#Tucker's kobolds

[halfdemonguy]

Normal civilized ones? Depends. Tuker's cobolds? Hell nah. The moment I see them I'm jumping off a cliff. I don't wanna even live in the world those bastards live in

Would you smooch a Kobold?

[homebrewandhypotheticals]

Hypothetical for you all: You've been faced with a challenge by a bored outer god: delve into a dungeon he's populated with pathetic, weak Goblins that are, nevertheless, very crafty, and secure a golden idol he's placed at the end, and he'll reward you with 1 singular wish of your choice, no strings attached (you could even wish to surpass him in power, if you wanted! No wishing for more wishes, though, that's the only off limits one).

You have one week to prepare for the dungeon delve, any equipment you can scrounge up is allowed but you can't bring anybody with you and you get no outside help. Once you're in the dungeon, you're all alone except for the supplies you brought with you.

The dungeon is 10 stories deep, about the size of a football stadium in its totality, and while the Goblins are armed with only basic equipment you'd expect from the Dark Ages, they've lived in the dungeon for generations and have an *intimiate* knowledge of it, customizing large parts of it to prevent adventurer raids as much as they feasibly can while still allowing it to act as a natural ecosystem they can live in day to day. Outside of this info, the Outer god refuses to bestow any other info about the Goblins and the contents of the dungeon, outside of the fact that the Goblins are so weak, basically any attack you can throw at them should, theoretically, kill them.

The outer god makes it clear that he has presented this challenge to people throughout the centuries, and so far, nobody has ever won.

What do you bring? What's your strategy for pushing through the dungeon? Do you think you'd succeed? And if so, what would you use your wish for?

Tl;dr: You have the chance to get one free, no strings attached wish, but you have to solo a 10 story dungeon full of very weak, but very clever goblins to do so, securing the idol at the end. You have 7 days to prep before you're teleported to the dungeon, bringing any equipment you can scrounge up in that time. What do you bring, what's your strategy, do you think you could win, and what do you wish for?

[malamiteltd]

Holiday Pictures 2023! (part 2)

A continuation of my holiday pictures for friends on Twitter!

This one is for Luna! I’ve drawn her Yoshi character quite a long time ago, but this was my first time drawing her porcupine self. I’ve admired her artwork for a long while, so hopefully my style does the character justice.

For AtroxChobatsu, it’s the ever-toony Sarah N. Dippity! I had drawn her a few times before, but this time I put her in a situation that shows more toony expressiveness. Seems she’s attempted to slow her fall, but that umbrella she’s using doesn’t appear to have held up…

This one is for the also-very-toony Dingoroo! I remember him from way back in my DeviantArt days. His art style was and still is very cute! I tried to make Dingoroo in my own style here. Not sure what he’s planning to do with that large mallet…

For LE-the-Creator, it’s their character Veggie Sprigwort. A very neat character design for a plant person! I was worried it would be hard to draw her well, but it ended up coming together a lot smoother than I thought. Maybe I’m becoming an artist after all…

For RakkuGuy, it’s his little kobold character Coal! She’s becoming an aspiring hero in a webcomic series, “Monsters Can Be Heroes Too!” This look mostly pulls from the more recent artwork I’ve seen, including a tattered yet stylish cape.

For CosmicCartoons, it’s the Ceryvian known as Demi. Here he seems to be struggling with a strange puzzle originating from Earth. This alien species wouldn’t be too out of place in the “Last Soldier” universe, though I don’t know how often they and the Teijru would interact.

This one is for – and featuring – Chaz Serir. If you ever wondered what possessed me to make various alien characters over the last few years, this is who inspired that. Now you may be asking, “What is going on here?” And my response is “That is correct.”

Oh hey, these are my characters! The two Tokarus, Sketch Tucker and Heather Britannia, are holding onto each other as they travel to other universes. Perhaps the characters we saw are some of the folks they met along the way. Who knows?

