Tomb of Horrors - example of many, or one of a kind?

[Celebrim]

What you've written does make the adventure seem rather decent, apart from this one bit...While there are adages or connotations that would support these as superior choices, they seem to me to be rather weak bases on which to hang a (literally - at least for the PCs) life or death decision.

In context it tends to make more sense, and as I suspected people are complaining that I haven't put things in context and used concrete quotes from the text. I was prepping my game last night though and hadn't more time to waste.

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The context might be for example, that you are in a pit or standing on a pit. Do you want to go down?

The important point is that Acererak tends to be consistant. It might not be at all obvious at first

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that up is good and down is bad

, but once you have a bit of evidence of Acererak's consistancy and fairness you can thing start making choices on the basis of that. And if you do, you then have the basis - along with a lot of care and caution - for getting through the tomb.

 

[Celebrim]

I have to start with telling that I neither played ToH nor have read it. This is meant as an open question, because of a perceived contradiction:

Celebrim, you are telling us that ToH is fair, with Acererak being predictable and clues for the right decision being available. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority tells me that ToH is meat grinder and extremely deadly.

ToH is fair with Acererak being predictable and clues for the right decision being available. ToH is also a meat grinder and extremely deadly. There is nothing contridictory about those statements.

Is it, as a test of player ability, extremely hard, so that only the very best are able to notice and piece together the clues?

To a certain extent yes. Equally so, only the very experienced and creative players are able to adjust their mindset to the tomb and play it accordingly. In most cases, "We move cautiously down the hall checking for traps." is a reasonable approach within a dungeon. As I indicated, in ToH it leads to the most automatic TPK in any dungeon I'm aware of. Literally the whole party dies no save. However, hopefully the much less lethal entrance corridor and surrounding zone will have by this point convinced the party that the normal approach won't cut it. Simply put, if you leave things up to chance, if your idea of checking for traps is saying, "I check for traps" and hoping the DM rolls well for you, then you will die.

A more typical approach that does work and which does avoid the trap (and most in the dungeon) would be:

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We tie a rope around the Thief and cast Fly on him. He'll scout ahead on the end of the length of rope looking for traps and secret doors, and if he gets in trouble, we will try to pull him to safety.

And of course, there are lots of variations on that theme, some of which have already been mentioned in the thread. The important point is most of the traps are easily bypassed if you don't have the whole party blunder into them, and you either can sacrifice your scout or you put the whole parties effort into protecting the scout.

Or is it that the players don't have a chance to know that ole A is playing fair at first? And if so, is their a real chance to figure this fairness out after their first mishaps?

That's why I said that its unlikely a 1st level party could survive without reading the text. The entrance corridor with its

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lethal but survivable pit traps

and the similar lethal but not completely lethal traps in the surrounding zone is something of a warm up for the real challenges of the tomb. A high level party can survive making some mistakes here (we did), although there is one notorious death trap in the entrance corridor that's probably responcible for more TPK's than any other trap even though its far from the most lethal thing in the dungeon. It's just the first example of a player proposition that leads to death without a save, and often a party will encounter this trap while still thinking of the tomb as a normal dungeon where if they get into trouble they can always find a way to get out again. However, even this trap is very avoidable and once its gotten you, you tend to realize just how dumb you were for falling for it. Or not. Some people never get over the fact that they were punished for doing something obviously stupid and blame the module designer. The proper responce to a TPK in the entrance corridor is to grin and try again. People who do that tend to be the ones that end up really enjoying the module.

 

[chaochou]

There is at least one section in the Tomb of Horrors (Area 9) which I think is pretty rough. I'm not gonna quote the text, but there are no clues and no way of avoiding damage (save luck). Getting through is arbitrary trial and error and, IMO, attempting to be 'clever' is specifically penalised - you're just wasting time, effort, spells and thought trying to defeat something the text says is 'absolutely' unpreventable.

Having said that, this is from the first room of the 'Sample Dungeon' in the DMG:

ROTTING SACKS: There are 10 moldy sacks of flour and grain stacked here. The cloth is easily torn to reveal the contents. If all of them are opened and searched, there is a 25% probability that the last will have YELLOW MOLD in it, and handling will automatically cause it to burst and all within 10’ must save versus poison or die in 1 turn.

