Tucker's Kobolds, Veeky Forums

Retard found.
The quote is "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet"
At least learn the saying you're trying to use.

Tactics were used against my players, who shut them down with better tactics or pure ballsiness. When faced with a corridor full of murderholes, the monk dived to the floor to avoid the initial pincushioning, while the magus had a shield spell up and high enough dex to simply dodge everything. The Oracle threw a poison cloud through one murderhole and then blocked off one wall's openings with a stone shape spell and the ninja turned into a fox and jumped through the other side's holes and started murdering everything on the other side in stealth.

The monk then punched right through a giant boulder rolling towards them with adamantine-tipped fists in something right out of a Jojo manga scene.

I was pretty cheerful about the whole thing especially when the players thought it was a great fight, when they were facing what was supposed to be cannon fodder kobolds.

Not him, but you are wrong.
>A rose by any other name would smell as sweet
>A dwarf is a dwarf, no matter how you call it
>Not-a-dwarf is not-a-dwarf, even if you call it dwarf
The guy is using the quote correctly.

Hm. Possibly. Perhaps I am the fool. Or just drunk and tired, but who's judging?

Everyone judges.

> Dwarves are the real Jews
I think you meant (((Gnomes))). Dwarves are the most manual Labour friendly race there is.

>the most manual Labour friendly race there is
That's what the Egyptians said about the Jews.

Here's an interesting question, if fantasy races are ethnicities, what the hell are humans?

A bland mish-mash of other cultures.
In other words, Americans and post-multicult Europeans.

look you can't just throw goblins or kobolds that use advanced siege/defence tactics on players without at least some backstory. They need a warlord or a trainer or something.

besides this shit is only of real use in murderhobo enabling systems like D&D. Ones with more human interaction usually require more interesting player input.

my DM tried this on my party once. I convinced everyone to divert a river into their multi level dungeon since they didn't have any hostages and were engaging in banditry. Fuck fighting fair.

Okay, let's decide a canonical race to race chart.
Humans -> mixed-race sludge
Dwarves -> Jews
Orcs -> Arabs
Elves -> Scandinavians
Drow -> Slavs
Halflings -> Anglos
??? -> Blacks
??? -> Asians

Humans - Humans
Dwarves - Dwarves from european Fairy Tales
Elves - The French
Orcs - Negros and Male humans
Drow - Black Elves from Icelandic Folklore
Halflings - As in LOTR
You find equivalents to fantasy races, but what about fantasy monsters? They are player characters too

Once, a long time ago, I was in a one-session campaign that started and ended thusly:

The party walked into a pitch-black cave filled with kobolds with ninja class levels in elevated prepared positions carrying crossbows and potions of invisibility.

We laughed in the DM's face and left.

Do Hobgoblins count as low level? Because I play them how they're supposedly meant to be played in DnD: A super-disciplined army with very little individuality among any of them, existing only for war and destruction.

You're a twat and you need to stop spamming this shitty mango/LN

You know, there are also bad GMs who spite on their players by giving them that kind of thing.

betafags always speaking up then making excuses when they're wrong

>In other words, Americans and post-multicult Europeans.

Not even Israel, the smallest heavily multicultural state, managed to preserve the cultural distinctiveness of the various people who make up its population.

>??? -> Blacks
Kender. Known for stealing shit, but if you don't like them, you're a small-minded bigot.

This is thread is now officially sovereign /pol/ clay.

>Orcs - Negros and Male humans
I see what you did there.

See, stuff like and always happens

Whenever this is mentioned, everyone argues over which fantasy race is supposed to depict which real-life one. I've seen the Orcs argued to be Arabs, Blacks, Imperial Germans, British Football Hooligans, United States Southerners...

1d4chan's page for Dwarves alone not that this means anything calls the race Jews, Germanics, Australians, and Scots over the course of two paragraphs.

You'd think that if these races were intentionally designed as stand-ins, people would have an easier time agreeing who works best with who. Even if they WERE made to be stand-ins, the fact that nobody knows what they should be standins for means that few people are playing them as such.

