Making Kobolds powerful

[Particle_Man]

I've got some ideas for a campaign, and one of them is to make some viable pc races out of LA+0 monster races. The kobolds seemed a bit weak, but I think I found a way to make them better, without modifying them too much, and also solving another problem I had.

a) Make kobold's favored class = fighter. (Wait! Read the rest first!)
b) Make kobolds the only race that can take fighter as a class. Other races can be warriors.
c) Prohibit members of other races from taking any feats on the fighter bonus feat list as feats. Note: kobolds can take fighter feats either as fighter class bonus feats (if they are fighters) or in their general feat slots. Exception: classes that grant bonus feats that are on the fighter list still grant those bonus feats to non-kobolds of those classes.

This would hopefully make kobolds more attractive, without making the game dominated by fighters. (Oh, I make barbarians both orc-only and NPC-only).

I do other weird things too, but I just wanted to see if this would make kobolds more viable. I just liked the idea of making a race more powerful by taking power from all other races.

Is this the right forum for this stuff?

 

[Agamemnon]

Yes, that would make them more powerful. However, it would create a strange situation in the gameworld. Kobolds are a race that is ill-suited to combat, yet they're the only race that gets access to a primarily combat-oriented class? Also, players wanting to play a martial character could quite possibly be upset over this.

I would improve the Kobold as a race with something like more bonus skillpoints or maybe (just maybe) Dodge as a bonus feat.

 

[Darklone]

Give them ECL -1. That works

 

[Nifft]

So, no one but a Kobold could ever take Weapon Finesse or Weapon Focus?

No thanks.

-- N

 

[Voadam]

You still have rangers and paladins of other races.

 

[Squire James]

Let's look at what Kobolds normally get:

-4 Str, +2 Dex, -2 Con
(odd, their "average" scores does not bear this out)
Darkvision 60'
Small size
Speed 30 (unusually fast for a Small creature)
+2 to Craft (trapmaking), Profession (miner), and Search
+1 natural armor
Light Sensitivity

Hm. Make that -2 Str and +4 Dex, and remove the Light Sensitivity, and they're not bad! Not a warrior race, to be sure, but if one really wants to be a Fighter, Orc or Hobgoblin would be a better choice.

If the campaign is all "evil" humanoid races such as kobolds, orcs, gnolls, etc., then the fact they have no mental score penalties should be somewhat of a draw for spellcasters.

 

[Sigurd]

Why do you want to use kobolds?

Why dont you mutate the standard Kobold and create one with more vital dragon blood. They could be the product of chance, sorcery, divinity etc....

Failing that I think I remember a white dwarf race called the Urviles, perhaps taken from thomas covanent??.

Even just being associated with the kobold would taint and give this new race a head of steam against the rest of the world.

Kobolds live very short, brutal lives and just about define the bottom. If you remove them from this role you lose an element in your world. If you want to make them powerful make them work together, otherwise mutate them, recreate the race on top of the other kobolds.

Want to make a powerful Kobold? Create a magic desease where dying kobolds who breath their last near another humanoid are reborn inside of that humanoid who half mutates into a kobold. The humanoid must fight not the diminutive physical body of the kobold but its ancient draconic will.

See if that scares the crap out of players and countryside.

 

[Particle_Man]

Your idea is interesting. I think the best way to justify what I did with the kobold was to show you the context it came from.

http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=89372

The short version is, the god that created kobolds wanted dragons, and got seriously screwed over by the interference of other gods. But even in their weakened bodies, only kobolds have the minds of fighters, if that makes sense.

In metagaming terms, I wanted to reduce the prevalence of fighters and barbarians, which in my local campaigns seem to be omnipresent in parties (and if I saw power attack/cleave as the feat option one more time, I was gonna hurl). I thought that by restricting them to kobolds and npc orcs, I might encourage other options, without eliminating fighters entirely from pc options. Plus, I kinda like kobolds, even the way they are, so I wanted to increase their power by decreasing that of the rest of the world. Obviously that won't work for all campaigns.

 

[the Jester]

The low-level game I run has a kobold pc. I run him straight from the MM (although he's now a 4th-level bard/sorc); the player asked before creating him if he could get anything to compensate and I told him that if he wanted to play a kobold, he had to live with it.

That kobold has a strength score of 1.

The character is now the highest-level pc surviving in the party and is amazingly cool and fun.

 

[Darklone]

Strength 1? Loincloth means medium encumbrance ?