I disagree! It's actually quite tight, design wise, if you go in knowing it's full of death traps then it's on you if you get trapped to death. Remember that they are all high level spell casters who can cast spells for days and rest as much as they want. As for the skull .. you don't have to touch him. Steal his treasure and leave! Put him in a bag of holding! Cast earthquake and drop him into a fissure!
Sorry i am a ToH truther lol
I'd also disagree about gygax being a good game designer, but i think it's worth reading the module, looking at each trap or puzzle and piecing out what a party can do to solve it: there's generally a solution you can work out or way to by pass it.
"I'd also disagree about gygax being a good game designer"
I find this intensely strange. This guy co-created one of the iconic board games and, with almost nothing to work from, created a series of mostly-awesome adventures that set the template for all RPGs to come.
If this freakin' legend is a bad designer, what chance do the rest of us have?
The first ed dungeon masters guide is basically game design outsider art in some places. There are whole complicated sub systems that don't make sense in practice at all (thinking of unarmed combat here). He wrote a bunch of rules that by all accounts he didn't use himself (he tended to just roll a d20 and go with the vibe, which i respect dgmw but that's more good dungeon mastering than any kind of design). There's an entire subsystem around armour vs weapon type that is literally unusable and that he never bothered fixing.
Against that, his modules are great, and the 1e magic item list is amazing. Like he is a hugely important figure, i just think that isn't because he was a good designer. Look at what he did after d&d (e.g. cyborg commando https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/10/10214.phtml).
haha that's very fair! I would contrast it to something like, say, runequest/Call of Cthulhu, where there is a clear design intent to the systems, or Traveller. Also Rolemaster, though that's a bit later - you can see people champing at the bit to replace D&D's messy palimpsest with some rules that actually make sense. Doesn't mean that is always going to be a better game of course.
I was born in 1970 and I remember us all thinking D&D was fairly average as a pure game back then, we still played it though. I actually wish we'd played BECMI (Basic, Expert, etc) because coming at it as an adult it's a much cleaner system, but we turned our nose up - why have basic when we could have advanced!?
This has inspired me to do one of these about the 1E DMG.
I think the weird shagginess of that book comes from that fact that Gygax was writing a big book explaining how to do a thing nobody has cone before, and we still didn't know what people would need. So he tried to anticipate every want (like a random dungeon generator).
I don't think this massive ambition is a thing to hold against him.
That's awesome! I'll look forward to that. I spent idk how many hundred hours poring over it as a nerdling, and it's undeniably fascinating, i just think the amount of actual routinely usable dm advice in it is a bit skimpy and it represents a game that is less designed than accreted, even when compared to contemporaries (cf basic d&d)
That actually DOES sound like a fun way to run ToH. I think you could make that work.
I’d add one wrinkle: after the party runs through the 20 pre-generated characters they have to run their own high-level characters. Hope those 20 runs got them the info they need!
I ran it last with everyone having three characters and I'd made a bunch of badges for 'first to die', 'most gruesome death', 'most treasure collected' which I handed out as we played. They made it to the fake lich with only three deaths, iirc.
I think there are lots of good ideas in Tomb that wouldn't work in a CRPG. The circle of annihilation works in a tabletop RPG because you can do anything you can imagine--feed in a rope, poke in a 10' pole, etc--and get (hopefully) helpful feedback. In a CRPG, there simply aren't that many ways to interact/explore the world.
I think a fun version of this would be an egyptian style tomb that the PCs are expected to explore, not in one go, but over the course of months, with hordes of hirelings brought in to help explore and test for traps while occasionally being harassed by hostiles on the surface. Think the start of The Mummy with Brendan Frasier.
On the other hand, the list of ways to hurt the lich seems dumb and arbitrary. Like figuring out boss weaknesses in the Final Fantasy JRPGs. Why even have Blind as a spell if it only works on one boss in this whole game?!
I agreed. I thought about converting the two "Tomb of horrors" modules into a NWN:EE module but figured it wouldn't really work. You either have to hardcode a lot of stuffs, to fake flexibility, or just make it a Slack & Hack module that lost the "charm".
It does kinda sound like Tomb of Horrors was made less as an actual “this’ll be a fun way to tell an interactive story!” good-faith campaign, and more of a “this’ll shut those obnoxious, rules-lawyering, power-gaming nerds up!” endeavor. Which highlights a fundamental deviation between a hands off, everything-must-work automagically video-game, and a TTRPG where there’s a DM who has to actively deal with everything as it comes - game and social mechanics.
A developer can step away from their players. They can tune out feedback, toxic and otherwise. They can block and ban them as they’re ultimately internet randos and there are hundreds of them. But a TTRPG DM is as essentially non-negotiable as the game engine itself. A CRPG dev. can say their customers are their players, but a DM’s players are *really* their players. Even if Tomb of Horrors wasn’t designed vs. people Gary was sitting across the table from, this perspective as a DM impacts his perspective as a designer.
