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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SWAT" data-source="post: 2987459" data-attributes="member: 2751">True Story. By the end of a campaign I played in, all the characters, and all the players, were completely utterly terrified of kobolds. At 18th level. And not kobolds with class levels. Just the regular kind. Given the choice between fighting kobolds or pit fiends, we would have chosen pit fiends because the chances of survival would have been higher. So powerful was this terror that it persists to this day in other games run by other DMs.Why? Because the DM in question figured that kobolds, being small and puny compared to most everything else, would have become trap and tactical experts. We got our butts kicked by kobold ingenuity so many times it wasn't funny anymore. Just think of the most insanely clever and devious trap 500 kobolds can come up with, and that doesn't put many of them in harm's way, and do that.Example. We once came upon a portal and for some stupid reason decided to go through it, not knowing it was one-way. The kobolds that lived in the dungeon on the other end had long ago realized that sometimes things would suddenly appear in one of the rooms. So they built a very thick stone wall around that one spot. They made it airtight except for a few small holes at the top, which they connected to some water system. So anything that appeared would be trapped and drown as they filled the prison with water. It would have been a TPK without my teleport spells.The trap had nothing to do with us. It was just something the kobolds had done. So instead of thinking about how the kobolds would survive with the PCs around, think about how they would survive with creatures twice as tough as the PCs around, and see if the PCs go up against whatever it is. Keep it up like that and your PCs will be terrified of kobolds too.On a similar note, my character Trezav was once captured and bound by kobolds. Having nothing else to do but talk and annoy them, I wasn't inclined to shut up, and they didn't gag me. But they had a goblet, and they'd hit me with it whenever I talked, doing like 1 point of subdual damage. I ran with it until I was unconscious, and thus the Goblet of Trezav Slaying was born...</blockquote>

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