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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7706368" data-attributes="member: 4937">If the 1st level party has a few low level potions or scrolls it is quite doable.  How few they need is a matter of debate, but possibly as little as one potion of flying would be sufficient for a 1st level party to complete the module. I have as hard of time believing you in this than you have believing me in the ease that Tomb of Horrors be defeated.  You either didn't run it as written (ignored poison gas, or played the 'top down' non-competition manner), or you had parties that were vastly higher level than those suggested.  How you could have ran it multiple times without at least one party trying to take a rest in the dungeon and start choking to death on the 'carbon monoxide' or wandering around until they were deep into the death clock without finding an exit I have no idea.Seriously, if I could recite the clue poem, I could run Tomb of Horrors purely from memory.  I know the adventure very well.  1) I'm not understating the exception.  Acererak is not killable as written by parties of the suggested levels (or any of the pregen characters).   The successful party just chooses not to fight him.  So my assumption is that a party clever enough to reach him would simply choose not to fight (since he's helpless unless you choose to attack him) or would run away immediately once combat started, losing just 1 character.2) The fact that I'm not misunderstanding the module is precisely why a 1st level party can beat the module.   There are basically no required combat encounters in the module.  Arguably if you need to get the ring to open the door in the chapel (because you don't have one of your own), you might run into the snakes in the chest, but they are IIRC just 1HD and even a low level party being cautious should be able to take them down (a single sleep spell does it, for example).  All the traps are passive.  They only kill you if you touch them.  Almost all are gravity based, most can be bypassed just by probing with a 10' long pole or tossing a heavy sack of dirt out in front of you, and being able to fly bypasses almost every trap in the dungeon with ease.  The one exception that might TPK the party is cured by having the thief that is probing ahead of the party be on a rope so you can reel him back.   It's not that hard of a dungeon if you don't do things that are stupid.   When I was in junior high, we got through but didn't get the treasure, and lots of people have beat it.3) Again, the Will o' the Wisp is basically an unkillable nightmare beast when you run up against it at that level.  It's an active nasty foe that can chase you down.  It's almost impossible to hurt.  It's AC is bonkers for a party of this level, with most of the party only hitting on a natural 20.  Nothing in Tomb of Horrors chases the party down.  And it's not even the only beasty that you've got to fight.   And as far as traps go, the sand trap in 'Hidden Shrine' is worse than all but two traps in 'Tomb of Horrors' (the slime curtains, and the unsavable sleep gas + juggernaut), and is harder to avoid than both of those.  4) While the level of the party doesn't matter as much as playing cautiously in Tomb of Horrors (because many traps bypass saves and hit points), a party of 9th-10th level characters still has vastly more resources available to it than 5th-6th level characters.  There is far more room for error in Tomb of Horrors.  If you foolishly fall into a spiked poisoned pit in Tomb of Horrors, you'll still probably survive.  And if you don't, that's what 'raise dead' is for.  Clerics of this level have tons of experience using 'neutralize poison'.  You have zero room for mistakes in 'Hidden Shrine', and if you are under-leveled you are dead.  But as I pointed out, being under-leveled in Tomb of Horrors just gives you less margin for error.  If you play perfectly, you never fight anything or take damage anyway.'Hidden Shrine' is a nightmare.  Having ran it a couple of times, I'm wholly unconvinced you ran it as written.   Again, because of the time pressure and the lethality of monsters, it takes considerable planning to figure out how to beat the module even if you know the text.  It's still a hideously dangerous module if you are overleveled for it.  By comparison, if you are overleveled for Tomb of Horrors, you probably cast 'Find the Path' and found the module a joke.You keep repeating all this stuff about 'intention' as if that was proof of anything.  Both modules were tournament modules.  The fact remains, that as written 'Hidden Shrine' is vastly harder than 'Tomb of Horrors'.  Did you or did you not track every turn that they were in the Shrine, and how the heck did they get out before everyone died?   It's hard to path out of the lower levels before the sand runs out on the timer even if you know which way to go!  Average random walks are invariably lethal.  The module is designed to kill 9 parties in 10 just by random bad luck before it even gets out of the first level.  Even with parties of 6 or 8 characters (compared to the 3(!!) you are allowed in tournament play) it's a reliable TPK.</blockquote>

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