Given that Mr. Gygax wasn’t just a DM, but *the* DM…? Few can imagine what kind of vitriol he had to deal with.
Was the Tomb of Horrors designed to entertain? Or was it designed to punish? There seems no reasonable way to beat it without having actually read it before hand, it’s lethal beyond reason, and being primary “puzzle-based” means most rewards you get won’t really help. Here’s a +5 Longsword – good luck stabbing away the illusionary floor-to-bottomless-pit instant death traps. Arbitrary, opaque, and frankly unfair, it reads like a more prolonged, “rocks fall, everyone dies, no saving throws, get out of my mom’s basement!” than a legitimate, well crafted adventure.
I'm going to wave my TOH fan flag again and suggest actually reading it, and thinking about it from the point of view of a skilled player with a character that has (say) 35 spells that might be useful in getting past traps, and is one of a group of similarly skilled and high level players. You can back out and rest to swap out spells at any point. Poison doesn't matter, you're immune because of slow poison. Pits don't matter because you're levitating. You can cast an augury before taking actions. You have hirelings and summoned creatures to trigger traps. There is no time pressure. Reading it with that lens, you can notice that all the traps actually have a fairly sensible way through, though you're still probably going to have a body count.
Now let's talk about "Return to the Tomb of Horror". That's a completely new stage of fuckerage. I actually love reading the module, but I would never want to play it...
(I guess no one cares about spoiling here) It has everything in "Tomb of Horror" plus more -- like Moil the city that waits and a fortress in the negative material plane, where the players get more tickets to an instant death. This sort of things.
See how the new Cubicle7 WFRP deals with character advancement and eventual overpower - a really neat idea. No need to end the campaign as such - each character can eventually achieve their "long term ambition" and retire, or meet their "doom" as proclaimed by a doomsayer. Either outcome gives bonus points to the player's new character creation - brilliant solution.
Hm... I haven't played this module, and know nothing about it beyond what you've written here, *but* to me it sounds like 'The Face of the Great Green Devil' is doing exactly what Dark Souls does (in every iteration).
Basically, each Souls game (and Elden Ring and Bloodborne and what have you) opens with a (very) brief tutorial segment teaching players the basic controls against the weakest possible enemies (often so weak they won't even fight back)... culminating in a boss fight against an enormous monster that is *vastly* more powerful than the player. And while these bosses are theoretically possible to defeat, most players won't be skilled enough to do so -- especially on their first run through the game -- so they're very clearly intended to kill the player, after which a cut-scene plays and the player is teleported to wherever it is that the game properly begins.
This immediate death is pretty important because it very quickly (and effectively) communicates to players that they are outmatched, and if they're not careful, they're going to die. A lot. Survival is going to require they pay attention and consider their actions -- and, when possible, plan ahead.
Now, to me, it sounds like this D&D module is oriented primarily around puzzles and traps, with little to no combat. If that's the case, beginning the game with an instant-death trap would very quickly and effectively communicate something similar to players: that it's a dangerous place they're in, filled with lethal traps, and they're going to need to be very, very careful to survive.
The important thing, I think, would be designing the dungeon in such a way that they will be able to survive, all the way through, by paying attention and finding clues (speaking of, who doesn't love a good riddle or ten?). That boss fight, itself, could be viewed as a puzzle -- with clues to how to damage/defeat it sprinkled through the dungeon: if the players are being methodical enough to avoid the traps and solve the puzzles necessary to progress, surely that would enable them to find a lot of those clues, too, right?
The main issue from a DM perspective would mostly just making sure that the necessary tools/items to defeat the boss can be found somewhere in the dungeon, should the players' find them, and learn whether or not to use them. If I wanted to be particularly cruel, I might even toss in a couple of items that buff the boss or something.
Basically... I don't think this dungeon concept is all that bad, it would just require... a kind of specific approach, and not an approach much dissimilar from the Souls games. Only where the Souls games are about going up against lethal enemies, this would be oriented more around lethal traps, yeah?
A rather drastic difference from Dark Souls is that you come back after dying to the first boss. Whereas whoever steps into the sphere of annihilation is gone.
Also, this dungeon doesn't actually have those clues or items you mention. Yes, there could be good ways to design something filled with instant death traps. This is not that.
The sphere annihilates anything it touches, so if you put a ten foot pole into it it will be annihilated. If you jump into it after that it's on you imho
This is pretty much the Kaizo Mario World of TTRPGs!
