[Jack Simth]

Yeah, it's the teleporting demons with nifty stunning attacks that get dicy...... and those are Core. Had fun with the power suits, too - party completely re-geared their defenses in response.

If you like. Makes no real difference to me.

Ah, Tucker's Kobolds? Yeah. That's mean DM tricks. It's actually kinda easy to set up a situation that's nasty if you have complete control over the "battle" location and infinite time to prepare beforehand... you know, if you're the DM. Mostly, though, neigh-unwinnable situations such as that aren't fun.

Of course, a sufficiently high level party can take down Tucker's Kobolds. Teleportation gets the party away to safety (the idea with Tucker's Kobolds mostly precludes anything stopping teleportation). Energy Resistence all around makes those flasks of alchemist's fire, or the burning oil, go fizz. The Fireball spell has a clause which indicates it may very well be useable for bypassing line-of-effect issues and going back through some of those murder holes. With Polymorph, you turn someone into a Dire badger (unless the walls are "solid rock") to tunnel into an area the Kobolds haven't prepared / don't expect; all those well-placed murder holes are quite useless when nobody's on the other side (a Druid-4 could potentially have one as an Animal Companion, a Druid-3 can get one for a few rounds from Summon Nature's Ally II, and a Wiz/Cleric 5 could get a Celestial Dire Badger from Summon Monster III). After 17th, the Wizard Shapechanges into a beholder... for the Disintigrate at will. Not for hitting the kobolds, but to change the terrain. Open up those tunnels, one 10 foot cube a round. Jason can reach through walls. There's actually a lot of different counters. The only problem is that most of them need to be prepped in advance..... but then, some of the counters are stand-by spells, useful for lots of different things.

But those kind of risks for the treasure and XP you're officially supposed to get from a few dozen cr 1/3rd to 2 critters is kinda.... blech.