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Message: <blockquote data-quote="blalien" data-source="post: 5683607" data-attributes="member: 41954">So I'm running the 4e version of the original Tomb of Horrors module for some friends.  I made the mistake of overhyping it, telling them how scary and deadly it was when I played it a million years ago.  As a result, a couple players have made extremely optimized characters, whose passive perception can detect any trap in the dungeon, and who are very hard to kill.  They tediously search every corner for secrets, they agonize over every decision, and they refuse to take risks.  They have just finished the battle against the False Acererak after two sessions, and so far there has not been a single player death.  Any sense of immersion is gone, and since ToH wasn't really meant to be a straightforward dungeon crawler, it just isn't fun.  The whole thing has boiled down to a big math problem.  I'm wondering if anybody else ran into this issue.  I have a few ideas:*I could accept that 4e isn't a good fit for ToH and run it as a straight dungeon crawler.*I could ban optimized characters.  But that seems hard to define, since there's a thin line between optimized and simply good.  I could at least ban hybrids.*I could just make the rest of the dungeon harder, but I don't think a number tweak is really going to fix anything.*Most drastically, I could dig up the old 1st edition version of the dungeon and run that.  Since none of us actually know how to play 1st edition, it would be a lot harder to optimize.Have any of you dealt with this issue personally, and how did you handle it?  I don't want to punish my players, since they haven't really done anything wrong, but I can't just tell them to change the way they play either.</blockquote>

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