This ended up being quite the undertaking. I'm not confident that I'll ever make this many images for a holiday again. Either way, I hope everyone likes them, and that everyone have a Happy Holidays!

EXTRA

Here is Stephano, another character made by NS-Games. I experimented with the design a bit in this image – the eye area has white fur, and I gave him the Big Pant with a nifty pattern along the outer legs. I wonder what he’s drawing on that tablet…

He makes some things under the name of “Deyem Productions.” I ended up sketching a logo design concept for the “Deyem” name. It’s not the first time I looked into it, but I thought this was an intriguing avenue to explore…

[tecatins-thought-pile]

*Looks at Tuckers Kobolds*

"Ferb I know what we're gonna do next session"

[kobold-royalty]

Trick or treat or tuckers kobolds

[canmom]

on D&D

there have been many a Posten floating across my slice through the tumblr database of late on the flaws of Dungeons & Dragons. this is an old, old argument - pushed by the White Wolf fans before my time, raised to a furious pitch by the Forge movement (Ron Edwards infamously declared that D&D players have brain damage), and continuing to simmer as the Forge gave way to 'Story Games', and then ebbing a bit with whatever that movement have way to. i don't even especially disagree - most of the good times I've had with D&D have been more despite the printed rulebooks than because of them.

however, it's worth considering what D&D actually is.

"D&D" should not be confused with the books released by Wizards of the Coast or TSR. Nor even the other books in the D&D family in the OSR, Pathfinder, etc. these are an important part of it to be sure, and WotC would certainly like us to think that it all flows out of the books.

however, I think 'buying a D&D book without any expectations, reading it cover, and attempting to run the game as described in the book' represents probably a tiny fraction of D&D players. any more than you could discern the practices of a religion by reading their holy book.

D&D, as actually practiced, is something like that - a set of practices or sorta oral tradition. you learn what D&D is when someone invites you to a D&D group, or you listen to an 'actual play' podcast, or - like me! - you fall into forums and read libraries worth of arguments about which edition is best and game balance and funny game table anecdotes, which create a picture in your head of idealised D&D, and then off you go and try and get your friends on board. you use the books primarily as a reference. (or nowadays you go on 5e.tools instead and don't buy expensive books).

the thing is, this tradition is really good at perpetuating itself and it's as endless and weird to dig into as any long running media franchise. and because a lot of it is an echo of weird 70s shit that comes from, say, an off-brand tokusatsu figurine from Hong Kong, or an author like Jack Vance whose legacy has been kinda swallowed by D&D, there's real character. yeah, there's plenty of tedious wank too, but the density of it means it can serve the 'creative prompt engine' function of an RPG in a way that's very difficult for a smaller, more tightly focused, and tbh less stupid game to be able to do.

it's also got a huge body of folklore to immerse in. the Dread Gazebo. Tucker's Kobolds. Pun-Pun. and it's fractal. a D&D forum, a podcast fanbase, etc. will end up with their own niche injokes. (of course, so will an individual group). there's endless lore to learn about the game's own history if you're that way inclined.

now you might say, most of that doesn't depend on it being D&D, the janky system outlined in the books of WotC. and that's true! there's no reason (beyond copyright) you couldn't confront a Bulette in Burning Wheel, play a Mind Flayer in Fiasco, or even set a game of Apocalypse World in Dark Sun.

this is where one of the quiet strengths of D&D-the-product does come in though. the role of the book is mostly to lend a certain sense of concreteness. it's a rhetorical trick: if you can turn to a page of the Monster Manual and see a mindflayer with a statblock, an artwork and a couple of unique abilities, then mindflayers feel more 'real'. factor in the existence of decades of history, splatbooks expanding on the concept, articles in Dragon, modules, stories about other groups who've encountered a mindflayer, and you feel like you know something. nevermind that most of the mindflayer lore is kind of eh at best! D&D is a machine that rewards your autism, hard.

and in terms of actual game design, there are some things that D&D is very granular about, like what your character can and can't do. D&D certainly is an unbalanced grab bag of not-exactly-integrated systems with no unifying design philosophy... and that's largely to its advantage in terms of making the stuff on your character sheet feel concrete, rather than ephemeral like the freely chosen Aspects in FATE. by making the map more complicated, the supposed territory it describes (the shared fiction) might be made to feel more substantial. it's not the only way to do this, mind you - you can absolutely make something a strongly impactful, constraining part of the shared fiction without numbers and dice. but the numbers and dice provide a scaffolding, a thing to lean on when you draw a blank.

