Tell me your tale about the Tomb of Horrors

[Crothian]

I ran it back in 97 in second edition. I had three players and didn't tell them what I was running for them that week. About 30 minutes into when they are still digging out the three entrances one player catches a glimpse of the cover and stops and stares. He recognizes it but it takes him a little while to remember what it is. Once it dawns on him his face gets a little pale and he says

"Wait a minute this is Tomb of Horrors?"

"Um, yes it is."

"F this I'm not going through this module again!!"

And he packs up his stuff and leaves. We were a little shocked by this as we were gaming at his house. He never would tell me what happened the first time he went through the module but it left him emotionally scarred.

I ran it then for my other two players and they got through it with a little luck and plenty of good note taking and deductive reasoning.

I also ran it for a 3e group and of the 4 PCs I think 6 of them died

 

[DM-Rocco]

I also ran it for a 3e group and of the 4 PCs I think 6 of them died

ROFL

 

[rossik]

Reminiscing about ToH makes me wonder if D&D's heyday is way in the past, at least for me. It's gravitated so far away from puzzle-solving and other forms of strategic thinking, and its current design and development staff feel that the majority of players want an RPG to deliver short-term and fast-paced gameplay that rewards reckless, triggerhappy behavior instead of making it costly. Looking at how people employed at WotC call it a badly-designed or overrated dungeon makes me kind of sad.

No, ToH isn't for everyone. Heck, I sure wouldn't want to run that style of dungeon more than occasionally. But I do regard it as a facet of D&D gameplay that shouldn't be discarded.

very nice words, i agree in so many levels.

i read a couple of days ago, dont remember where, someone say something like:
"the problem with modern systems is that characters level up faster than players" <--almost this

 

[Ulrick]

^ What rossik said.

I've run Tomb of Horrors thrice. Each time as a one-shot, and each time with a high death rate. No one made it to the final resting place of Acererak. And the players didn't get mad at me, they got mad at Gary Gygax for designing such an unfair module.

While I understand that some traps in that dungeon could be considered unfair, but I told them that it was a "thinking player's module" (to quote Gygax himself). Your character's level and powers almost do not matter. Gygax designed that modules with this in mind. He was tired of seeing "inexperienced" players with "experienced" characters walking around boasting about what their characters could do.

I think this was the case in all three times I ran the module. And I think the reason why the majority of my players were pissed, not because they weren't careful enough, but they would make foolish choices and they could only blame themselves.

I would love to run this module again (not updated 3.5 version!), but I'm wondering how much of an uproar it would cause.

 

[Corathon]

I've never run this module - but I did play in it. It was certainly challenging, but it didn't seem as deadly as so many stories make it out to be.

Our GM told us that our PCs knew that the dungeon was of legendary deadliness, so we acted accordingly. When we were exploring this place, we had a find traps spell running at all times. There were two clerics in our group. so we had plenty of those. When the last find traps ran out we left the dungeon and rested. Anything even remotely suspicious was checked with true seeing, or other divination magic. This method avoided a whole lot of pointless death traps.

We had zero deaths until the battle with Big Bad at the end. Some deaths are pretty nearly unavoidable there.

 

[Bregh]

Felon,

That was one of the best posts I've ever read wrt Tomb of Horrors (and D&D in general).

You sum up my views pretty much perfectly.

 

[Jackelope King]

Tomb of Horrors annoyed me to no end. What a waste of an afternoon. The instant-death room in particular... ugh. I lost my first character to that because I wanted to search the door frame for traps after we opened the door, and the DM decided that it meant I was in the room enough to die. I also lost a character to the statue's mouth after being assured that I couldn't find any sign of a trap. After my third PC died to a rat bite that killed him with a disease within two minutes, I was done.

It promoted a style of gameplay that made characters completely worthless as anything more than game pieces, and was the king of arbitrary DMing. While I wasn't the victim of this directly, another player had his character flattened about two hours in because the player had an argument with the DM during a smoke break. Gygaxian-style "expert dungeoneering" gets old real fast.

I'm more interested in exploring the characters themselves, not asking the GM to come up with new ways to kill them. If I want to see interesting ways for people to die, I'll YouTube "Faces of Death". When I play a roleplaying game, I want interesting characters in interesting places doing interesting things.

 

[rossik]

My most recent run through the ToH, from another thread about this topic a year or two back:

Session #1
Session #2

One of my players (Reinbowarrior, who pops into that thread as well) ran the 3e ToH for two other groups he knows. One was TPKed and the other made it through with some very ingenious play: they whipped a bag over Acererak's head, ran with him into the anti-magic room and proceeded to pummel him to death. Very smart.

