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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7706414" data-attributes="member: 4937">That would be a cool way to run it, retaining the difficulty but allowing the party an exit if they wanted one. Almost all the time we played, we played homebrew campaigns with stuff we wrote or at least heavily modified.  However, from time to time we'd have a guest DM (usually an older player, such as a college aged cousin or a high schooler that heard about our table), or we'd want to try the challenge of a published 'competitive' module to see if we could beat it.  In those cases, we ran run shots using either pregenerated or one off characters.  My first introduction to both modules was ran by older DMs for us as a favor for the 'munchkins'.  As such, we weren't using our 'primary' real 'earned' characters.  And while I know because I know the text of the module now that the DM of 'Tomb of Horrors' pulled at least one punch, by and large both DMs were 'out to get us'.  There is actually very little clue that you are having a poison gas problem except for a vague hint about the unhealthy air.  It certainly won't be obvious to everyone that they are taking damage because they are being poisoned, so it might take a while to stumble on the solution to the problem.  And even then, it's a nasty problem.   A 6th level AD&D cleric doesn't have that many spells, and must prepare them in advance.  LOL.  I believe you, because you are actually describing the circumstances and explaining some things that would otherwise be inexplicable (exit is available, stack of slow poison scrolls), and you know details of some of the encounters and are willing to tell your tales.  And I'm certainly not arguing that C1 can't or hasn't been beaten, only that its much harder to beat than S1.Can C1 be beaten first try, even ran in 'hard mode'?  Yes, I think it can, but the way it's set up, there are a lot 'left/right' style coin flip decisions that parties have to make, and there are very little clean paths.  If you had 64 tables with no knowledge of the text, I'd expect a couple to randomly walk the right paths, get to the second level and then the winner (in a tournament) would be determined by scoring those few remaining tables.  Once you get up to the second level, the dungeon isn't necessarily easier, but its a whole lot fairer and more straight forward.  Whereas, if you had 64 tables with no knowledge of the text playing S1, I'd expect more than half to get to the Hall of Pillars, and most of those to the Mithril Vault.  Acererak isn't really beatable with any of the pregen parties, but several groups that got that far would be smart enough to not try.  The thing about S1 is that by and large Acererak 'plays fair', a fact so obvious that it was a major plot point of 'Return to the Tomb of Horrors' (which, ironically, doesn't play fair and is tougher than the original).</blockquote>

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