Wait a minute, does this mean the optimal 3.5E party is five orthodox Rabbis?

>Known for stealing shit, but if you don't like them, you're a small-minded bigot.

Sounds more like Anglo-Saxons to me.

It never works, given the sheer amount of power players have in, say, Pathfinder or 3.5E. Unless the DM deliberately relies on fiat, players will just do what they always do: Stay together and gradually kill everyone in the way, then pull back to town and rest when they get bored.

This. Tucker's Kobolds are fiction, and if played straight can only work against a low-level party. A firing line of kobolds with light crossbows? Oh, they hit me only on a crit and deal at best 8 damage. Maybe if there was 200 of them they could be a threat. Also our wizard definitely prepared more spells than Fireball.

Only my animals behave like simple beasts, and even then the smarter ones will use decoys and pack-tactics.

Random gobies/kobos may be dumb and just run right in or run away immediately, but if it's brigands/bandits/enforcers/thieves/etc the'll behave accordingly, using appropriately simplified guerrilla tactics.

Not to mention that the low-level rogue is basically invisible to them. The Barbarian can just punch through fucking walls if he rages, and Sleep or Command takes out whole groups at once.

D&D isn't the kind of game where the weak can triumph over the strong. For instance, a Level 1 farmboy can never take out a Level 10 fighter, even if he crits the Fighter. It's simply physically impossible for him to do more than two digits of damage.

Depends on your definition of "works", user. A DM doesn't have to be doing their damnedest to kill the players. A Tucker's kobolds like scenario can be used to give the players a challenge and a sense of accomplishment when they overcome it whether through tactics, quick thinking or sheer force. I play in a campagn where the power level is very high for the actual levels of the players, and now and then the DM will still surprise us with an encounter or challenge that really challenges us, laid out by enemies that have a good grasp of using terrain/numbers/preparation to their advantage.

What about 5 farmboys with scythes?

> Pathfinder or 3.5E
Nothing ever works in worst edition, user.

That's nice and all, but I just want to be a bug green asshole who smashes things. Or a pissed off giant turtle in platemail.

I don't give a shit about what culture they're aping or if orcs are a stand in for black people in your setting or even if you have human analogues to my desired fantasy race, I don't want to play a human. I wanna be some mushroom man douchebag who uppercuts you right in your whore face.

holy fuck

>bug green asshole who smashes things

That was a typo, but yeah I'd play that too. I don't even give a shit about your 2deep cultural implications for your bugmans so long as I get to be a chitinous cuntpuncher.

Not the guy you were responding to, in fact I don't even agree with him, but players like you are the absolute worst. Go play a video game and leave this hobby, because you're not welcome.

Level 10 fighter with say +2 to con averaging:
10 HP + 7.5*9 = 77.5 HP on average.

A farmboy with 14 in strength would do on a crit 2d4+3*4 = 44 damage.

Farmboy steps in, catches the farmer off guard and gets to go first.
Fighter fumbles initiative, farmboy gets to go again.
Farmboy attacks again.

It'd take some good rolls but a level 1 farmboy could take down a level 10 fighter with two crits.

You'd need two crits, two confirms, one maximum damage hit, one almost maximum damage hit. Assuming a 25% chance to confirm, you're looking at close to one in a million.

But videogames are exactly where all these garbage OH MAH GAWD I'M SO MORALLY SUBVERSIVE FIR MAKING NOBLE SAVAGE ORCS cliches come from. Just fuck off and let me be an unrepentant asshole of smashing goddammit.

1 level 1 guy will struggle futilely against 1 level 10 guy for the same reason 1 scrawny manlet will struggle futilely against a single murder machine.

However, if the manlet and his buddies get some guns and fire in rank at the murder machine, they'll probably take him down. Unless he's a wizard/sorcerer, because then they're up against a demigod.

>Had low level monsters rape an unexpecting party with tactics?
Yes but I don't go full magical realms and make the rape literal.

