moritheil
First Post
Thanks for your posts. I feel I should explain my last post and my mindset.
I have no doubt that they are nasty. The current PC group is just immune to many categories of things and are all competent powergamers to boot. It's not that a kobold can't be made into a decent fighter relative to baseline standards, it's that a kobold's strength in terms of optimization does not typically lie in melee. Thus, I had the party face mostly sorcerers and shugenja with warriors as fodder. Why warriors? Efficiency - kobolds pack more effectiveness per CR as warriors relative to fighters, because they get a discount to their CR and thus more hit dice. If I really wanted to mess with them using kobold melee I could break out Bo9S, but that is more complexity than it is worth for a bunch of expendable melee muscle.
When I run campaigns for optimizing players I prefer to optimize the monsters and keep things at minimal CR rather than faking it with higher CR encounters. That's a stylistic issue, and I recognize it as such. Since I think in terms of efficiency per CR, I tend to think that I could do a lot better than kobolds if I wanted melee muscle - say, the godspawn slayers of Tiamat. Actually, I need to use those at some point in time, since half the PC group is evil outsiders.
There were already three sets of traps on the way in, so I didn't have any actual traps in the climactic fight. I did have, as I mentioned, an altar with effects that hit non-LE characters that got too close, which might have had a traplike feel, as it was an unpleasant surprise for some.
FoP refers to the Fiend of Possession PrC and is one reason the use of dragons and other individually powerful monsters should be very carefully considered in this campaign - throwing them at a FoP simply means the FoP gets to spend the rest of the campaign inside this powerful body, wreaking havoc with it. Evil characters are especially easy for it to possess. Obviously possession is not foolproof, but failure to very carefully consider it will result in a broken or trivial campaign.
I have no doubt that they are nasty. The current PC group is just immune to many categories of things and are all competent powergamers to boot. It's not that a kobold can't be made into a decent fighter relative to baseline standards, it's that a kobold's strength in terms of optimization does not typically lie in melee. Thus, I had the party face mostly sorcerers and shugenja with warriors as fodder. Why warriors? Efficiency - kobolds pack more effectiveness per CR as warriors relative to fighters, because they get a discount to their CR and thus more hit dice. If I really wanted to mess with them using kobold melee I could break out Bo9S, but that is more complexity than it is worth for a bunch of expendable melee muscle.
When I run campaigns for optimizing players I prefer to optimize the monsters and keep things at minimal CR rather than faking it with higher CR encounters. That's a stylistic issue, and I recognize it as such. Since I think in terms of efficiency per CR, I tend to think that I could do a lot better than kobolds if I wanted melee muscle - say, the godspawn slayers of Tiamat. Actually, I need to use those at some point in time, since half the PC group is evil outsiders.
There were already three sets of traps on the way in, so I didn't have any actual traps in the climactic fight. I did have, as I mentioned, an altar with effects that hit non-LE characters that got too close, which might have had a traplike feel, as it was an unpleasant surprise for some.
FoP refers to the Fiend of Possession PrC and is one reason the use of dragons and other individually powerful monsters should be very carefully considered in this campaign - throwing them at a FoP simply means the FoP gets to spend the rest of the campaign inside this powerful body, wreaking havoc with it. Evil characters are especially easy for it to possess. Obviously possession is not foolproof, but failure to very carefully consider it will result in a broken or trivial campaign.
Thanks!
