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Message: <blockquote data-quote="increment" data-source="post: 7693505" data-attributes="member: 52672">Frank (and the Wikipedia page for the Tomb of Horrors that shows up for me anyway) are correct that the Tomb was run at Origins in 1975, not 1976. You are correct that the PHB did not come out until 1978.It is true that they are not the same adventure. The Origins Tomb was run for exactly 120 people in the 1975 tournament, eight parties of 15 players each. Yes, each party was 15 players, so they used the infamous "caller" rules. At four scheduled times in the convention, Gary Gygax and his son Ernie each simultaneously ran the adventure for one group.It is thus not an entirely apples-to-apples comparison to look at the 15-player parties of OD&D pregens designed for the 1975 Tomb versus the 2-10 player parties designed for AD&D in the 1978 module version of the Tomb. The 1978 module does say that if more than 5 players are participating, each should control only one character, so, let's say it is designed for a 6 or so character descent as opposed to the 15 character descent of the Origins tournament. More disposable bodies are handy when dealing with so many traps and arbitrary ways to die.It is similarly difficult to say whether the module version is more deadly without cherry-picking details that perhaps aren't representative given the differences in the system between OD&D and AD&D. The first false tunnel, which collapses for 5-50 damage in the 1978 Tomb, deals only 4-40 damage in the 1975 Tomb; and the gargoyle in room #8 that has 64 HP in the 1978 Tomb has only 42 HP in the 1975 Tomb. At least one prominent gamer who played in the tournament - Mark Swanson, who came down to Origins from Boston - complained that the Tomb of Horrors was a really stupid adventure full of pits and traps that had no real depth to it. He also lamented that of the people in his party, only four of the fifteen had ever played D&D before, which made the adventure difficult to navigate. Characters were distributed in alphabetical order, so you didn't get to assign the most powerful characters to the most experienced players (and there are pretty vast differences in the power-levels of the pregen characters, they range from 12th to 4th level). His group didn't get very far.Swanson sourly noted that parties that ran later in the convention weekend got inside information from previous tournament participants, which gave them an unfair advantage.One group did manage to get the whole treasure at the end. The overall winner of the tournament was Barry Eynon, who was an experienced player from the Ryth campaign visiting from Michigan.</blockquote>

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