Don't forget that farmboy gets a free feat, because of his human ancestry.

Simple - it's a mish-mash of those cultures.
So instead of, say, Dwarven Kingdom, you have a kingdom that features Jews, Germanics, Australians and Scots living in the same country.
>b-buh it's improbable and unrealistic!
What, different cultures interacting in the same country? Wow, truly an impossible feat that in no way resembles reality!
They don't even have to be the citizens of said country - they just have to influence the local culture, like, yknow, the French did with Imperial Russia to the point where the french language was almost the only language the Russian nobility spoke with.

Fine too

They won't, because most likely their guns can still only damage him on a crit, and unless they're extraordinarily lucky he will reach them before they can even scratch him at all.

Guns are against Touch AC, you know?

Except they weren't made to represent stereotypes. The type of fantasy you describe comes from Tolkien. The only ones who represented a stereotype were the hobbits. The orcs were based on European accounts of the mongol hordes. The Elves were based equal parts on the christian concept of humanity before the Fall of Man, the Alfar and the Tuatha de Dannan. The Dwarves were just a heavily switched up version of their mythological counterparts

I mean, how high will a level 10 fighter's Touch AC reasonably be? Regular will be around or a bit over 20, but most of that comes from armor. I can see like 17 at the highest for a fighter with high dexterity and magical bonuses (most won't have these), but that's still a pretty easy TN for a squad of level 1 characters with guns.

I'm really tempted to do it to my group likely with Goblins who make expert use of traps , environment and hiding. I want to subvert the trope of the high level party encountering something they did at low level and laughing it off because they're big scary cock punching dragon killers now by having them humbled by a bunch of Cr 1/4 Goblins.

I know they'll all whine, cry and complain like the entitled bitches they are until I feed them more magic items though. But ill have fun which is what matters most of all.

WEW
E
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I'm always conflicted by Tucker's kobolds because while I like monsters using their wits and environment, I feel like there's a point where dungeon is the real monster and the kobolds are just little fluff bits that could be interchangeable. Like if a kobold was driving a tank and killed you, could you really say you got murdered by a kobold or a tank?

I'm not even really sure where I'd draw the line.

Even the cheapest firearm is still 750gp, and even against TouchAC you're likely only hitting about half the time (assuming level 1, as stated).

Not to mention the fact that firearms only resolve against touch in the first range increment, which is =

d20pfsrd.com/equipment---final/weapons/firearms/modern-firearms

Mosin-Nagant only 400 gp to 80 feet bro

just grab sks and go inna woods

All the time OP. All the time.

Also I don't give out XP. I give out gold which can be exchanged for goods and services, like additional training.

Also:
>Commonplace Guns: While still expensive and tricky to wield, early firearms are readily available. Instead of requiring the Exotic Weapon Proficiency feat, all firearms are martial weapons. Early firearms and their ammunition cost 25% of the amounts listed in this book, but advanced firearms and their ammunition are still rare and cost the full price to purchase or craft.

>Guns Everywhere: Guns are commonplace. Early firearms are seen as antiques, and advanced firearms are widespread. Firearms are simple weapons, and early firearms, advanced guns, and their ammunition are bought or crafted for 10% of the cost listed in this chapter. The Gunslinger loses the gunsmith class feature and instead gains the gun training class feature at 1st level.

If you're going with GUNS!GUNS!GUNS!

Cheapest firearms would be 75GP for a matchlock. A decent revolver would be 400 GP still.

>Mushroom uppercut

Forest Hunters forever. Call the Blades of the Darkmoon I don't give a fuck.

So you're saying that fantasy races aren't stand-ins for any one culture, but often inspired by multiple different cultures.

Glad we agree on this.

Except they never actually enslaved them and saw them as fanatical religious barbarians.

No, they probably DID enslave some monotheists but they never had them build the pyramids or any of the big old tombs at all honestly. Those got built well over a thousand years before that ever actually happened.
And it was never "all the monotheists" either.

