Is the original Tomb of Horrors a well-designed adventure module?

[Fishbone]

The thing is a total meatgrinder. Unless you be as meticulous and cautious as possible your character is dead or seriously screwed.
"Hmm, what's Jharek doing now Greg?"
"Breathing in oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide."
"Ooh, not good, take 5d6 damage, no save."
The traps aren't even mechanically sound, it just whomps you with badness with no chance to avoid it.

 

[d20Dwarf]

The traps aren't even mechanically sound, it just whomps you with badness with no chance to avoid it.

That's how my traps would be if I was a demi-lich trying to protect my tomb.

 

[wilrich]

That 1 in 8 chance of instant death, though, really makes you sweat! When you get past it, you've *been through something.*

Why? If you've made it through that, all it means is that a "1" didn't come up on the 8 sided dice. The challenges I remember are the ones that I was able to overcome through clever tactics, a clever approach, etc.

(FYI -- I know I'm oversimplyfying, but to me the above encapsulates my opinion of the tomb -- arbitrary, contrived challenges that can only be overcome with contrived tactics and, as illustrated above, luck)

 

[d20Dwarf]

That 1 in 8 chance of instant death, though, really makes you sweat! When you get past it, you've *been through something.*

Why? If you've made it through that, all it means is that a "1" didn't come up on the 8 sided dice. The challenges I remember are the ones that I was able to overcome through clever tactics, a clever approach, etc.

(FYI -- I know I'm oversimplyfying, but to me the above encapsulates my opinion of the tomb -- arbitrary, contrived challenges that can only be overcome with contrived tactics and, as illustrated above, luck)

There is plenty of room in the Tomb for clever tactics and approaches. An arbitrary life or death trap is a bonding experience, just like eating poisonous puffer fish.

 

[Glyfair]

(FYI -- I know I'm oversimplyfying, but to me the above encapsulates my opinion of the tomb -- arbitrary, contrived challenges that can only be overcome with contrived tactics and, as illustrated above, luck)

One thing to remember is that the gaming atmosphere has changed since those days. In those days a very common atmosphere was "Player vs. the dungeon" (which was occasionally warped into the "player vs. the DM" atmosphere that you will often hear about). Today, we are in a more "the player guiding his character through the story" or "character tries to overcome the challenges."

I believe part of the reason more focus is made on individualizing characters is that the character has become more important. In those days, typically the player was more important.

Yes, you did have storytellers and roleplayers in those days. However, if the player wasn't a very social player, the character wasn't (regardless of what the character's charisma was). The "character" was tied very closely to the player.

So, the players who would want to tackle Tomb of Horrors would be the sort of players up for the challenge of trying "contrived tactics" to work their way through.

 

[Garnfellow]

The careful balancethat D&D has may be good from the gamist point of view but for some it will hurt versimillitude(sp?) because, sometimes, life just isn't fair.

But there's nothing in 3e that says you couldn't or shouldn't place encounters that are, say, 5 or more EL higher than the PC's level. I don't have one every session, but I place just enough of these killer encounters to keep the players on their toes. They understand that sometimes, you just have to run, and when they don't, they pay the consequences.

The system itself doesn't preclude making the setting as deadly as you want it to be. It just gives the DM better tools for making decisions about setting challenge levels.

 

[Garnfellow]

Capricious? Yes. Fun? Hell yes! The vaunted 3e balance that you talk about makes adventuring feel like a series of risk/reward ratios that only an insurance adjuster could have fun with. It doesn't create memorable encounters, just "balanced" ones.

Your description of 3e play is so utterly different from my personal experience that I really can't respond other than to offer my condolences.

I'm sure you've played a ton more 3e than I have, but I really have not had a problem with players being able to think out of the box or from us having memorable encounters. Or if we did, the problem didn't stem from the system.

 

[Quasqueton]

So, this is an edition war now?

Quasqueton

 

[Delta]

But there's nothing in 3e that says you couldn't or shouldn't place encounters that are, say, 5 or more EL higher than the PC's level. I don't have one every session, but I place just enough of these killer encounters to keep the players on their toes. They understand that sometimes, you just have to run, and when they don't, they pay the consequences.

In theory, that's totally correct. But I find that published 3E adventures actually avoid that.

When I got Monte Cook's 3E adventure "Fane of the Demon God", I flipped through it wondering about exactly that distribution. To my great surprise, I found that every encounter through the whole adventure was at a single, fixed EL. It actually took me a while to mentally digest that.

I think that's really the standard 3E adventure structure. I suppose it does make it easier to churn out adventures like that.

 

[Pants]

If you think, even in todays wimpified 3.5 spells version, that it is the characters getting tested all the time and not the players, you and I play different games.

I don't know what you read, but it wasn't my post.

I remember parties herding livestock (or slaves) down corridors to discover traps,

See, that's borderline ridiculous to me. That's not out of the box thinking, that's just stupid.

They'd trick wandering monsters to go down suspicious corridors of trapped dungeons, spend most of an adventure preparing a complicated ambush for a wizard with disentigrate, or other things that modern parties just wouldn't bother with because they are realativly certain that there is no sudden death encounters to have to think around and the rules have been carefully balanced so that just as the enemy can't take them out they also can't get lucky.

Hm, yeah, just go tell my players that the few times they've gotten lucky and have been 'taken out' by enemies didn't happen. It was just a figment of their imaginations.

I realize that I never gave my perspective on the ToH in this thread. It's a horrible campaign module, but it's a good tournament/one shot module.