Return to the Tomb of Horrors - your experiences?

[Celebrim]

I find your statement puzzling. In what ways is the Return more arbitrary than the original dungeon?

I didn't just say it was more arbitrary, although its pretty arbitrary. In particular, the reason I find it more arbitrary is although it has fewer death no save instances, it requires more fiddling with the objects you encounter in order to advance further and more investigation, but its just as likely as the original to punish you for merely touching, moving, or looking at something with instant death.

But it wasn't the arbitrariness of 'Return' that I was talking about. It was the fact that so much of it was unavoidable. It's not just the arbitrariness that gets me, but the consistancy. It's all got to be slogged through.

Aside from

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the portal in Moil that randomly opens a vaccuum sucking the PCs to their likely deaths*

, I can't think of anything off-hand that a paranoid, veteran party wouldn't be able to avoid.

That's a really odd statement seeing you picked one of the traps that a group is probably most likely to avoid by accident or design, but avoided mentioning any of the many encounters you are forced to grind through with little in the way of a trick to solving them.

Also, I don't think you can say that heavy combat is unfair. It's a particular style of adventure that may not appeal to some people, but it's not inherently unfair.

It's not the just the combat that bothers me, although the severity of the combat challenges takes the module way far from its original roots. It's the number of combats in which if the attacker hits, it is either death or as good as death. Traps can be avoided, but usually these combats can't be.

All with the one you mention, some of my 'favorites' are the

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the moilian curse you acquire (save at -5) merely by wiping the frost from the wrong object

,

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forget just touching the wrong things, early on in Moil there are a number of well placed symbols that will kill you just for looking at them

,

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the Vestige

,

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the Winter Wight on the ice ledge offers the first of a long series of encounters in which the monster villian has a good chance of killing the PC outright if it hits often without a saving throw

,

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the black ball

,

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the Overseer's rending hooks

,

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the Molydeus with the +5 vorpal axe

,

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the weight of wait

,

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the Hezrou at the arch

, etc. It's very hard to choose 'right' through all of that if there even is a right choice. Mostly you are depending on getting lucky with the die rolls. A lost initiative is often as good as a lost saving throw vs. death, and almost all of the saving throws are versus death.