>Ever done similar? Had low level monsters rape an unexpecting party with tactics?
Yeah, I had standard axe-wielding orcs set up an ambush at 2 sides of a door leading into a dimly-lit room (this was because the players had already fought them before). My genius players went full Leroy and burst open the door, lunging inside, and got cut down one by one.

Yeah, Tucker's kobolds done wrong can feel less like your being punished for bad plays and more like the dungeon is so trap laden that you are going to die purely because statistically you are going to miss enough traps to kill you.

Clever tactics should not make kobolds more dangerous that dragons or make the party seriously consider literally going to hell over going in a kobold's den.

Ment to reply to

Then you simply break out Tucker's Balors.

Not the guy you were responding to, in fact I don't even agree with him, but players like you are the absolute worst. Go play a video game and leave this hobby, because you're not welcome.

4/5 jews pre war lived in rural areas in my country, aside for those that lived in the cities they all did manual labor. And out of those that lived only a small group was rich, or doctors etc, most of them were cheap workers that worked in other jew factories. So yeah dwarfs are jews.

>Drow - Black Elves from Icelandic Folklore

But svartalfar are dwarves

First encounter I threw at my players in a homebrew I've been working on I wanted to teach them to play smart. They are sneaking through a warehouse and see patrolling security drones. They spring an ambush, kill a few of them, and then their plan falls apart. They knew the location of every single enemy in the room and still made a dumb mistake. Six enemies were sitting in the back of the room behind deployable shields doing nothing until the party moved closer. Three enemies lured them forward. Three more ran towards the party sniper was hidden (they figured out where he was shooting from but couldn't see him). The party tank charged the enemies in the back, two shot at him, and the other four went into overwatch mode (think like Xcom). He's pinned down and can't move. He can't kill them because of their shields. He's not close enough to frag them out. Simple security drones were walloping the party, until they got smart and combined electric smoke bombs, stolen shield, and a bunch of buffs.

My Hobgoblins formed a phalanxed once

Honestly, senpai, I'm not sure what your point is. It's really obvious that a gang of level 1s with matchlocks can take down a level 10 fighter. Is it difficult? Eh, kind of. I mean I'd say it'd be a somewhat challenging encounter, but it's absolutely in their power to win.

You mean 5e?

Yes. In fact, I made an entire campaign based in this concept. The party got paranoid with basically everything they saw.

>Tucker's Kobolds

Don't work. If the story is not made up entirely, it is just the party being utter morons.

No amount of tactics is going to compensate for sufficient difference in strength.

There are systems other than Pathfinder and 3.5e

Tucker's Kobolds weren't even for either of those, they were for AD&D. You're making zero sense

You mean with literally any opponent that has sentience and a fortified position? Yes.

Over-trapping a cave where it would make it difficult for the people living there to move around, hunt, and otherwise get goods?

No. And the second one is a good way to have the party collapse the entire dungeon, then dig through the rubble with acquired hands for the treasure.

>B-b-b-but then there isn't enough money for them1!111!

Then why are they doing this annoying piece of shit dungeon anyway.

Tucker's Kobold is made up or the players are utter retards for not sending the rogue in first and having him empty the entire dungeon.

Show me a group of players that doesn't immediately fold to remotely intelligent and capable opposition and I'll.. well I'll believe you since I'm sure it's possible but I've never caught whiff of it. People tend to want a very precise level of challenge if any at all and, in my experience, generally don't want to actually have to work all that hard. Which makes a bit of sense because this is after all a leisure activity but it does tend to mean the only challenging encounters I tend to see are when players roll poorly or the GM tacks on a few extra hit dice or whatever.

The least believable part of Tucker's Kobolds is that the players were the type to try to go back into the dungeon but still weren't capable of actually understanding a tactical threat.

>Tucker's Kobolds weren't even for either of those, they were for AD&D.

