Reflections on Kobolds

It's time to round out our tour of the Neanderthals' enemies with the famous, infamous, kobolds. This isn't the main monster tactics post for them, though. Instead, I want to reflect for a minute about what kobolds are and what they have been in the game.

Some History

Perhaps more than any other monsters, including dragons, kobolds have had an eventful history in D&D and its relatives.

In Chainmail, kobolds are all but indistinguishable from goblins. OD&D differentiates them by making kobolds weaker, and AD&D 1e continues the differentiation by depicting them as reptilian and mentioning that they hatch from eggs.

The 1981 Basic Rulebook has an illustration that might be reptilian, but it describes kobolds as "dog-like," with rust-brown skin and no hair. Apart from mentioning that they attack gnomes on sight, this is the earliest source for actual kobold tactics I can find. It says they prefer to attack from ambush.

In 1987, a letter in Dragon introduced "Tucker's Kobolds" to the world, and along came the idea that kobolds fill their lairs with ridiculously deadly traps. That becomes official with second edition. In third edition, kobolds stop speaking their own language and start speaking Draconic. From there, it's a short hop to the current iteration of kobolds as trap-building dragon-lovers who may even be related to dragons in some way. Which is a far cry from the old description of kobolds as basically the same thing for gnomes that goblins are for dwarves.

So, What Are Kobolds?

Now, I'll be the first to admit that "just like goblins, but weaker," is a boring monster. But I'm also bored of "these ones make traps!", and the whole connection between kobolds and dragons seems forced to me. Once you see it, it's hard to unsee: 3e made everything with scales speak Draconic to cut down the number of languages in the game. Kobolds have scales but they're also boring. So we can make them an iota more interesting by really leaning in to having them speak Draconic. Let's make kobolds love dragons! Because, you know, we don't want to have too many languages in the game.

But if we confine our attention to (non-advanced) D&D of 1981 and earlier, kobolds are really a blank slate. Why should your kobolds, in your D&D game, be the same as what they became in 2nd through 5th editions? What if we try something else?

For inspiration, I strongly recommend the Wikipedia page on kobolds. It's chock full of neat possibilities that are decidedly not what you get in any edition of D&D.

One thing that stands out to me from that page is the idea of kobolds as "mine spirits." I also want to incorporate them into my treatment of Chaotic humanoids as embodiments of terrible things. Just like goblins are dwarf-hatred, kobolds are living, breathing incarnations of hate for gnomes. But it's bigger than just that. Kobolds are also connected to greed and the kind of contempt and hatred it can engender.

Yeah, Yeah, but What Are Kobolds?

Kobolds happen when people hate gnomes. They especially happen when gnomes hate and resent other gnomes as threats to their wealth. They emerge from the mines where the gnomes get their treasures, making war on them. That doesn't explain everything about kobolds, such as their paltry treasure. But I want to set that aside for now and think about what kobolds are as part of the game. What's the point of them?

Kobolds are individually weak antagonists. An average sleep spell will neutralize nine of them, and their only hope against a well-prepared first-level party is to have surprise and numbers on their side. 

Their treasure is an insult. A typical dungeon lair will have 33 kobolds, plus a 2 HD chief and 3 bodyguards with 1 + 1 HD each. That's 200 XP worth of monsters. They'll be carrying 14 cp each, for a total of 518 cp, or 5 XP of treasure carried. Their lair treasure, if there is any at all, is 3000 cp and 200 sp. So that's another 50 XP worth of treasure. But 68% of the time, they won't have any lair treasure at all. So call the horde's average XP value 16. That's 200 XP of monsters with 21 XP of treasure on average — in a game that should be giving out about three times as much XP for treasure as for monsters!

Giant rats have better treasure than kobolds.

So, call it 221 XP per 37-kobold lair, or 6 XP per kobold, including treasure. A party of four first level characters would have to 833 kobolds for their thief to reach second level.

Obviously, kobolds aren't there for PCs to fight and loot. It's a waste of the players' time. But if that's so, what are they for?

I think kobolds have two main functions.

First, they are nuisance monsters. They are the quintessential wandering monster. One of their best uses is to pose a strategic question to the players: Do we ignore the kobolds harassing us and focus our resources on our main goal, or do we divert some resources from our main objective to eliminating the kobold threat? The point isn't that the kobolds are a real threat to the party. The point is that they can be a consistent, minor resource drain until they're eliminated, but eliminating them requires diverting resources (including time) away from the main task.

Kobolds are like the bandits in Slay the Spire. Bandits ask the player: your money or your life? You can keep them from doing much damage to you, but they may well get away with some of your money. Or you can keep them from taking your money, but they'll probably deal you a bunch of damage. You often can't protect both your money and your life, so you have to choose. 

As nuisance monsters, kobolds can slowly bleed off party resources, until the party spends expends resources to get rid of them. The trick for the players is to figure out whether to tolerate the slow bleeding. Will it cost them more than just getting rid of the kobolds altogether? Maybe. As a dungeon designer, it's your job to make that an interesting question for the players.

The point of nuisance monsters like this isn't to be a threat. It's to change the resource calculation players have to make.

Second, kobolds can be used to challenge player expectations about the challenge curve of an adventure. 

Always remember that this is a resource management game. One good adventure structure involves PCs trying to make it to their objective with enough resources left to actually accomplish it. But that structure actually has at least THREE different shapes.

• Shape 1 - Even Challenge. Every challenge is of about equal intrinsic difficulty. The final challenge, to accomplish the objective, is intrinsically just as tough as the first challenge, but it is harder because the PCs have expended resources to get to it. Although the rule books recommend against it, this is very easy to do with the encounter-building tools provided from 3rd edition onward.
• Shape 2 - Increasing Challenge. The challenges get intrinsically tougher as the PCs get close to the objective. Maybe each level of the dungeon has tougher monsters than the previous level, and the objective is on the bottom level. Or maybe there are a bunch of easy challenges to warm the players up before a big, tough, climactic challenge.
• Shape 3 - Decreasing Challenge. The challenges become intrinsically easier as the PCs get close their objective. The final objective may not be very difficult in itself at all, but getting to it could be deadly.

What DM Tucker knew is that Shape 3 can be very tough and challenging too. You can start with a challenges that put the PCs in great peril and pose, even more urgently than Shape 1 and Shape 2, the question of whether resources are better spent to overcome this challenge now or conserved for later. You can stack up a bunch of really hard challenges to see if the PCs can get through them with enough resources to deal with a bunch of mere kobolds. Or whatever. And if most adventures follow Shape 1 or Shape 2, then players will probably find this terrifying.

So, from an adventure-design perspective, kobolds are seasoning for an adventure. They are either annoyances that waste party time and resources as they try to accomplish their main goal, or they can help challenge player expectations about the shape of an adventure's challenge curve.

Kobolds are a good example, but there's nothing really special about them. Other weak monsters can be, and should be, put to the same uses. Bats, giant centipedes, goblins, kobolds, normal humans, rats, and sprites are all Basic Rulebook monsters with under 1 HD and not much threat. Any of them can fill the niche of nuisance monster of easy-ending to a Shape 3 adventure.

Next: Kobold Tactics