Rate S1: The Tomb of Horrors (corrected poll options)

[Rawhide]

As a 1e adventure, it's terrible, since if you miss a Find Traps check and miss a check, you die. You can't Take 10, or Aid Another, or make Knowledge checks... you just die.

Converted to 3e, it all depends on the conversion.

 

[Crothian]

Converted to 3e, it all depends on the conversion.

that's why I do only my own conversions

 

[Numion]

What's more, I fail to recognize the names of the loudest critics of this module on any published work I have read, so I suspect it's merely a case of sour grapes and/or someone having lost their favorite PC to the infamous Gygax shredding machine.

Ouch! So I should be a published ARR-PEE-GEE author before I can spot a sucky adventure or two? Dayum, cooolldbllooded .. maybe I should just start randomly choose the adventures I run for my group since my non-published ass knows so little anyways.

 

[Jupp]

Get some tranquilizers before you post in the morning please

 

[Numion]

Get some tranquilizers before you post in the morning please

C'mon, dismissing an opinion because the opinionee hasn't published anything you've read is not good argumentation. It kinda makes 99,9% of EN World posters irrelevant :\

As for the poll results, a lot of people found the adventure to be 10 / 10, a perfect adventure. Kinda surprising that this module is in so many peoples minds the ultimate D&D adventure.

EDIT: Now I'm completely tranquilized after a boooooriiiing morning meeting at work

 

[ZuulMoG]

No, it's the distinction between player and character knowledge. Like I quoted above, someone defines stupid action as trying to play a blaster mage in ToH. Thats meta-stupid, not character-stupid. Hence, metagaming.

Um, under what circumstances is designing any character to be nothing more than a walking talking wand of fireballs viable? Sounds like munchkin power-gaming to me. I have no interest in that. I want ROLEplaying, not ROLLplaying.

It's quite surprising you would say something like this if you've ever played 3E. I've had no trouble killing PCs in 3E, not that it was (always) my goal. Equal EL encounters have quite often killed PCs in my games. Besides the adventure writing guidelines in DMG specifically state that adventures should encounter also significantly higher ELs than their level. If you've not read that part, do that. If you only ever use equal EL encounters you're not playing the game as it was intended.

When 4-6 6th level PCs take out a 12th level PC and his minions, there is a serious problem. And every time our DM has thrown a high-level enemy at our party, generally only one of us has been able to do anything to it reliably, the rest of us need 20s to even scratch it. At that point, you can almost hear the fudging. I hate fudging, even in my favor, no, ESPECIALLY in my favor. It's insulting. If I can't beat it, don't put it in front of me somewhere where flight is not an option.

Example:
Our party of four (1/2 orc Monk 12, human gestalt fighter-rogue 9 (happy lil me), an elvish half-dragon4/wizard7, and an elvish cleric 11 went up against a grey slaad. Nothing we did had the slightest effect on it, except for the monk, who is outfitted with a ridiculous whopping crapload of magical items, having assiduously looted all of the bodies of PCs who died along the way, never returning them to the new PCs of the players that owned them originally. One of the players asked the DM after three rounds, with most of us hovering in single digits, how badly hurt this thing was. Another player leaned over the screen and yelped, yes, yelped, "It's still got triple digits! We're ****ed!!"
At that point, Merrit the Rake, my PC, decided he'd had quite enough of this frozen keep, and ran for the exit, ruining his +2 greataxe hacking through the bars of three portculli. He ran off into the freezing mountain wastes, to die when his Endure Elements spell wore off. Meanwhile, the rest of the party, deciding that valor was the better part of caution, stayed and fought on, and it died one round later, when all of sudden, this grey slaad was apparently no longer defending itself and possessed of no MR worth noting.
Just about every other fight any PC group we've fielded has been in was either a cake-walk or a similar suicide fight that ends with a little judicious fudging. I've had it with the fudging, and from now on my PCs will no longer rely on the metagame knowledge that the DM won't let us die. Mind you, it's not just the current GM either, this is the norm.

What makes your "observation" even more untrue is that D&D 3E includes quite a lot of insta-kill spells at medium to high levels. I don't see how you can assert that only roleplaying situations can kill PCs when the opponents might be packing fingers of death and disintegration. Now, there are protections against those, but the protections can be pierced, and there usually is a saving throw. Unlike in ToH.

