I have never met anyone who ran it in its original tournament format (other than myself with friends one afternoon) - with the supplied pregenerated characters and a time limit. I would be very interested in hearing from anyone who did play through it that way and succeeded in getting to Acererak.
The only accounts of succeeding that I have heard relied on
1) sending waves of hirelings/summoned critters/slaves at everything and setting off every trap in the place.
2) having access to raise dead/resurrection/a supply of replacement characters.
or
3) Summoning some sort of huge creature and simply digging the tomb out - bypassing everything.
I would also be very interested if someone has written a walk through that explains the clues that tip off the characters to the various traps.
The trap that I found particularly annoying was the tapestries of green slime/brown mold - 2 die rolls and 3 characters (or maybe 4) were killed - no save. Although later on when I owned the module and read through it - it could have been argued that this was actually the DMs fault because one character didn't actually say he was holding on to the tapestry when it was moved aside for us to go through the secret door.
I'm curious about the same thing. Several years ago, I sat down with the module and a plan to map out what clues it provides the PC's and how helpful those clues might really be. I gave up pretty quickly.
I'll freely admit that puzzles and riddles aren't my thing when I'm a player. But I'm not convinced that the Tomb can be solved through player skill alone. Has the topic been addressed around here before?
ISecondly, this amounts to a spoiler of some sort, but Tomb of Horrors is fair. Acererak plays fair. He's so uncannily and unusually fair given his apparant goal (killing adventurers) that it had to be lamp shaded and explained in the game universe in 'Return to the Tomb of Horrors'. He's not using reverse psychology on the players to force them into guessing what's behind door #2. If you must guess whether to go left or right, then success depends largely on luck. Acererak follows a pattern and sticks to it, so that with care you really don't have to guess after you successfully enter the tomb. ... Tomb of Horrors is almost entirely singular in being a killer dungeon where this is not true. If you make the right choices, you can 'beat the dungeon' with practically a party of 1st levels.
Admittedly, I haven't read the original module, but this assertion seems to run counter to everything I've heard about it. Could you elaborate why you think this is the case, possibly in SBLOCKs for the benefit of those who don't want to be spoiled?
Admittedly, I haven't read the original module, but this assertion seems to run counter to everything I've heard about it. Could you elaborate why you think this is the case, possibly in SBLOCKs for the benefit of those who don't want to be spoiled?
Sure, as soon as I figure out how spoiler tags work...
The module has a totally unfair reputation for unfairness, not because it is unfair but because it is utterly unmerciful and unforgiving. D&D is a very forgiving game usually. You have hit points. If you get hit, you lose a few but it in no way degrades your performance. And pretty soon, you have a lot of hitpoints and can survive a lot of stuff before it kills you. If something bad happens because you weren't careful, you generally expect that there is a random chance you'll just get out of it with no or little harm. And so forth. There are a lot of things I could touch on, but the point is that normally in D&D it takes a lot to kill you and any one mistake by design is not normally fatal. So normally, D&D players are a bit careless because they don't figure that they have to take much in the way of additional precautions on account of the fact that in their expeince when they get into trouble, they can get out again.
So you can imagine their shock when they take that care free attitude in and the DM just closes the book and says, "Well, you're all dead now. Thanks for playing."
Like a child whose suddenly realizing that things aren't what they expect, they typically say, "That's not fair.", and since they typically run away from the module at that point and they leave it at that.
However, being merciful is by definition not being fair. When you are shown mercy, it's because what you deserve is something worse and you are unfairly given more (or less) than you deserve.
But the tomb is very fair because the tomb is never really arbitrary.
Arbitrary is usually a synonym for random, and the tomb is rarely random.
Acererak doesn't use reverse logic. If Acererak calls for a sacrifice, he'll reward you if you make it rather than laughing at you about your pointless loss and then punishing you on top of it. If Acerak gives you a choice between a noble deed and an ignoble one, the noble choice will be repaid. If something looks evil and diabolic, then it certainly is. There is no 'evil is good' and 'good is evil' stuff going on in the tomb. If the tomb warns you against doing something, then its a fair warning and the consequences of ignoring it will be bad. If the tomb provides you a clue, it's a fair clue that isn't meant to mislead you. When in doubt, it's the middle way. Up toward heaven is good and down toward hell is bad.
Acererak doesn't play damned if you do, damned if you don't. There is a way forward, and if you take that way foward you won't get punished for it. If there is a way to disarm the trap and you need to disarm the trap, the way to disarm the trap won't also be trapped. You won't come to any dead ends, and if you do, it's because you missed something. You won't come to a spot where all the doors are wrong, and if you are at that point, it's because you didn't look for another door.