Remember, this is the sample dungeon from the DMG and there's a random death trap in the corner of the first room. You could easily wipe out half a party which decided to search those sacks.

If you do the maths with a 6 character first-level party searching the sacks - you get a 25% chance of yellow mold and less than 1% chance of all 6 characters making a save vs poison - so you could have a 24% chance of at least one character death in room one. That's pretty harsh for searching some sacks of grain. Tomb of Horrors is, by and large, significantly fairer than that, I think.

 

[Umbran]

I've read and studied the module pretty closely, and I find your description of it incongruent.

I haven't looked at the module in years (maybe I'll review it when I get home), but I think I have something to note along Bullgrit's line here.

"Consistent" does not imply "predictable". Whether or not a thing is predictable depends on how much of what information you have. What you can see as a GM is much different than what a player can see. The GM, with all the information at his disposal, may feel it is predictable, while a player in situ won't have the information to make the same prediction with confidence at the time he needs to make a decision. Remember the player only gets information through trial and error, and errors are generally deadly in this scenario.

For example, if a module is consistent in that left turns always lead to deadly traps, the GM can see that because he can see all the turns at once, and know what they lead to. The player, however, can't make the same prediction until after he's taken both the left and right branches several times, to see the pattern, losing several party members in the process (how many points of consistency do you expect them to divine before they run out of party members?).

And, powers help you if the descriptions also have it that the deadly traps they've seen so far are also in rooms with grey stone walls, or maybe it was always that the elf was in front when they entered the deadly areas, and they decide the maker hated elves. I don't think it reasonable to expect the players will see which bits of information are the right ones to cue off off until they're already well into the module.

 

[Raven Crowking]

Removed

 

[Ulrick]

There is at least one section in the Tomb of Horrors (Area 9) which I think is pretty rough. I'm not gonna quote the text, but there are no clues and no way of avoiding damage (save luck). Getting through is arbitrary trial and error and, IMO, attempting to be 'clever' is specifically penalised - you're just wasting time, effort, spells and thought trying to defeat something the text says is 'absolutely' unpreventable.

Having said that, this is from the first room of the 'Sample Dungeon' in the DMG:

ROTTING SACKS: There are 10 moldy sacks of flour and grain stacked here. The cloth is easily torn to reveal the contents. If all of them are opened and searched, there is a 25% probability that the last will have YELLOW MOLD in it, and handling will automatically cause it to burst and all within 10’ must save versus poison or die in 1 turn.

Remember, this is the sample dungeon from the DMG and there's a random death trap in the corner of the first room. You could easily wipe out half a party which decided to search those sacks.

If you do the maths with a 6 character first-level party searching the sacks - you get a 25% chance of yellow mold and less than 1% chance of all 6 characters making a save vs poison - so you could have a 24% chance of at least one character death in room one. That's pretty harsh for searching some sacks of grain. Tomb of Horrors is, by and large, significantly fairer than that, I think.

Yet then again: why would player-characters want to search a bunch of sacks of moldy grain and flour? Let alone searching all of them? Is there any indication of something to gain by doing so? No.

In comparison with the ToH:

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why would player-characters want to reach into the Green Devil Face's mouth? Is there anything obvious to gain? NO.

Yet I've had players do both. I took those moldy and rotten sacks and put them in one of my dungeons long ago. The character searched the sacks. I rolled the %, and fortunately the yellow mold didn't go off.

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And at least one player got mad because his character died from jumping into the Green Devil Face's mouth. (Note for those who know what I'm talking about: I was not running the Return to the Tomb of Horrors).

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man, now I want to run ToH again...

 

[Umbran]

If you choose the tormenter rather than the arch (or cannot figure out how the arch works), then it should come as no surprise that there is torment.

Yes, but while the GM may know the "designer" doesn't user reverse psychology, is there a clue telling the player that? Do you think somehow the players would be surprised at a villain who misleadingly mislabeled things?

 

[Raven Crowking]

Removed

 

[Umbran]

Cast augury.

That's nice for one single situation. But how many auguries have you prepared that day? How many choices are there to be made in that dungeon? Do you know that this is one you should use your precious resource on before someone's dead?

 

[Raven Crowking]

Removed