I also ran it some years ago for a group under 2e rules. I was leaving the country and wanted to have a cool final session for the group I was DM for at the time. So I picked Tomb of Horrors. The group was pretty potent - all around 12th and 13th level, and kitted out with good gear for that level. Like it mattered.

After losing one PC in the entryway to the big squishing block, they redoubled their resolve and entered the Tomb. Within the next half an hour we had two characters stumbling about naked (wailing and wailing about their lost magical goodies), another lost an arm to the black mouth (sending the player into "my character is now suicidal with rage" mode) and a fourth was burned to a crisp by something (I can't remember what now, but at least it stopped all the wailing). Pretty soon we were down to two very scared PCs running about inside, completely lost (their map having been burned up too).

In the end the players begged me to declare the adventure a dream or a hallucination or anything. For a while I was all "Sorry, your prized PCs are dead, the campaign is over and I'm leaving the country tomorrow. Have a nice life" but something weak and pitifully human in me relented and I eventually agreed and let them have their precious characters back the way they were. In hindsight, actually, it was better that way. TPKs are all well and good, but nothing beats condescending generosity after watching grown men plead and whine for an hour.

wow, do you have a clone ?
i just found this:

I ran this once, or tried to, anyway. I was leaving the country and wanted to have a cool final session for the group I was DM for at the time. So I picked Tomb of Horrors. The group was pretty potent - all around 12th and 13th level, and kitted out with good gear for that level. Like it mattered.

After losing one PC in the entryway to the big squishing block, they redoubled their resove and entered the Tomb. Within the next half an hour we had two characters stumbling about naked (wailing and wailing about their lost magical goodies), another lost an arm to the black mouth (sending the player into "my character is now suicidal with rage" mode) and a fourth was burned to a crisp by something (I can't remember what now, but at least it stopped all the wailing). Pretty soon we were down to two very scared PCs running about inside, completely lost (their map having been burned up too).

In the end the players begged me to declare the adventure a dream or a hallucination or anything. For a while I was all "Sorry, your prized PCs are dead, the campaign is over and I'm leaving the country tomorrow. Have a nice life" but something weak and pitifully human in me relented and I eventually agreed and let them have their precious characters back the way they were. In hindsight, actually, it was better that way. TPKs are all well and good, but nothing beats condescending generosity after watching grown men plead and whine for an hour.

 

[Ipissimus]

Yup, bravo Felon.

The first time I went through ToH incurred no PC deaths. We knew the module by reputation, of course, and treated it with the respect it deserved. Frankly, the experience left us all wondering what the fuss was about. Sure, the Sphere of Annihilation bit could be tricky, but when we stuck the 10' pole in the room and it disintegrated, we gathered that going in wasn't a good idea. We bypassed the orange portal, figuring it was an obvious trap. The 4-armed gargoyle went down on round three, the scimitar-armed skeleton went down on round one. The Demi-Lich scored no points due to the Magic-User's knowledge of monsters, habitually carrying an Oil of Etherealness and a scroll of Power Word Kill 'just in case'.

But yes, we approached it like the opening scenes of Indiana Jones. The thief checked everything for traps and we used the old 10' pole to check just in case. We went through alot of 10' poles. Once we secured an area, we moved our henchmen's 'basecamp' forward and we took our time with every section. That being said, we did have some foreknowledge, Acerack would have been impossible if we knew nothing about Demi-Liches at the time.

The other thing that people forget about ToH is that it's a tournament dungeon. Tournament dungeons aren't designed like regular dungeons, the point is separating the wheat from the chaff, then the lucky from the unlucky, so that a clear 'winner' can be determined. It's more like a test than entertainment, I've played worse tournament modules than ToH. I hate playing competitively, though, it tends to kill everything good about the game for me.

Years later in 2e I had the opportunity to do Return to the Tomb of Horrors, which was harder. We did incur casualties that time, though nothing that couldn't be fixed with a res. It was also alot more fun that time around mainly because we didn't take it as seriously as we did the first time.

 

[hong]

Reminiscing about ToH makes me wonder if D&D's heyday is way in the past, at least for me. It's gravitated so far away from puzzle-solving and other forms of strategic thinking, and its current design and development staff feel that the majority of players want an RPG to deliver short-term and fast-paced gameplay that rewards reckless, triggerhappy behavior instead of making it costly. Looking at how people employed at WotC call it a badly-designed or overrated dungeon makes me kind of sad.

No, ToH isn't for everyone. Heck, I sure wouldn't want to run that style of dungeon more than occasionally. But I do regard it as a facet of D&D gameplay that shouldn't be discarded.

You've pretty much said above why it's a facet of gameplay that should be discarded.