Acererak doesn't build a maze. He doesn't make you guess which way to go. It's not a sprawling labrinth filled with a lot of arbitrary choices between left and right with no way of knowing which leads to certain doom and which to a reward. You aren't arbitrarily picking your way through it, and if you paid attention he'll give you very specific directions through the tomb. False leads look like false leads once you have the real one to compare them too, so just look around before you decide to follow the first thing you find and you'll be alright.
Acerak doesn't rely on attrition. He's not trying to wear you down. He's not going to force everyone to make a saving throw just to go foward and turn the whole affair into a test of whether you can roll high on 4 or 5 unavoidable rolls in a row. The dungeon doesn't amount to whether you can win initiative enough times, or whether you roll high on your damage dice, or whether the monster makes his saving throw, or whether you can avoid a streak of 1's. If you play by his rules, you'll probably never have to make a saving throw, and if you screw up and get reckless you'll probably never have a chance to. There is almost no combat; there is almost no luck, good or bad
Pretty much everything you need to get out of the tomb is in the tomb. Sadly, not everything necessary to defeat Acererak himself is in the tomb, but that might be asking for too much since the final fight in my opinion is again primarily a test of whether you stupidly blunder foward into things without observing and thinking first. Avoiding combat is probably the best option, and its lets you get out with all the treasure. Looting the tomb and getting away is in my opinion true victory, and as I said, it's just about possible for a 1st level party to loot the tomb and escape from it.
I could cite a lot of specific examples from the tomb, but it's getting late.
The best way to see what I mean is to read the module and then compare it to its imitators like Grimtooth's Traps where the rule of the day is coming up with completely unfair gotchas and no win scenarios for the PC's and where the text encourages DM's to adopt that sort of 'Ha! Ha! Fooled you!' attitude. Even comparing the text to something like S2: White Plume Mountain is very instructive.
I have to start with telling that I neither played ToH nor have read it. This is meant as an open question, because of a perceived contradiction:
Celebrim, you are telling us that ToH is fair, with Acererak being predictable and clues for the right decision being available. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority tells me that ToH is meat grinder and extremely deadly.
Is it, as a test of player ability, extremely hard, so that only the very best are able to notice and piece together the clues?
Or is it that the players don't have a chance to know that ole A is playing fair at first? And if so, is their a real chance to figure this fairness out after their first mishaps?
Thanks, Celebrim! Unfortunately, I must spead it around, etc.
What you've written does make the adventure seem rather decent, apart from this one bit:
When in doubt, it's the middle way. Up toward heaven is good and down toward hell is bad.
While there are adages or connotations that would support these as superior choices, they seem to me to be rather weak bases on which to hang a (literally - at least for the PCs) life or death decision.
" never mind searching for an entrance, I'm going to have my Type VI demon will just dig through the side of the mound."
"I'll have my pet bronze dragon help!"
Damn munchkins.
And then there was the plane-traveling group of Arduin characters, and the time when I tried adapting it to Traveller and they decided to simply blast through it with their scoutship's lasers....
The only accounts of succeeding that I have heard relied on
1) sending waves of hirelings/summoned critters/slaves at everything and setting off every trap in the place.
2) having access to raise dead/resurrection/a supply of replacement characters.
or
3) Summoning some sort of huge creature and simply digging the tomb out - bypassing everything.
Yes, I feel that very deadly, difficult dungeons such as ToH encourage this sort of play, which is extremely undesirable because it's bypassing content. One could argue that it isn't playing D&D properly, the PCs are not engaging with the content at the anticipated level - never touching anything, never entering any rooms, going straight to the treasure chamber. This is all possible with high level spells and powerful magic items - passwall, dimension door, shapechanging into a dragon and ripping the top off the hill, using a Mattock of the Titans, etc. All this kind of play is too clever. In Tomb, Gary anticipates this problem by having a demon attack if PCs become astral or ethereal.
Players could even take it a step further and have their PCs become patrons, staying in Greyhawk and hiring parties of adventurers to go sack dungeons for them. This is really only one step up from sending waves of slaves/summoned creatures/animated undead into each room to set off all the traps. By this stage I would say the players are no longer playing D&D.
Celebrim: OK, while everyone else gives you kudos for saying all that stuff, I guess I'll have to be the one to point at the pink elephant in the room:
You don't give one piece of evidence from the module to support your description of its design. Not a single line, or word from the module text. You're just stating something authoritatively and expecting everyone to believe you because you are firm in your presentation.
I've read and studied the module pretty closely, and I find your description of it incongruent.
