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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Garnfellow" data-source="post: 2910426" data-attributes="member: 1223">I should say that, although I don't think Tome of Horrors is a shining example of great adventure design, I do think it's an incredibly FUN module to run, in part because of the very limitations of its design and in part due to its importance in the history of the game. It also has plenty of wonderfully memorable window dressing.I loved it when Dungeon magazine put the green devil face on the cover a couple of years ago, and thought it was pretty cool that they were able to work a reference to the Tomb into the Age of Worms. The Tomb is the quintessential meat-grinder dungeon and features at least half a dozen iconic D&D moments  -- every player should experience losing at least one character to the infamous Tomb, and I've run it myself at least 5 (or maybe 6?) times over the last 20 years, and I'd love to run it again. It's like an initiation rite. And I agree with a lot of posters that the Tomb is much more favorably viewed (and run!) as a one-shot tournament module than as an adventure to be inserted into a campaign. But all this said, I wouldn't want to see a new adventure that emulated the Tomb's design. One Tomb of Horrors in the repertoire is really all you need. And I strongly disagree with a point a lot of Tomb defenders have made over and over again in this thread: that the Tomb is a real test of players, not characters.First, I don't much like the implication behind many of these comments: that back in the day, our system didn't support nothing, so all the real players had to use their imagination! and manly intellect! to survive, and that this newfangled 3e with all its high-falluting rules makes the players nowadays stupid and weak. I'm just not even gonna get into this.But second -- and more importantly -- I seriously question the basic premise that the Tomb tests players, not characters. I see this written again and again, but I really wonder, how so? Like I wrote above,  I've run this module a bunch of times and I've seen NO correlation between intelligent play and success. None, zero. If anything, I've seen it contra-indicated. The two groups that got utterly wiped out had a large and diverse collection of very smart and experienced players. They used a sensible mix of  caution and daring, and for all this, they still got annihilated. I think one group did not get much more than 3 or 4 rooms in. But they guessed wrong and rolled badly.The two groups that fared the best -- by far -- had a lot of inexperienced and thoroughly reckless players. Their basic approach was to more-or-less run flat-out through the entire Tomb, whooping and yelling and setting off traps left and right. They lost a lot of henchmen, summoned monsters, and a few PCs, but they got lucky and penetrated deep into the Tomb.I understand anecdotes are only worth so much, so I'd like to know -- from a design standpoint, just what are the encounters in the Tomb that really challenge players, not characters? How do they work, and why? What would be an example of clever play in these situations?</blockquote>

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