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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4624288" data-attributes="member: 4937">Sure.  Like I said, I agree with the point of the article just as much as I shudder at the example.  In my experience, in 1st edition somewhere between 9th and 12th level - depending on how free the DM has been with the magic items, a large experienced party acquires the ability to take down almost anything in the MM and quickly in a straight up fight.  In open battle, a large party of 12th level characters is literally the equal to an entire army.  A few thousand kobolds wouldn't present an excessive challenge.And it's not that I don't think you can challenge 12th level characters with 'only kobolds'.  You can, you just have to put them in situations were hit points and armor class and THAC0 don't matter.  You use traps, seige weapons, ballistic fire, grenade-like weapons, etc. and you try to never have a kobold actually in line of sight.  Which is the problem with Moore's example.  In Moore's example, of 'Tucker's Kobolds', there is very little evidence from the text that the kobolds were relying on anything but the most basic of traps (setting oil soaked straw on fire) and there is plenty of evidence that they were in line of sight and exchanging attacks with the party.  It's not a situation where the kobolds are lobbing flaming oil over stone walls, or dropping it down chutes, or luring the party into pit traps: the described situation is primarily one of hurled javelins and axes and volleys of arrows and bolts.  That situation doesn't ring true to me as a player and DM with about 15 years of experience with 1st edition.What does ring true to me is that the party leader says, "Oh no, it's them!  Run!", not because he thinks its futile to fight kobolds, but because he's come to learn that it is futile to fight the DM's PC.  The party leader is just accepting the abuse as a matter of course, knowing that if he tries to fight the kobolds nothing will work out right and the DM will just go to greater and greater lengths to make the kobolds 'impressive'.  The party leader is metagaming.  The best way to deal with 'Tucker's Kobolds' is to pay homage to Tucker's fearsomeness, but to not give Tucker much of a chance to use them and instead move on to monsters Tucker has less of his ego invested in.I think it could have been a wonderful adventure, and that it is filled with alot of good ideas and written by someone that understands 1st edition well enough to know how to abuse it, but....Most of the uber-Dungeon is taken up with 'Skip's Goblins', which are 'Tucker's Kobolds' on steroids.  Not only are the kobolds given enormous amounts of one shot magical items including literally hundreds of explosives and hundreds potions of heroism, but scores of one shot 'rings of spell storing' like devices that grant the goblins various protections.  They are also placed in highly deadly a trap filled environment (with 4' ceilings).   But not only that, they are expressedly immune to all of their own traps.  So, for example, all the doors in the environment are very difficult to open, but all the goblins know special tricks that allow them to be opened immediately.  The goblins automatically avoid all the traps.  The environment is liberally salted with rot grubs, that never attack the goblins.  Plus, additionally, the goblins have special rules for mass volley fire that lets them make nasty area attacks with regular bows.  Essentially, any group of goblin archers can cast fire ball - with no fire resistance.  It kinda sorta makes sense for say 20 goblins working together if you don't think about it too hard (a bunch of arrows is bound to hit something right?), but if you think about it at all you immediately realize that per the rules two archers who don't aim at the target and instead fire in the general direction are far more dangerous than four or eight archers that take aim.  The rules are screwy, ill-thought out, and just designed to screw with the players, because of course they can never take advantage of all these special rules for goblins working in formation.  And that's just the tip of the iceberg.  Trust me, I'm vastly understating the problem.Well, sure, but even Sauron has a limited supply of this stuff.  Why not supply actual humans with it?  Or gnolls?  Or bugbears?  Why spend a couple hundred gold peices on each kobolds equipment?  Why kobolds? But ok, suppose they do have a powerful patron or some similar situation where money is no object.  Maybe they luckily acquired a whole dragon's hoard from an unwary party of adventurers out of spells and down to their last hit point, and then they dug in suffiicently before any one knew what was going on to keep the goblins, orcs, derro, and drow from taking the ill-gotten gains from them.  Or, even more to the point, suppose you want to challenge your PC's with kobolds?I'm fine with that.  I just think that the skilled DM is showing off how much he can do with so little, not just in terms of the size of the monster, but in the resources that that monster has.  I always want to be careful to seem like I'm extrapolating for the kobolds what's reasonable for them to have, and not what I want to give them to make them seem special.   I'd really only be able to answer the implicit question, 'What do you think is reasonable?', by actually answering in detail.</blockquote>

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