(D&D arrived at this more or less by accident mind you. you could definitely say that something like the Moves of a PbtA game are a more coherent and flexible framework for system and fiction engaging without sacrificing substance. and there's plenty of trad games besides D&D which follow the same paradigm, not least because splatbooks are good business. still, I think there is something gained by what seems at a glance to just be an unholy mess of jank).

for a new game, it can't work in the same way. it's a chicken and egg problem. if nobody's ever played your game before, you can't so easily introduce it by doing. (sure you can run it for friends, but you can't rely on most people being introduced to the game that way). there may be a small or even large community of people for any given game, or maybe fans of types of game, but you have to mostly rely on the book to build up the concept in the player's mind.

one of the most useful tools you have is genre, but that's a double edged sword. there are many games that are just 'PbtA for cyberpunk' or whatever, instantly forgettable. again, that's a tricky bootstrapping problem. somehow, a game book needs to get players enthusiastic about the premise using the familiar, introduce them to the unique quirks that make it interesting, and put them in a mindset where they're ready to extemporise in whatever idiom the game suggests. tall order!

the voice of Apocalypse World - the rulebook - is very casual, quite aggressive. 'to do it, do it', not 'when its condition is met in the fiction, the Move is triggered' as a later PbtA might put it. it swears a lot. the voice of a Jenna Moran game is full of little asides and wordplay. the voice of an Avery Alder game is exhaustingly sanctimonious, which has unfortunately spread to other authors. this aspect, the feeling you get reading it describe the stuff it wants you to do, is way more important in telling you about the game than the short story you skip over at the beginning of the book, or even any particular mechanical procedure.

the voice of modern D&D is... honestly in its current edition, painfully corporate and dull. nothing puts me off playing D&D faster than reading the class introductions! but where it has the most character unique sort of slightly arch 'game prose', kind of like an encyclopedia entry with dice rolls in the middle of a sentence. it's unabashedly nerdy, comfortingly so. this is why long lists of almost identical polearms are actually valuable. games need to have something weird and jank and inexplicable for your brain to hold on to.

however... that mass is also a weakness. because all that concrete stuff that you can lean on to flesh out and inspire your imaginings... is also a lot to digest for a potential new player. (this is a reason why I've found it hard to get into games like Shadowrun and Eclipse Phase, lacking a clear on-ramp, and my ideas clashing unpredictably with established stuff.)

compared to games with a hyper-defined setting, and games that create it all improvisationally in the first session, D&D's modular framework is actually pretty ingenious. if every campaign takes place in its own mini setting designed by the DM, there's huge libraries of stuff that could be there, so you can get that 'I recognised that' knowledge, but there's no need to digest a campaign setting or worry about lore conflicts. you can be ~intertextual~ with other D&D games - "oh yeah, my DM used that!" - without all the commitments of an official setting. (of course, D&D has plenty of those too, and many of them are pretty neat. but it's agnostic about whether you use them.) this also gives you a starting point for making your own setting. "here's a thing that's expected to be there. what's your spin on this?" is a really productive question, if the things are minimally interesting.

so being a DM is kind of a bridge between "run it by the book" and "make your own game". you have a lot of freedom, and you have fallbacks to lean on. that's actually pretty good I think.