I disagree! It's actually quite tight, design wise, if you go in knowing it's full of death traps then it's on you if you get trapped to death. Remember that they are all high level spell casters who can cast spells for days and rest as much as they want. As for the skull .. you don't have to touch him. Steal his treasure and leave! Put him in a bag of holding! Cast earthquake and drop him into a fissure!
Sorry i am a ToH truther lol
I'd also disagree about gygax being a good game designer, but i think it's worth reading the module, looking at each trap or puzzle and piecing out what a party can do to solve it: there's generally a solution you can work out or way to by pass it.
"I'd also disagree about gygax being a good game designer"
I find this intensely strange. This guy co-created one of the iconic board games and, with almost nothing to work from, created a series of mostly-awesome adventures that set the template for all RPGs to come.
If this freakin' legend is a bad designer, what chance do the rest of us have?
The first ed dungeon masters guide is basically game design outsider art in some places. There are whole complicated sub systems that don't make sense in practice at all (thinking of unarmed combat here). He wrote a bunch of rules that by all accounts he didn't use himself (he tended to just roll a d20 and go with the vibe, which i respect dgmw but that's more good dungeon mastering than any kind of design). There's an entire subsystem around armour vs weapon type that is literally unusable and that he never bothered fixing.
Against that, his modules are great, and the 1e magic item list is amazing. Like he is a hugely important figure, i just think that isn't because he was a good designer. Look at what he did after d&d (e.g. cyborg commando https://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/10/10214.phtml).
What game design *wasn't* "outsider art" in 1979?
haha that's very fair! I would contrast it to something like, say, runequest/Call of Cthulhu, where there is a clear design intent to the systems, or Traveller. Also Rolemaster, though that's a bit later - you can see people champing at the bit to replace D&D's messy palimpsest with some rules that actually make sense. Doesn't mean that is always going to be a better game of course.
I was born in 1970 and I remember us all thinking D&D was fairly average as a pure game back then, we still played it though. I actually wish we'd played BECMI (Basic, Expert, etc) because coming at it as an adult it's a much cleaner system, but we turned our nose up - why have basic when we could have advanced!?
This has inspired me to do one of these about the 1E DMG.
I think the weird shagginess of that book comes from that fact that Gygax was writing a big book explaining how to do a thing nobody has cone before, and we still didn't know what people would need. So he tried to anticipate every want (like a random dungeon generator).
I don't think this massive ambition is a thing to hold against him.
That's awesome! I'll look forward to that. I spent idk how many hundred hours poring over it as a nerdling, and it's undeniably fascinating, i just think the amount of actual routinely usable dm advice in it is a bit skimpy and it represents a game that is less designed than accreted, even when compared to contemporaries (cf basic d&d)
That magic item list though, fantastic.
That actually DOES sound like a fun way to run ToH. I think you could make that work.
I’d add one wrinkle: after the party runs through the 20 pre-generated characters they have to run their own high-level characters. Hope those 20 runs got them the info they need!
I think this would be a blast.
I ran it last with everyone having three characters and I'd made a bunch of badges for 'first to die', 'most gruesome death', 'most treasure collected' which I handed out as we played. They made it to the fake lich with only three deaths, iirc.
I think there are lots of good ideas in Tomb that wouldn't work in a CRPG. The circle of annihilation works in a tabletop RPG because you can do anything you can imagine--feed in a rope, poke in a 10' pole, etc--and get (hopefully) helpful feedback. In a CRPG, there simply aren't that many ways to interact/explore the world.
I think a fun version of this would be an egyptian style tomb that the PCs are expected to explore, not in one go, but over the course of months, with hordes of hirelings brought in to help explore and test for traps while occasionally being harassed by hostiles on the surface. Think the start of The Mummy with Brendan Frasier.
On the other hand, the list of ways to hurt the lich seems dumb and arbitrary. Like figuring out boss weaknesses in the Final Fantasy JRPGs. Why even have Blind as a spell if it only works on one boss in this whole game?!
I agreed. I thought about converting the two "Tomb of horrors" modules into a NWN:EE module but figured it wouldn't really work. You either have to hardcode a lot of stuffs, to fake flexibility, or just make it a Slack & Hack module that lost the "charm".
It does kinda sound like Tomb of Horrors was made less as an actual “this’ll be a fun way to tell an interactive story!” good-faith campaign, and more of a “this’ll shut those obnoxious, rules-lawyering, power-gaming nerds up!” endeavor. Which highlights a fundamental deviation between a hands off, everything-must-work automagically video-game, and a TTRPG where there’s a DM who has to actively deal with everything as it comes - game and social mechanics.
