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Message: <blockquote data-quote="IceFractal" data-source="post: 4082004" data-attributes="member: 27704">The armor isn't a problem ... yet.  Right now, most of the kobold armor is worse than normal armor, which is easily explainable, and PCs are unlikely to take it for that reason.  But someday soon, I predict we'll see something like an "Bugbear Juggernaught", who wears super-tough spiked armor which grants him Resist Weapons and does damage to people attacking him.  And then either the PCs fight a Bugbear and all have super-armor, or the really lame excuses that piss off players start.The kobold glue pots are much worse though.  They're actually a useful thing to have, and it doesn't matter whether they go bad quickly, because the PCs can make them.  Why can they make them?  Because:* Kobolds are not intelligent or wealthy.* Kobolds don't have any special bodily fluids like poison spit.* Kobolds don't have any magical glue-creating powers.* Kobolds aren't brave.  If you captured a kobold and made him tell you the recipe, he would.* Kobolds aren't so rare that they're shrouded in mystery.So yeah, either you let anybody with basic alchemy skills make these pots at a fairly low cost, or you start coming up with the lamest, weakest, most-player-aggravating excuses we've heard for several editions.Now yes, sometimes monsters have things PCs don't.  But those things should be exclusive to monsters for a reason.  If, say, you're got a group of snakemen with poisonous venom who distill that venom into a toxic gas, then that's a reasonable exclusive item.  If there's a group of fire cultists who use an open portal to the elemental chaos combined with their lifetime study of fire to craft weapons of solidified flame, that's reasonable too.It should be noted even then that if PCs go to extreme steps to produce these items (capturing a whole group of snakement, for instance, or opening their own planar rift and having a fire-specialist Wizard), then it should be possible.But don't pull crap like - "Yes, he's a human warrior and so are you.  No, he's not better at shield use than you.  But you can't have his non-magical shield that lets him negate ranged attacks, it's for monsters only!" - That has never been a good feature in D&D.</blockquote>

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