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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Orius" data-source="post: 1656100" data-attributes="member: 8863">The entire dungeon is in some ways an excercise in metagaming and outright blocking any use of PC abilities.  It seems to take into account the normal assumptions made by players and to screw them over as much as possible for making those assumptions in the first place.  Thus Acererak is studded with lots of shiny, valuable gems, and the first impulse of players with be to grab the skull and therefore get lots of XPs.  Of course by doing so, a good chunk of the party will likely be wiped out.  Though this could be defended by saying that it's not really good for players to get into a habitual routine, and this modules seems to do everything it can to disrupt that routine.  Blocking PC abilities is worse, IMO.  If PCs go astral or ethereal in the dungeon (which I assume was a sort of standard practice), then they get attacked by demons.   Many of the death traps offer no saving throw, presumably because of the nature of pre-3e saves where high level characters consistantly made their saves most of the time.  And many of those traps are triggered either through minor mistakes, or by once again baiting PCs into taking fairly routine courses of action.    My opinion is that Gygax went through a kill-off-all-the-PCs phase when he wrote this.  I went through something similar at one point, but it was before I started playing D&D and I was still playing Hero Quest.  It got to the point where the characters had become so powerful that they easily overcame all the challenges they faced, and so I created deathtraps with the purpose of wiping them out.  The Tomb of Horrors to me comes off as something very similar.  Perhaps it is not unusual for an inexperienced DM to go through this phase I think.  Also I think the module shows how much the game has changed over the years.  As Saeviomagy points out, if all treasure seems ike a trap, then who would want to take it?  That's really a line of thought that goes with more recent examples of D&D, since treasure by itself is no longer worth XP.  But back in the day, that treasure would give levels, and so the first impulse would be to grab it.</blockquote>

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