the DM role is... you could spin it different ways. on the one hand, it gives one player vastly more work than the others, turning them into a mini game designer + master of ceremonies + multirole actor + narrative author + typically, organiser; the one who's responsible for carrying the whole thing. on the other hand... that's a stage. if you are lucky enough to play with a really good DM, the whole thing really does come alive in a way that a book, no matter how elegant or flavourful, could never convey - because it's responsive to you and you get a rapport going. of course by the same token an unengaged, unenthusiastic DM can't be saved by any procedures or rules you could imagine. in that middle ground... that's where tools like Apocalypse World's MC moves come in to help. for D&D, 'how to DM well' is in my experience communicated almost exclusively through stories and imitation - you could never learn it from the DMG.

viewed as a practice or a ritual, D&D likes to mysticise the DM, like the mad wizard who built the moldering pile etc etc. you have the pageantry of the DM's screen, hidden dice rolls, passed notes, asking for perception checks without explanation. if you play in to it (you should, it's part of the fun), you get to lean on the established image of the Dungeon Master, not just someone in a room telling a story. oh wait, is that actual magic?

incidentally, I never really ran Apocalypse World strictly 'by the book'. I was aware of the list of principles and vaguely remembered the moves, but equally, perhaps more so, I was thinking of the idea of an Apocalypse World MC suggested in discussions online. I was also of course leaning on previous experience playing D&D and other games. it worked well, better the second time when I was older, because it's like 75% about being genuinely enthusiastic and paying attention to people when you get right down to it.

all this is why it's hard to replace D&D with a suite of modern, elegant purpose built systems. most of what happens at a TTRPG table, with any 'system', is not determined by what's written in the book but some fuzzy social dynamic in a given group of people and their shared idea of what the game is supposed to be. you can try and introduce rules and procedures into that dynamic, even create a game like Firebrands where nearly every step comes from a prompt list. (the question of how much the explicit mechanics should touch social interactions and narrative structure is a matter of taste). it can be helpful, but you can also risk stifling something important that comes in improv.

viewing the broad space of indie RPGs as its own tradition, like D&D... 'indie RPGs' has its own content, a shared context of frequent ttrpg players, the type like me who are likely to try a new system every campaign. the more games you play, the more analogies you can draw and the quicker you can pick up the gist of a new game. you'll have cross-game skills in e.g. improv or breaking down systems, and an established habitus in terms of stepping into character or playing a GM-like role that can't be written in a book. if you've only ever played D&D, or no TTRPGs at all, you'll have some of that, but a lot will be unfamiliar and the benefit won't necessarily be obvious.

I do think getting into the broader space of TTRPGs is worthwhile, because... ok this is going to sound pretentious as hell but seriously, it's a ridiculously interesting art form, both the designing and the playing of them. but also that's given me a perspective to look back and say, oh, that's what D&D was all along!

what would kill D&D, WotC edition? hard to imagine. there have been splinters, like the OSR for people who like simple mechanics, high lethality and the flavour associated with older editions, or Pathfinder for people who... idk, who really like 3.5 I guess and just wanted a few balance tweaks, idk, did it diverge more? it's definitely just D&D in a funny hat though. oh and there's Dungeon World but lol, Dungeon World.

D&D-the-product-line has come close to collapsing a couple of times, once when TSR went under, again when 4e divided the 3.5e fanbase hard, but 5e being a 'pretty solid for the most part' game that managed to somehow appeal to multiple ideas of 'what D&D is', along the Actual Play renaissance selling a new generation on the idea of D&D... that saved it. maybe it's about to take another hit with this new OGL killing the secondary industry.

