Better

Okay, combat.

The party crosses the threshold into the dungeon and encounter a group of  six kobalds dwelling in the forward guard room of a kobald lair.  As described in Keep on the Borderlands:

"1. GUARD ROOM:  6 kobold guards (AC 7.  HD 1/2.  hp 3 each, #AT I, D 1-4, Save NM, ML 6).  They will throw their spears the first round if they have initiative.  Each carries d6 silver pieces. One will run to warn areas 4. and 6.. The guards will be alerted by loud noises or lights."

 

This is 43 years old so it begs the question, is this still interesting?

The answer is yes.  I can still make this work, because it advantages some tried-and-true tropes that are no easier for players of the same game than it was then.  The one that runs to warn the rest of the lair virtually assures that the party achieves no surprise going forward, while the possibility exists of them having to fight all the rest of the kobalds in the lair in one combat (though I knew no one in my youth with the nerve to run the Caves of Chaos that way).  The volley of spears is a good start, especially if the mage is one of the targets, though the chances are only one or two spears will hit and, being kobald spears, won't do much damage.  Still, the format is sound ... and if it's six ogres and they start the combat by all throwing rocks, that makes a strong encounter for a higher level party.

But we can obviously do better.  We don't need to send one kobald to warn other areas, because we don't stupidly build a lair where room (4) is 150 ft away in one direction, while room (6) is 110 ft in another:

If rooms 3 through 6 are a rational distance from room 1, where the guards are, then the one kobald can shout, or bang a cymbal, or ring a bloody bell, and then fight with the others.  And this means it only takes two or three rounds for another 20 kobalds to appear, plus maybe the big one in room 5.  In quick order, the party does well against the first six, finds themselves getting rushed come round 4, give ground and stumble outside, and then it's a running fight through the forests to the keep, unless the mage has something that can turn the tide.  Better combat.

Better still, we can put all the kobald rooms, including the guard room, in a more logical arrangement: we put the guard room around a blind corner, with the same pit trap.  Only now the situation is this: you see the end of the passage and the hall becomes a 10 ft. wide, 20 ft. long area of worked stone.  On the far left side of of this small rectangle is a 3 ft. high wall, which a player can easily jump over.  But when the player moves to jump over the wall, they set off the pit trap at the hall's end.  Now they can't jump straight over the pit, because straight over the pit is a wall.  And if they do somehow get over the 3 foot wall, well ... I'll give you a diagram:

See?  The guards don't have to SEE the party coming, they can hear them; and the guards can't be seen because they're around a 180-degree corner; in fact, the players have no idea there's anything around the corner but more hallway.  As the party comes within 15 feet of the pit, they're just as close to the guard room.  As they chat to each other, with their clanking metal armour and so on, the kobalds can hear everything.  And if the players won't set off the pit trap, the kobalds will.

Furthermore, from the hall beyond the guard room, we can add all that other help from rooms 4, 5 and 6.  Who are at least partially protected by a simple 3 ft. wall that the players will have difficult getting across faster than one at a time.  That's all the advantage the kobalds need.

Better combat still.

So your first task is to figure out a better arrangement for the combat based on the intelligence of the creatures being attacked.  Kobalds aren't that smart, but even a small child knows to put a gate in front of a house.  Imagine the kind of obstacle course a group of elves could invent with blind corners, three foot walls and pit traps.  And other things too, obviously.

You can go with the tried and true method of just throwing the bad guys willy nilly at the party.  I did it last week, sort of.  And the 2nd-4th level party had a good time slaughtering a gang of 22 goblins, though six of those were archers, who started targeting the 4th level, 52 hp fighter with every volley.  They drilled "Hof" down to 14 hp before the archers had to run away; they were a bit slow; Hof got one.  The targeting was logical: Hof wreaked absolute havoc on everything near him.  He has an 18 +1+3 strength and a +2 trident.  It's not pretty what that does to goblins, even when one is 3rd level with 25 hp.

But putting the players in a situation where they find themselves at the top of a hall going, "Huh?  This doesn't look right ..." is miles better.  I haven't done the blind corner bit above, not yet ... but my party is moving into a drow elf lair, so, it should get interesting.

The party's not high enough level, obviously.  But so long as this group beats a hasty retreat at the right time, it's a collection of the players' henchfolk they're running, so they have access to their own higher level characters.  To whom they'll bring valuable intel.

If you can design combat fields that belie the standard D&D models, you'll give the players a far better combat experience and increase the intensity of your game by quite a bit.  But to do so requires that you embrace an aspect of game combat that many, many dyed-in-the-wool D&Ders eschew with great bitterness.  You'll have to adopt a tactical model.

Now I ran combats like the set up shown for years using paper and pencil, sometimes making a notation for who was who but most of the time not needing to.  The distances were meaningless, it only mattered who you attacked last time and who was attacking you now.  This is rather easy and provides no valuable tactical intel.  The only value it adds to a combat is that you can see how many of the enemy is left, and enjoy a small dopamine thrill when one of the X's get scratched out.  Players are always O's.

I can run a non-tactical combat if I so desire.  For example, the players are coming through a forest and get attacked by a swarm of giant ticks.  The ticks attack and scurry off, disappearing into the undergrowth, so I can randomly attack a party with random ticks for a few rounds before they're "fought off" and the party can count their number.  I don't need a map for this.

But doing it with a map would be better.

I understand, however, why many DM's resent any notion of making combat tactical.  It takes an enormous amount of time, years, to (a) get used to a tactical system; (b) build a tactical system that can rationally handle anything you throw at it; (c) and learn how to educate new players and old into how your tactical system works.  This also requires patience and belief in a system and the ability to change as a person.  Most of these demands are quite beyond the sort of stale, lazy, fussbudgety DM heels who hate combat anyway, with a passion, because they believe D&D is not about combat.  Despite the fact that 160 pages of the original DMG's 200 are dedicated in some manner to combat and it's rewards.  

I'm not concerned that there are loads of DMs running around trashing tactical combat.  I'm concerned about you, reading this now.  Games are inventions that depend on hitting the right buttons with human persons.  Several centuries before the invention of RPGs, tactical combat board games proved their value to millions of persons ... far more than will every play RPGs, as those games remain wildly more popular by far.  Whatever our feelings about combat board games, we can't disparage their popularity.  Rather, we should maintain an open mind about how to steal some of that popularity for ourselves.

Non-tactical D&D combat is, to say the least, forgettable.  It doesn't lend itself much to story telling.  As a result, the "rule of cool" model that discards all logic in non-tactical combat modelling has become the guideline in many existing communities.  It isn't what your attack does, but how you describe your attack.  It's the same die, and the same metric of removing points, but your ability to graphically explain a profound set of expressible actions within a three foot space defines whether or not the DM's light shines upon you.  Call the "move" you make whatever you want; it's still just a die and a number.  To paraphrase a physicist talking about how many subparticles exist in the universe, "If I wanted to remember all the combat feats that are available in all the splatbooks related to D&D, pathfinder and other games, I'd have been a botonist."

The second path is to avoid combat like the plague ... or, when it happens, get it over with quickly and move on.

The third path is to build a tactical system.  Or adopt one.  And get so good at it that you can run your tactical system so fast the players won't give a damn.  Which is what I do.  What's rewarding about it is the way players use a tactical system to make amazing things happen.  In a session I was running a month ago, I had two players do tricks with light and fog during a combat so profound I'm still trying to figure out how to write it in a blog post.  It unfolded unexpectedly to me, and I guess you had to be there to see it.