They don't work in AD&D either. There were specific modules which tried to reproduce Tucker's Kobolds, such as IIRC Dragon Mountain, and even with tons of magical equipment kobolds only could challenge shit parties. Even in Rules Cyclopedia a party with a wizard on hand (whom they were supposed to have in-story) would effortlessly rape them. Or if they are not interested in literal kobold rape they would be sitting outside drinking tea while a summoned fire elemental, whom kobolds cannot possibly injure or impede slaughters everyone.

Why not collapse EVERY dungeon?
Why should the players not gather extensive intel about any quest they accept before charging in?
Why not start a mercenary company with the funds from adventuring, and have them do the dirty work instead?
Why not take some of those kobolds, goblins and assorted popcorn and make them into slaves?

>Show me a group of players that doesn't immediately fold to remotely intelligent and capable opposition

On the first time and even the second most groups probably would fold, due to the surprise factor.

Then you'll have a group that spends half of each fucking session making careful tactical plans that stack things so far in this favor I don't even know why I'm bother rolling.

Of course there are people who just aren't smart enough to ever adapt, but I prefer not to play with them.

There's still that that's only true when speaking about kobolds

People tend to forget choosing kobolds was entirely arbitrary and you could pick any kind of enemy you wanted. Also that the party was only mid level. The underlying logic is flawless

Because there are fragile valuables inside and the cost/difficulty ratio is properly balanced. Because someone wants to reclaim it and use it for something. Because a wizard wants to go in and research the place and is paying for it. Because the DM has made it easier to comb through the place and kill everything then ignore the challenges and collapse it.

>implying players don't already do that
What do you think tavern rumors are?
>muh divination magic OP
Stop playing D&D.

Why not? There's been adventurers and stories where players have done that. Black bands, pirate groups, and so on.

I dunno, why not? There's nothing /stopping/ players from doing that. Murder is just simpler.

>shitty questions

>Why should the players not gather extensive intel about any quest they accept before charging in?

Because they... were hired to gather intel?

Plenty of dungeons can't be collapse because they have no roof and even more dungeons are completely immune to it because they were constructed around a lode-bearing final boss.

I'll give a MUCH simpler and more accuarte answer: People want to do a dungeon crawl, not win by any means possible. They go through the motions because they have fun doing it, or at least it's what they expect from their game. Most don't ever consider doing shit like collapsing the dungeons

They do when the dungeon is pointlessly frustrating. Re: Tomb of horrors.

I mean, I've just never been in or known of a group that had any real interest in tactical combat. And you know there's definitely other things to tabletop gaming, for sure. But that's probably one of the things that interests me more. Makes the combat, which these groups are still into, more than just numbers versus numbers.

Whenever my monsters show the slightest hint of tactical initiative, my players go to pieces and I have a party wipe on my hands.

It doesn't even matter if it's the same group of players from the wider club! Every time the enemy varies their tactics even a little, the entire party die! They can't handle even small things not going according to their plan! They HAVE no 'Plan B' to compensate for when things go wrong!

I've got a REPUTATION for being "That DM that wipes parties" now! Half those times were only due to bad rolls and the rest were purely my players refusing to think beyond, "Aha, I can equal any one of them! What's that? They brought backup? And there's a musket line behind their pikes and a mage who can counter the spells I am very well known for using? Ohhhh noooo!"

That or my dice hate me and the monsters miss every attack and fail every saving throw and die within two rounds... Or I over-estimate their actual threat and under-estimate how beardy my players can be... ROB...

Is it bad I enjoyed Tomb of Horrors?

Every action had a risk, it was great.

Not the guy you were responding to, in fact I don't even agree with him, but players like you are the absolute [strikethrough]worst[/strikethrough] best. [strikethrough]Go play a video game and[/strikethrough] please don't leave this hobby, because you're [strikethrough]not[/strikethrough] very welcome.

>Adventurer's guild clerk
Why are they always so hot? Between this bitch, that elf from Danmachi and that semen demon from KonoSuba, they're always high quality pieces of ass!