I don't think that most of the D&D groups out there, in it for the idea of D&D, would be playing other TTRPGs if only D&D was not so big. likely they wouldn't be doing any such thing at all, but some other dorky hobby. if WotC-run D&D goes under, I'm not sure what happens! D&D-the-practice would continue no doubt, and maybe it starts looking like the OSR, with numerous variations on a theme that don't carry the stamp of 'officialness', until one or another can become an unofficial standard. maybe it looks like open source software and some kind of nonprofit D&D foundation is created to control the source lol. would be interesting to see.

aaaaanyway. if you want your fave non-D&D TTRPGs to thrive as D&D has, here's what you gotta do. talk about them. tell anecdotes from your games, the stupid memes and injokes, what you really like about the mechanics, tell everyone about the weird fun fucked up bits of the lore. tell a story about what it means to play that game. and sure, talk about how it's different from D&D and why you like it more. that story is the bait that will get people onto that fun new RPG system and give them a handle to get started. what got me into 'Story Games' all those years ago was finding a forum with a whole bunch of people having fascinating nerdy discussions about sides of TTRPGs I'd never been exposed to in D&D.

[of course me being me, I took it way too seriously and made a whole thing in my head about how much better these new, progressive Story Games were better than janky old incoherent Trad Games. for years I wouldn't even consider playing D&D or similar. all I can say is, I'm really glad I got over that attitude. hence this kind of post.]

[pitaenigma]

One of my big pet peeves is when someone asks for advice on creating encounters and people respond "Tucker's Kobolds". Tucker's Kobolds is an anecdote about how a DM used monsters in a slightly more intelligent way than "swarm the players". It is not a response or a guide on how to create more difficult encounters, it's "my kobolds used traps and heights", which is what they should be doing in good encounter design. And it's a good anecdote that can help beginner DMs with the idea that monsters can be intelligent too, but it's not a good response to "how should I challenge players"

[dungeonmystic]

do people even know what Tucker's Kobolds are anymore

[tim-el-e]

Tucker’s kobolds

This month’s editorial is about Tucker’s kobolds. We get letters on occasion asking for advice on creating high-level AD&D® game adventures, and Tucker’s kobolds seem to fit the bill.

 Many high-level characters have little to do because they’re not challenged. They yawn at tarrasques and must be forcibly kept awake when a lich appears. The DMs involved don’t know what to do, so they stop dealing with the problem and the characters go into Character Limbo. Getting to high level is hard, but doing anything once you get there is worse.

 One of the key problems in adventure design lies in creating opponents who can challenge powerful characters. Singular monsters like tarrasques and liches are easy to gang up on; the party can concentrate its firepower on the target until the target falls down dead and wiggles its little feet in the air.

 Designing monsters more powerful than a tarrasque is self-defeating; if the group kills your super-monster, what will you do next, send in its mother? That didn.t work on Beowulf, and it probably won’t work here. Worse yet, singular supermonsters

rarely have to think. They just use their trusty, predictable claw/claw/bite. This shouldn’t be the measure of a campaign. These

games fall apart because there’s no challenge to them, no mental stimulation, no danger.

 In all the games that I’ve seen, the worst, most horrible, most awful beyond-comparison opponents ever seen were often weaker than the characters who fought them. They were simply well-armed and intelligent beings who were played by the

DM to be utterly ruthless and clever.

 Tucker’s kobolds were like that. Tucker ran an incredibly dangerous dungeon in the days I was stationed at Ft. Bragg, N.C. This

dungeon had corridors that changed all of your donkeys into huge flaming demons or dropped the whole party into acid baths, but the demons were wienies compared to the kobolds on Level One. These kobolds were just regular kobolds, with 1-4 hp and all that, but they were mean. When I say they were mean, I mean they were bad, Jim.

 They graduated magna cum laude from the Sauron Institute for the Criminally Vicious. When I joined the gaming group,

some of the PCs had already met Tucker’s kobolds, and they were not eager to repeat the experience. The party leader went over the penciled map of the dungeon and tried to find ways to avoid the little critters, but it was not possible. The group

resigned itself to making a run for it through Level One to get to the elevators, where we could go down to Level Ten and fight “okay” monsters like huge flaming demons. It didn’t work. The kobolds caught us about 60’ into the dungeon and locked the door behind us and barred it. Then they set the corridor on fire, while we were still in it. “NOOOOOO!!!” screamed the party

leader. “It’s THEM! Run!!!” Thus encouraged, our party scrambled down a side passage, only to be ambushed by more kobolds firing with light crossbows through murder holes in the walls and ceilings.

