Tomb of Horrors - your experiences?

[Abraxas]

There is more Luck required to survive ToH than Thinking, if the players aren't lucky someone in the party (most likely several someones) will die. One failed find traps role and 4 failed saving throws later and an entire party died - not because they weren't thinking - because they were unlucky. To many of those type of obstacles.

Test drive it with the premade PCs listed and see how far you get. Then talk to people who say they made it through and find out what levels they were and what equipment they had. Or see if they just threw summoned creatures at every door, box, chest, level, section of floor to spring the traps.

 

[JDJarvis]

Made it through in one campaign but the party was huge and of high level (there were 8 or so PCs and every one of us had 3 or more henchmen)
lots and lots of precsious followers, henchmen and slow witted fellow PCs were used as "early warning trap detection systems" by the ruthless and quick witted.

 

[Uller]

I had a group go through it and they found the "false" lich. They figured out that it was a false lich, but decided that was "good enough" and went home. Much death.

I find it useful to look for ideas for traps and puzzles for my own homebrew adventures (modified to be a bit less deadly).

 

[Henry]

... then he said "I can't run you through this, there is no point to it. Its just random no save death traps with no ways to figure them out leading to a party screw ending."

Considering what's at the end of it, I wouldn't call it necessarily a screw ending, assuming you are successful. The rewards are large - IF you live.

In truth, I'd have to call this, in one sense, the most "realistic" dungeon TSR ever produced; if some lich wanted to be sure you never found his remains, he WOULD probably design a place like this - no answers for the traps, death every turn, multiple screw-jobs faking you out all over the place, and you're not done even when you think you are. Then again, he could've just put his remains and phylactery into a solid rock with magic, set up a non-detection aura on it, and just plopped it a half-mile below ground in some godforsaken location, and save himself the trouble...

 

[Drew]

I went through this one with 2E characters. We didn't finish it, but made some decent progress. We were going through extremely carefully, using summoned creatures to open everything, feeling our way with 10 foot poles, and generally being as cautious as possible.

We got to the part (I forget exactly where) where you hear laughing voices down the hall and the sound of small creatures running away. What did we do after all our cautious, careful progress? You guessed it…we blindly ran toward the sound. We didn’t fail any saving throws, intelligence checks, or otherwise. We, the players, simply swallowed the trap hook line and sinker as we chased an Audible Glamour into a room filled with lava.

Stupid Tomb of Horrors.

 

[Treebore]

I was on of three 14th level survivers, out of seven. We took down Acerak, though. Lost two of us doing it. Otherwise five of us would have lived.

 

[VorpalBunny]

oh... and i liked the cover on the other one better too.

So do I. Actually, I kind of like the Hackmaster version's cover best of all:

 

[jasper]

again dm it with a bunch of munckins and megagamers. . Yuck. Even if I were to dm to day it an bit of trash. Oh which way do you shove this door? Yeech!

 

[Scion]

Horrible as written. 'Do you turn left or right? Wrong choice and you have to eat your character sheet, correct choice and we'll ask this question 20 more times in the next 5 minutes' and 'it is a secret door, how do you open it?' One character (very high level) took magic missiles every round until we were out of healing spells to heal him and then died because the dm didnt like the ways he said to open the door. woo. There goes 20 minutes of playing and trying to guess how to say 'push' in different ways (turns out, for the first door at least, push was the right way to open it.. but the dm 'didnt hear' the player say that.. so much for having that 17 int.)

To some degree it does make sense as something of a real world sort, but i am of the personal opinion that more thinking (as there is little to no actual thining involved in the module) plus actually useing game mechanics (strictly speaking level 1 characters have about as much chance as level 100 characters.. at that point you might as well be playing rock paper scissors.. since the character doesnt actually matter) such as saving throws maybe.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

I tried for six months to sucker my current group into this one. Sadly, the large mound with the skull-like rocks at the top and rumors of a king's ransom were not enough to overcome their metagaming ...