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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ruleslawyer" data-source="post: 2911778" data-attributes="member: 1757">"Killer dungeon" is fine. "Dungeon that requires arbitrary solutions or dumb luck to navigate" is not, IMHO.I'm not really so concerned about the "camougem" (especially since the "riddle" tells you how to get around that) or advocating that dungeons contain no non-standard rules situations or items. That is a rather unfair presumption on your part. I *am,* however, concerned with the idea of a dungeon that involves plenty of situations that neither an understanding of the rules nor basic logic has a role in overcoming, and ToH is (as ehren37 put it in his, er, inimicable fashion) loaded with such situations. I'm not fond of the overabundance of "there's a 1-in-x chance that you just die without any chance to deduce a way out or avoid your fate" situations in the module.For instance, the poem in ToH provides some room for PC creativity and problem-solving. So does [spoiler]the false lich encounter[/spoiler]. Some of the other encounters [spoiler](the devil mouth)[/spoiler] are just obvious "don't be stupid" plays. No problem with any of those. The pits? The undetectable secret-door accesses? The unsavable sleep gas? The so-called "puzzles" that involve mere trial-and-error approaches? The [spoiler]slot door that can take a ring, coin, or gem and thus requires pure guesswork to bypass?[/spoiler]All bad adventure design in my book. I see ToH's relation to a challenging module as being analogous to someone making a silly and baiting argument as opposed to a cogent, persuasive one. Both kinds can confound responses, but for bad reasons in the first case and good ones in the second.Finally, the Trojan Horse is probably not the analogy you're looking for, for several reasons:1) It features in a myth, not a game intended for the enjoyment of the players and DM2) It has a very good and sensible (quite non-ridiculous) place in that myth. The horse is the symbol of Poseidon, and a common object of sacrifice to that god, who (along with Athena) was a patron of the Achaean besiegers. Thus, it was seen as an auspicious object to the Greeks, and the Trojans would thus naturally covet it (and seek to bring it into the city walls) because it represented an object of reverence to their foes (and thus capturing it was a symbolic victory of sorts).</blockquote>

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