 Kobolds with metal armor and shields flung Molotov cocktails at us from the other sides of huge piles of flaming debris, which other kobolds pushed ahead of their formation using long metal poles like broomsticks. There was no mistake about

it. These kobolds were bad. We turned to our group leader for advice. “AAAAAAGH!!!” he cried, hands clasped over his face to shut out the tactical situation.

 We abandoned most of our carried items and donkeys to speed our flight toward the elevators, but we were cut off by kobold snipers who could split-move and fire, ducking back behind stones and corners after launching steel-tipped bolts and arrows, javelins, hand axes, and more flaming oil bottles. We ran into an unexplored section of Level One, taking damage all the time. It was then we discovered that these kobolds had honeycombed the first level with small tunnels to speed their movements. Kobold commandos were everywhere. All of our hirelings died. Most of our henchmen followed. We were next.

 I recall we had a 12th-level magic user with us, and we asked him to throw a spell or something. “Blast ‘em!” we yelled as we ran. “Fireball ‘em! Get those little @#+$%*&!!” “What, in these narrow corridors?” he yelled back. “You want I should burn us all up instead of them?”

 Our panicked flight suddenly took us to a dead-end corridor, where a giant air shaft dropped straight down into unspeakable darkness, far past Level Ten. Here we hastily pounded spikes into the floors and walls, flung ropes over the ledge, and climbed straight down into that unspeakable darkness, because anything we met down there was sure to be better than those kobolds.

We escaped, met some huge flaming demons on Level Ten, and even managed to kill one after about an hour of combat and the lives of half the group. We felt pretty good, but the group leader could not be cheered up. “We still have to go out the way

we came in,” he said as he gloomily prepared to divide up the treasure.

 Tucker’s kobolds were the worst things we could imagine. They ate all our donkeys and took our treasure and did everything they could to make us miserable, but they had style and brains and tenacity and courage. We respected them and loved them, sort of, because they were never boring.

 If kobolds could do this to a group of PCs from 6th to 12th level, picture what a few orcs and some low level NPCs could do to a 12th-16th level group, or a gang of mid-level NPCs and monsters to groups of up to 20th level. Then give it a try. Sometimes, it’s the little things “used well” that count.

From Dragon Magazine #127

[vintagerpg]

Dragon Mountain (1993) is another deluxe campaign box set from TSR’s later years, though not nearly so late in its life as Night Below. And compared to that campaign box, Dragon Mountain offers a lot less nuance. But there are still lots of surprises!

Dragon Mountain opens in a wilderness area dotted with small settlements, detailed in the first booklet. A number of adventures are to be had here and, naturally, all of them seem to indicate that something larger is afoot in the region. The second and third books detail the mountain itself, which is a massive dungeon in the classic style, complete with improbable death traps no sane person would build.

The secret of Dragon Mountain – and maybe stop reading if you think you want to play it – is that it is an attempt to rehabilitate one of D&D’s wimpiest monsters into a force to be feared. In my humble opinion, that experiment is a success.

Back in Dragon Magazine 127, there is an editorial about Tucker’s Kobolds. The DM used kobolds as an entrenched guerilla force in the first level of a deep dungeon and they prospect of facing them and their endless traps either coming or going was enough to make his players’ blood run cold. Dragon Mountain is, in my view, an attempt to formally publish D&D kobolds that match Tucker’s for their guile and gumption. I believe that if you run this campaign correctly, your players will never want to meet a kobold ever again.

That’s to say nothing of the dragon that resides in Dragon Mountain, or the unusual reason PCs have never heard of that worthy wyrm. Taken together with the kobolds, Dragon Mountain is a challenging, and likely very deadly, campaign.

Oh, did I mention the interior art is by Tony DiTerlizzi? It is! That makes it worth the price of admission alone.

