kobolds and goblins!

It's a concern I had as well, but then I had to remind myself of this: "What made a kobold combat different from a goblin combat in the past?"

Not very much.

I now feel that any 'tent-pole' powers, as its been described, is better than the very little mechanical variance we have had in the past with such monsters. Moreover, if they succeed in making the monster rules as easy and transparent as has been described, you can still make that orc archer to surprise even the most game-tested players.

 

[phloog]

Not to be a jerk here, but there's an almost [insert your least favorite politician] level of ambiguity on the HOW. I understand WHAT - - the fights all have different flavor, but I'm not sure I get how they are that much different that 3e.

Actually, I should probably rephrase this:

Are they different in some way that is not attainable by 3rd edition? Meaning, if I sat down and made fifteen different flavors of kobold in 3.5, would this be effectively the same?

I guess I'm seeing 1) The Rules are New and Completely Different, and 2) The Monster Design Philosophy is Radically Different as two things - and you might be able to have one without the other.

 

[That One Guy]

Plus I used to be The Man.

(Course, now I'm just A Man.)

Hey man, nothing wrong with being just a guy.

Not to be a jerk here, but there's an almost [insert your least favorite politician] level of ambiguity on the HOW. I understand WHAT - - the fights all have different flavor, but I'm not sure I get how they are that much different that 3e.

Actually, I should probably rephrase this:

Are they different in some way that is not attainable by 3rd edition? Meaning, if I sat down and made fifteen different flavors of kobold in 3.5, would this be effectively the same?

I guess I'm seeing 1) The Rules are New and Completely Different, and 2) The Monster Design Philosophy is Radically Different as two things - and you might be able to have one without the other.

That is a fair statement/question. Let me put it this way, all goblins have a certain features/powers that make them unique in combat. They can shift away from enemies who missed them. Kobolds can shift as a minor action, so they can move forward, attack, and then shift away (or any other strategy, I just liked this one) so they can bottleneck the PCs or force them to provoke OAs. Gnolls fight in packs and are incredibly vicious (I haven't run anything with these guys because I don't think my PCs really could take them, yet). Orcs have a lot of 'bloodrage' type of things where the bloodied state comes into play (IIRC). These tactics give an ingame tactical style to monsters and go along with their incharacter style of lore/history/fluff. Also, there are a variety of each race. There are kobold minions, but there are also soldiers, ranged attackers, casters, etc. But, they all have the kobold power of 'shifty', just as all of the ranks of gnolls benefit from fighting with other gnolls. I hope that makes sense. The excerpt that features the orcs is a good example of how they have common ingame features and powers that work together and go with the orc 'feel'.

So, hypothetically these racial features and powers along with their various pseudo-classes could be adapted to 3.x, but they are 'hardcoded' into 4e.

2 much more so than 1, I think. 3.x's later years (immediate actions, interrupt actions, reserve feats, tome of magic/battle, etc.) feel a lot like 4e.

I hope that helps.

 

[Scott_Rouse]

So I've played a fair bit of 4E so far, but it mostly consisted of one playtest scenario at 13th level (in which everything being new was expected), and several sessions of Scalegloom Hall (which is almost entirely fighting kobolds). Last week I started running Keep on the Shadowfell, and the first scenario was fighting kobolds.

Last night was our second session. Another kobold encounter. Then an encounter with some goblins, a trap, and some rats. And here's where the cool thing happened.

The players knew at this point that different creatures (even different flavours of kobold) have different tricks up their sleeves--real tricks that can have a significant effect on how they fight and how they can be defeated. So even though they knew what a goblin was in general, they were genuinely worried about what the goblins might be able to do. The rats were even worse--in fact, the party barely survived the rats with little input from the goblins (who mostly held back to snipe from a distance). Despite a strong start to the encounter, in the end the heroes were forced to disengage, regroup, and rethink their tactics.

That's right: forced to retreat by some rats and goblins.

I love the sense of discovery that's coming from 4E--more than I recall from previous edition changes. 4E may have conceded a lot of "realism" (in the form of fiddly rules) in exchange for smoother gameplay, but it's added a lot of veracity through more sophisticated and variable bad guy tactics, more ebb and flow in the combat, and the higher level of challenge that can put PCs on the ropes in even a "routine" encounter.

I love the fact that players have to learn, through the encounter, how to deal with a challenge--they can't simply rely on their favourite tactics each time with faith that those will carry them through. (This is especially true at this stage, when everything is new--but will hopefully continue to be largely true.)

I'm surprised it took me this long to notice, but I guess that's because my previous experience was limited to a very narrow pool of creatures.

