Tomb of Horrors - your experiences?

[Scion]

Only for very small values of thinking More like, 'flip a coin, heads you die, tails you go on to the next coin flip'.

 

[schnee]

I'm about to run a party through it... or, a truncated version of the Black Academy followed by the Tomb.

I'm having more fun generating the villans than I think I will DMing the tomb.

 

[Whitey]

Tomb of Horrors seems pretty much like the gold medal standard by which hard-core adventure modules are judged. It's actually the third module ever written (or fourth, or fifth, depending on what 'officially' counts as a mod), and it's a test of how high the challenge level can go. So, for that, it's a success.

Whitey's uber-est PC ever, Maedth the ranger, got poisoned, fried, and evaporated into a gem. It was still a blast, for the whole group. There are things in there, that look like coin-toss situations, but there are ways around them - divination spells, nifty items, or just lotsa summoned monsters to trip traps. That's the ethos. If a high-level party doesn't use every resource they've got, and use them wisely, they eat it. Eat a bucket full of it.

Henry says:
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.

Exactly. See, it's called the Tomb of Horrors. Because it's hard.

 

[Victim]

Our group (16th level) went through it without too much trouble. Admittedly, the 3.0 conversion our DM made replaced some of the no save effects with DC 35-40 saves, but we didn't really run into much of those in the first place. Our Shifter ran amuck, using Undead and Construct forms to become immune to almost everything in the dungeon, went incorporeal to search for secret areas, and dug tunnels. My character, a wizard, had Arcane Sight which allowed us to get some warning on magic traps and used a couple of summoned monsters to check things out.

Our first casualty came as we attempted to burn green slime off our rogue. Being overconfident and magically equipped, no one in the group had mundane fire, so a weak fireball was used. Not a good time for the character to roll a 1. Then my character died in the battle against the demilich when she attempted to use the crown and scepter on the floating skull and found out that Acerak put some safeguards up. Then the paladin hit him with a mounted smite for sick and wrong damage, destroying it in one shot. He followed up his successful attack by smashing himself unconscious with his hammer. Everyone else ran away during the battle.

 

[Style]

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.

 

[RFisher]

It has always amused me that half the people who've played this module say that it's nothing but random death with no point or possibility or success except by luck, while the other half claim that it is simply a challenging module that really makes you think.

Odd. I've often wondered why this is so.

I think this may be part of the answer:

There are things in there, that look like coin-toss situations, but there are ways around them - [...] If a high-level party doesn't use every resource they've got, and use them wisely

 

[Majere]

It has always amused me that half the people who've played this module say that it's nothing but random death with no point or possibility or success except by luck, while the other half claim that it is simply a challenging module that really makes you think.

Odd. I've often wondered why this is so.

I think this may be part of the answer:

Personally i suspect the people who find it hard are either :
People who have read the module
Metagamers.

If you DIDNT KNOW you were going into the Tomb of horrors or had a group of gamers who had never even heard of it they would all die veryvery quickly.
If you have people who have heard of it and basically meta game all sorts of strange tactics or have played it/read it etc it becomes "challenging".

Or thats how it always seemed to me
Majere

 

[Ourph]

People find Tomb of Horrors hard because it's the Everest of adventure modules. Is it possible to "beat" it? Yep! Is it forgiving of the careless or those who make mistakes? Nope! You've got to bring your best game when you're playing The Tomb, which is what makes surviving it, dying halflway through it, heck - even having the guts to take the thing on - a big deal to most gamers.

I'm proud to say I've had a PC in the Tomb of Horrors 4 times. Died thrice and made it out by the skin of my teeth once (we killed the fake lich but never found the real one). But I had a blast every time.

 

[Abraxas]

Try playing it with the resources of the pregenerated PCs in the back or with characters with equivalent resources.

Throwing summoned creatures at everything isn't clever and if thats all you really need to do, well thats just boring.
I agree with Majere's observation.

 

[the Jester]

I've both played it and run it in 1e (very, very lethal, nobody ever quite managed to finish it) and run RttToH in 3e- which was amazing, and the party came to a complete and total victory- albeit with many near misses.