[beragonds-tomfuckery]

Tell that to the Tucker’s Kobold style dungeon my party just escaped. By the end, the happy go lucky paladin-bard was ready to commit genocide on their hatchery.

[dr-archeville]

I see a lot of DM cries for help online, and most of them pretty much go the same way.

"Help!  I keep putting my players up against creatures that should be on their level, but my encounters are getting mowed down.  How do I give them a challenge without just bashing them over the head with encounters five levels above what they should be dealing with?!" 

Every table is unique, and every DM is going to face their own set of challenges.  With that said, a lot of the time the easiest way to challenge your players is to look at the monsters you have facing them, and to have them fight smarter, not harder.

Tucker's Kobolds

If you've never heard the tale of Tucker's Kobolds, you can check out the details in the write-up.  The short version is that these kobolds are the baddest asses out of Fort Bragg, and the DM who created them played some serious hardball.  Not by beefing up their stats, or giving them some kind of crazy nova beam breath weapon, either.  Every member of the group was a standard kobold, with no more than a few hit points.  A single hit with a big rock would have taken them out.

What Tucker's Kobolds lacked in BAB and hit points, though, they made up for in tactics, gear, and preparation.  To the point that a high-level party's plan was to book it through the kobolds' stronghold, hoping to hit the elevators before the little bastards knew they were there.  They just wanted to get down to the tenth level to fight some enemies they thought they could beat... you know, fifteen-foot tall fire demons.

When was the last time you saw a party over fourth level running scared from kobolds?  Or goblins?  Or orcs?  Probably never.  But you don't have to go through basic training to make monsters a challenge.  You just have to look at their stats, and ask how a creature like this would win against a superior foe.

The Art of War

Now, you don't have to get crazy here.  Let's take your basic orc.  It's a CR 1/3 challenge.  You don't need to give a squad of orcs a slew of character levels and high-powered enchanted weapons to make them a viable threat (though if that fits your campaign, more power to you).  What you need to do is look at their special abilities, and what would make that creature a threat to your party. 

Well, you'll note that greenskin orcs tend to have a few hunting wargs with them, according to their write-up.  What if those wargs were wrapped with suicide belts, and trained to rush in among the party?  So the dog runs in from an unexpected position, the greenskin leader flicks a switch or bellows the command word (or worse, you kill the warg as the trigger), and BOOM!  Everyone's got to make an unexpected Reflex save for half damage.  Even if the rogue and the monk make it, the wizard might be hurting if he doesn't have energy resistance up.  You don't have to use the crazy 10d6 of the ring of retribution either... just a few d6 can be a problem for low-HP characters who don't make the save.

The same trick might be used by the orcs themselves, and they could pop their exploding belts as soon as their Ferocity kicks in when they're in melee.  Perhaps after bellowing, "Witness me!"  And if you use their darkvision so they're attacking the party when they're blind, or you give your orcs launchers for alchemical items (just your usual, 1d6 fire or acid flasks), your party might soon be on the receiving end of a decent amount of hurt.  Especially if they're in a kill box, with the orcs behind cover at the top of the hill, and the party exposed in the open.

Can the party fight free of this situation, charging the pillbox and taking out the orcs?  Or using magic to blast the area and hoping to hit the right targets?  Sure, they can, but the point is you just took a CR 1/3 creature, and made the party burn 3rd and 4th-level spells to come out victorious.  That's a challenge.  Especially if the party can't just run away, and come back later with full health and spells, because now there's a fresh company with even nastier tricks just ready to get revenge for their dead comrades.

Remember, You Can Mix Things Up

There's nothing more boring than a bad guy who does nothing but claw, claw, bite every turn, without fail.  So mix it up.  Use pack tactics with dire wolves.  Have a horde of summoned demons charge in from one direction as a distraction, so the assassin can sneak up from behind and go for the kill.  Give your giants the Deflect Arrows feat.  Force the players to fight in a cramped, squeezed space against small-sized enemies, taking environmental negatives and moving through difficult terrain while getting hacked, slashed, and burned.