Charles,

I suspect that encounter will generate some TPKs. It is brutal and I have seen it almost wipe out two different groups.

It is fun, even the little guys surprise you and it requires adventurers to be on their toes and never underestimate any foe.

 

[Korgoth]

This is genuinely good news and I'm glad to hear it.

On the one hand, something I like about OD&D is that I can write down "AC 7, HD 1+1, Move 6" and that's a full statblock. Is it a tough orc, a hobgoblin or a frog-man? It can be any of those... it can have whatever "flavor text" I want. On the other hand, all of those things will be virtually the same mechanically unless I assign the critter a "special".

While 4E obviously has longer statblocks (though nothing like those nightmares of 3E), it seems to focus on giving you flavorful specials to differentiate the monsters. That says "fun" all over it. While there are some game mechanics I'm worried about, on the whole I'm actually very interested to see how 4E works in practice.

D&D is, in its essence, a game of discovery. Or at least that's how I see it. You are exploring strange and lost places, finding dangerous creatures and uncovering forgotten loot. Along the way, you test yourself against the various challenges. If that's the core of D&D, it looks like 4E is set to do a better job of that than 3E (which happily drove me back to the Old School stuff).

Since I like brain puzzles in D&D, I'm happy to see combat itself made into a brain puzzle. Combat in 3E was never a puzzle... the puzzle was class and feat selection, which is a really dull puzzle if you ask me.

 

[Family]

D&D is, in its essence, a game of discovery. Or at least that's how I see it. You are exploring strange and lost places, finding dangerous creatures and uncovering forgotten loot. Along the way, you test yourself against the various challenges.

That and eating pizza with friends...mmmmm, pizza.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Not to be a jerk here, but there's an almost [insert your least favorite politician] level of ambiguity on the HOW. I understand WHAT - - the fights all have different flavor, but I'm not sure I get how they are that much different that 3e.

Actually, I should probably rephrase this:

Are they different in some way that is not attainable by 3rd edition? Meaning, if I sat down and made fifteen different flavors of kobold in 3.5, would this be effectively the same?

I guess I'm seeing 1) The Rules are New and Completely Different, and 2) The Monster Design Philosophy is Radically Different as two things - and you might be able to have one without the other.

What makes a Goblin unique from a Kobold in 3E, mechanically? The Goblin has different stat modifiers. That's it. Once you begin to add class levels, a lot of this will be lost.
Unique aspects are more or less flavour - Kobolds tend to have sorcerers and tend to use traps, for example. Goblins might come in larger hordes. But mechanically, they look very similar.

If you add class levels, you can provide unique experience, but this is entirely based on the class. The players will note if they fight Kobold Rogues and Sorcerers or Goblin Rangers and Clerics, but they don't link the differences to the race. If you'd give the Kobold rangers and Clerics and the Goblins Rogues and Sorcerers, they'd use the same tactics.

There are ways you can change this. 3E has clearly monsters that are a lot more unique. Fighting a Beholder or fighting a Giant are two very different experiences. They have unique innate abilities, and players will have to account for them differently, entirely based on the monster, not on class levels.

The reasons some monsters are unique and some are not have a lot to do with the exceptions they have built in. A Hydra can make multiple attacks even if moving, and its head regrows. A Beholder fires multiple eye rays and has a magical cone. You can multiclass as much as you want, you will not get this abilities. Monsters like these are examples of "exception based design". Normally, no one has access to antimagic cone. Beholders do. No one can just regrow his heads, and get even more then he used to. Hydras do.
Dealing with a Hydra requires to find a way to deal with Regeneration (and utilize the option to cut down heads). Dealing with a Beholder requires to deal with antimagic-cones, and multiple magical attacks. You need different, unique tactics to deal with these threats.

In 4E, normally, no one can shift as a minor action. Kobolds do. It might be a very tiny thing, but it is breaking the normal way things work, and thus it changes the possible tactics and creates need for new counter-tactics.

 

[FadedC]

The flavors of kobold are also a bit more unique then they would be in 3e. A 3e kobold sorceror is really no different then a goblin sorceror or an orc sorceror. But a kobold wyrmpriest is a unique and completely different in both flavor and abilities from an orcish eye of grummsh (sp?)

 

[Family]

The flavors of kobold...

mmmmm...flavored kobold.

 

[Rechan]

Just a general question: can you elaborate on how you used the kobold's shifty ability to maximum effect?

Aside from 'Move in, attack, move out and let another kobold take your place', I can't think of it as an overly effective ability. Because on the PC's turn, they're going to shift and attack.

Wait, I can think of one: A skirmisher shifting away from a fighter, and then using its movement to go leap in the mage's face.