I assert that because there is no balance: either the PCs are unstoppable killing machines or they're utterly impotent. 4 CR6 enemies can't even challenge 4 level 6 PCs, and the same PCs won't even annoy one CR 12 monster.

Maybe my problem is with my gaming group...

...anyone playing in the Syracuse NY area that wants another player? Possibility of PC death by DM action (saves preferred, but not if we've been egregiously stupid) is a must.

 

[Numion]

Um, under what circumstances is designing any character to be nothing more than a walking talking wand of fireballs viable? Sounds like munchkin power-gaming to me. I have no interest in that. I want ROLEplaying, not ROLLplaying.

Then Tomb of Horrors is obviously the module for you

Mind you, it's not just the current GM either, this is the norm.

Not killing the PCs is the norm? In your group or 3E in general? I've got no problem with meatgrinder adventures, if they're not as arbitrary as ToH. When we played RttToEE there were close to 30 character deaths. But those were due to PC tactics, not instakill traps with no save.

I assert that because there is no balance: either the PCs are unstoppable killing machines or they're utterly impotent. 4 CR6 enemies can't even challenge 4 level 6 PCs, and the same PCs won't even annoy one CR 12 monster.

CR 12 monster is EL 12. Thats six over the party level. That should be overkill. 4 CR 6 enemies is about CR 10, and that should be pretty difficult for 4 6th level PCs. Probably you can find some CR 6's that cant scratch the group, but your group sounded kinda special anyway - gestalts, single classes and half dragons in same group? In my experience CR6 monsters that cant touch 6th level PCs aren't the norm, even though you probably could find some. I've never noticed this kind of thing in my group - the CR system has worked surprisingle well in the campaigns I've DMed (1-16, 1-23, 1-13 level campaigns). Very odd that you've only had opponents from the two ends of the spectrum, those that cant scratch you and those that are immune to you. I've seen those, but bulk of the encounters are from the middle range, from easy to very hard fights.

Sorry dude, it just sounds that you've had some pretty strange encounters. Plus one character packing much more loot than the others. In my experience 90% of the time 3E works as planned, opposed to your experience where it works 0% of time as planned. "As planned" here means with fights that are non-trivial but not killer.

 

[Mark Chance]

It's like Zork.... there is one and only one way to solve each encounter.

Several people have expressed this sentiment. Problem is: It isn't accurate, but, IME, reflects a dearth of imagination. After playing Tomb of Horrors many, many years ago, I borrowed and read the module to discover that we players most certainly used a variety of tactics to solve different encounters in ways that "surprised" the module.

Oh yeah: 8/10.

 

[Hussar]

I wouldn't call it the ultimate DnD adventure, although I did give it an 8 out of 10. It's almost like a rite of passage though. Whether you finished it or not, having actually played S1 back in the day, under straight ADnD rules, is an experience that not so many gamers have. It does come under bragging rights so to speak. I was there, I died, so did my dog.

I ran it later under 2e rules and it was a much easier adventure. The 2e characters, particularly the spellcasters, just had so many more options available to them for getting around problems. Plus, by that time, pretty much everyone knew what a demilich was and knew better than to start poking it.

Running it in 3e, I could see this being a MUCH easier adventure. 3e characters are designed around 3e creatures and challenges, which are a fair bit nastier than 1e. I don't mean to start yet another edition fight, but, lets face it, comparitively, a 1e 10th level character was stronger than pretty much anything in the MM. A 3e 10th level character is still monster chow for many things in the MM. 3e characters just have a lot more options available, such as skills, that 1e characters just didn't have. Take a rogue for example. By 10th level, if he makes a ref save, he automatically ignores the effects thanks to improved evasion. Those poor 1e rogues certainly didn't have anything like that.

 

[Numion]

Running it in 3e, I could see this being a MUCH easier adventure. 3e characters are designed around 3e creatures and challenges, which are a fair bit nastier than 1e. I

True that. Maybe it should be converted for lower level 3E characters, like level 6 or 7, because in 3E traps tend to lose some of their potency around level 10, at the latest. But then it wouldn't be the ultimate dungeon ..

Like, for example, if I play a cleric, I usually go into dungeons using Air Walk spell (it lasts an 10 minutes per level, and after that its time to go to rest anyway, if time permits). That right there negates all pit traps, or other pressure plate activated devices for example :\