Most importantly, though, don't get repetitive.  One encounter with suicide bomber orcs will shake up the status quo, but if every low-level enemy suddenly detonates upon death, your players are going to get bored all over again.  Just like how you can get away with a plot-important villain taking a 5-foot step and teleporting away from one fight, but if they do that every, single time the players encounter them, they're victories are going to feel pretty hollow after a while.  And if every named bad guy uses this tactic, then players are going to start coming up with reasons to cease attending your game.

So, while you should do the unexpected and use smart strategy, don't use the same strategy every time.  Because not only will your players lose interest, but they'll crack the code, and find a way to counter that specific thing, and then the steamroller has started back up again.  So keep them on their back foot, and remember that you don't always need bigger, badder beasties and pumped-up spells to challenge your party.  Sometimes you just need a kobold with a grenade launcher.

That's all for this week's Crunch topic.  It's a little more general than most, but I'll have something with more numbers in it next time.  If you want more content from yours truly, then why not check out my Gamers archive?  It's growing a little bit every month, so check back often.  If you want to make sure you don't miss any of my updates, then follow me on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter.  Lastly, if you want to help support Improved Initiative, then why not head over to The Literary Mercenary's Patreon page?  All it takes is $1 a month to help me keep creating content just for you, and to get some sweet gaming swag as a thank you.

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[nealflitherland]

How many times have you, or a DM you knew, sighed and shaken their head because your players smashed the challenges you put in front of them? Well, you don’t need huge beasts. I’m going to tell you a tale about Tucker’s Kobolds, and the lesson they all teach us.

[geekyzelda]

four rounds in on a fight with four level 12s against a beholder and a high level monk and we’ve hit the beholder twice. It’s not going well

[sleepdepwritings]

Bit of lore for my homebrew D&D setting inspired by this post:

Kobolds are big on home security because, frankly, humanoids have 0 chill about so-called "monstrous" people and you've got to be ready for them. If a kobold invites you into their home, they make a big show of disarming their front door traps to make it clear that they aren't luring you to your doom Tucker-style. Most kobolds are simply *aghast* when they learn that most humanoids don't trap their front doors at all.

"How do you protect yourself from wandering bandits then?!"

"Uhh... you mean adventurers?"

"..."

Fantasy stories should have more "what do you mean you don't do X" things in compare and contrast of cultures. Like the differences between peoples aren't the stuff they show off as "These Are Our Culture :)" things, fucking everyone has food and music and folk tales, but the things they've always assumed that everyone has, and are baffled to discover that they don't.

The people who are always barefoot are baffled that humans don't have a wash basin at their front door where people can wash their feet before stepping inside?? Do they just walk in with their dirty feet? The fuck do you mean you take your shoes off?

Humans don't have small baby-sized spellbooks for toddlers who just learned to read, so they can safely learn to practice tiny cute and harmless, age-appropriate magic spells before progressing to more mature and demanding spells? What, do they just throw teenagers completely unprepared into the arcane - hold the fuck up, is that why human sorceror mortality is so fucking high?

Dwarves who have always wondered why the entrance to human residences is so fucking big, why do you need to take up such a large area for a door that's just there to lead downstairs to the underground halls? Are the timber walls really as thick as a human is tall? What for? And once one of them gets invited to a human house to stay and rest, nobody ever fucking believes her: That's not the entrance, that's the whole fucking house. 100% of the human house is aboveground, there is no tunnel to the underground levels. They might have a single storage room down there, but the aboveground section is so fucking big because that's the whole house.

This post was brought to you by: People who butter their bread and who had no idea that there are people who put mayonnaise on their bread, and people who put mayo on their bread and had no idea about people who put butter on their bread discovering that the other kind of people exist.

[probablyfunrpgideas]

Dragonborn hard rock band called Claw/Claw/Bite

Kobold folk punk band called Tucker’s Brigade

Drow ska band called Icingdeath and the Dancing Panthers