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Message: <blockquote data-quote="PapersAndPaychecks" data-source="post: 2189815" data-attributes="member: 28854">The thing is that ToH doesn't exceed their characters' abilities either.  It just requires that they are skilled at dungeoneering. This is why I emphasized that ToH comes from a different era... those were the days when pretty much everyone who played AD&D was a gamer first, and a roleplayer/amateur dramaticist second. The way to live through meatgrinder trapfests like ToH is as follows: 1)  Use summoned monsters and reanimate them when they die.  No PC goes anywhere or touches anything unless a summoned monster (or the zombie of a summoned monster) has been there first.2)  Once your summoned monsters have identified at least some of the things that will kill you, you send your thieves in.  Nobody other than a thief enters any of the rooms until the thief has declared it safe.  If the thief meets a monster, he runs back to the party; the party never moves forward.3)  Your clerics stay back.  Right back in areas well cleared and certain to be safe.  Even if you do meet an undead thing.  Even if there are wounded to be healed or corpses to be raised, they move back to the clerics, the clerics do not come forward to the front line.  At all.4)  Use plenty of informational magic, auguries, legend lore, contacting other planes, the whole shebang.5)  Take all the time you need, there's not usually a deadline in the meatgrinder trap-dungeons.  You can rest up after every room if you want. Following those simple rules to the letter is pretty much a guaranteed win in ToH as originally written, probably with zero casualties. But people don't think like that any more... nowadays, people yearn for combat and for NPC's to interact with, and they agonise over whether it's evil to use summoned monsters to open doors.  And they think that death-no-save traps are unfair, which blows my mind... PCs of that level have all the necessary skills and spells to locate the trap, and to disarm it when they find it, they just need to learn to use them.</blockquote>

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