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Is TOMB OF HORRORS the Worst Adventure Of All Time?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7692835" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>So, I understand that a person's emotional response to a dungeon is subjective and differs from person to person and from experience to experience.</p><p></p><p>But speaking as a DM, one of the things that strikes me about S1 is just how difficult it is to successfully replicate the dungeon. There have been tons of attempts at replicating S1 - it's probably the most copied dungeon design in the history of the game - but most of them have been terrible, usually because they think that killing the PC's is all that is going on in S1 and they think they are being clever by killing PC's. A good example is Grimtooth's Traps, which tends to have traps that punish players for looking for tangential solutions or proactively being creative or the city of Moil in 'Return to the Tomb of Horrors' which is far more lethal than ToH (and really, has to be) but proactively kills the players in ways that make ToH seem perfectly fair and reasonable. Considering how many people have attempted to make S1 (including me in my younger days before I understood the module), and just how hard it is to do it well, I vote S1 to the highest levels of dungeon craftsmanship. </p><p></p><p>But G2 (indeed the whole G series) on the other hand always stuck me as something that your average senior in high school or freshmen in college could and did create. The are straight forward designs that are practically nothing more than implementations of an entry in a monster manual, 'Hill Giant tribe, found in lair, maximum numbers and numbers of servitors'. They play largely as straight forward tactical slogs of the sort Gygax was fond of - large numbers of demihumans, variously armed and equipped, with boss monsters that are slightly tougher than their comrades. The trope shows up again in B2 and in the first part of WG4, and in T1-4. I think it appeals to Gygax's love of D&D as a tactical skirmish level wargame. Some parts of those modules are inspired, but I never thought much of their basic design. If you want combat oriented dungeon crawl as opposed to D&D as wargame, Paul Jaquays was doing it better with works like Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia. </p><p></p><p>Lastly, Tomb of Horrors stands up well in terms of the stories its created. Everyone has a story. Sometimes, like with Wick, the story isn't very pleasant, but it is powerful in a way that 'we killed 80 hobgoblins', 'we killed 40 bugbears', 'we killed 20 ogres', etc. just isn't.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7692835, member: 4937"] So, I understand that a person's emotional response to a dungeon is subjective and differs from person to person and from experience to experience. But speaking as a DM, one of the things that strikes me about S1 is just how difficult it is to successfully replicate the dungeon. There have been tons of attempts at replicating S1 - it's probably the most copied dungeon design in the history of the game - but most of them have been terrible, usually because they think that killing the PC's is all that is going on in S1 and they think they are being clever by killing PC's. A good example is Grimtooth's Traps, which tends to have traps that punish players for looking for tangential solutions or proactively being creative or the city of Moil in 'Return to the Tomb of Horrors' which is far more lethal than ToH (and really, has to be) but proactively kills the players in ways that make ToH seem perfectly fair and reasonable. Considering how many people have attempted to make S1 (including me in my younger days before I understood the module), and just how hard it is to do it well, I vote S1 to the highest levels of dungeon craftsmanship. But G2 (indeed the whole G series) on the other hand always stuck me as something that your average senior in high school or freshmen in college could and did create. The are straight forward designs that are practically nothing more than implementations of an entry in a monster manual, 'Hill Giant tribe, found in lair, maximum numbers and numbers of servitors'. They play largely as straight forward tactical slogs of the sort Gygax was fond of - large numbers of demihumans, variously armed and equipped, with boss monsters that are slightly tougher than their comrades. The trope shows up again in B2 and in the first part of WG4, and in T1-4. I think it appeals to Gygax's love of D&D as a tactical skirmish level wargame. Some parts of those modules are inspired, but I never thought much of their basic design. If you want combat oriented dungeon crawl as opposed to D&D as wargame, Paul Jaquays was doing it better with works like Dark Tower and Caverns of Thracia. Lastly, Tomb of Horrors stands up well in terms of the stories its created. Everyone has a story. Sometimes, like with Wick, the story isn't very pleasant, but it is powerful in a way that 'we killed 80 hobgoblins', 'we killed 40 bugbears', 'we killed 20 ogres', etc. just isn't. [/QUOTE]
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Is TOMB OF HORRORS the Worst Adventure Of All Time?
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