A developer can step away from their players. They can tune out feedback, toxic and otherwise. They can block and ban them as they’re ultimately internet randos and there are hundreds of them. But a TTRPG DM is as essentially non-negotiable as the game engine itself. A CRPG dev. can say their customers are their players, but a DM’s players are *really* their players. Even if Tomb of Horrors wasn’t designed vs. people Gary was sitting across the table from, this perspective as a DM impacts his perspective as a designer.
Given that Mr. Gygax wasn’t just a DM, but *the* DM…? Few can imagine what kind of vitriol he had to deal with.
Was the Tomb of Horrors designed to entertain? Or was it designed to punish? There seems no reasonable way to beat it without having actually read it before hand, it’s lethal beyond reason, and being primary “puzzle-based” means most rewards you get won’t really help. Here’s a +5 Longsword – good luck stabbing away the illusionary floor-to-bottomless-pit instant death traps. Arbitrary, opaque, and frankly unfair, it reads like a more prolonged, “rocks fall, everyone dies, no saving throws, get out of my mom’s basement!” than a legitimate, well crafted adventure.
I'm going to wave my TOH fan flag again and suggest actually reading it, and thinking about it from the point of view of a skilled player with a character that has (say) 35 spells that might be useful in getting past traps, and is one of a group of similarly skilled and high level players. You can back out and rest to swap out spells at any point. Poison doesn't matter, you're immune because of slow poison. Pits don't matter because you're levitating. You can cast an augury before taking actions. You have hirelings and summoned creatures to trigger traps. There is no time pressure. Reading it with that lens, you can notice that all the traps actually have a fairly sensible way through, though you're still probably going to have a body count.
Now let's talk about "Return to the Tomb of Horror". That's a completely new stage of fuckerage. I actually love reading the module, but I would never want to play it...
I browsed it once, but I didn't dig into it. What in particular made it extra-nasty? I'm genuinely curious.
(I guess no one cares about spoiling here) It has everything in "Tomb of Horror" plus more -- like Moil the city that waits and a fortress in the negative material plane, where the players get more tickets to an instant death. This sort of things.
See how the new Cubicle7 WFRP deals with character advancement and eventual overpower - a really neat idea. No need to end the campaign as such - each character can eventually achieve their "long term ambition" and retire, or meet their "doom" as proclaimed by a doomsayer. Either outcome gives bonus points to the player's new character creation - brilliant solution.
Hm... I haven't played this module, and know nothing about it beyond what you've written here, *but* to me it sounds like 'The Face of the Great Green Devil' is doing exactly what Dark Souls does (in every iteration).
Basically, each Souls game (and Elden Ring and Bloodborne and what have you) opens with a (very) brief tutorial segment teaching players the basic controls against the weakest possible enemies (often so weak they won't even fight back)... culminating in a boss fight against an enormous monster that is *vastly* more powerful than the player. And while these bosses are theoretically possible to defeat, most players won't be skilled enough to do so -- especially on their first run through the game -- so they're very clearly intended to kill the player, after which a cut-scene plays and the player is teleported to wherever it is that the game properly begins.
This immediate death is pretty important because it very quickly (and effectively) communicates to players that they are outmatched, and if they're not careful, they're going to die. A lot. Survival is going to require they pay attention and consider their actions -- and, when possible, plan ahead.
Now, to me, it sounds like this D&D module is oriented primarily around puzzles and traps, with little to no combat. If that's the case, beginning the game with an instant-death trap would very quickly and effectively communicate something similar to players: that it's a dangerous place they're in, filled with lethal traps, and they're going to need to be very, very careful to survive.
The important thing, I think, would be designing the dungeon in such a way that they will be able to survive, all the way through, by paying attention and finding clues (speaking of, who doesn't love a good riddle or ten?). That boss fight, itself, could be viewed as a puzzle -- with clues to how to damage/defeat it sprinkled through the dungeon: if the players are being methodical enough to avoid the traps and solve the puzzles necessary to progress, surely that would enable them to find a lot of those clues, too, right?
The main issue from a DM perspective would mostly just making sure that the necessary tools/items to defeat the boss can be found somewhere in the dungeon, should the players' find them, and learn whether or not to use them. If I wanted to be particularly cruel, I might even toss in a couple of items that buff the boss or something.
Basically... I don't think this dungeon concept is all that bad, it would just require... a kind of specific approach, and not an approach much dissimilar from the Souls games. Only where the Souls games are about going up against lethal enemies, this would be oriented more around lethal traps, yeah?
A rather drastic difference from Dark Souls is that you come back after dying to the first boss. Whereas whoever steps into the sphere of annihilation is gone.
Also, this dungeon doesn't actually have those clues or items you mention. Yes, there could be good ways to design something filled with instant death traps. This is not that.
https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/134589/what-are-all-the-hints-in-acereraks-message
There's a big poem in terrible verse that is essentially a walkthrough, in the first corridor.
The sphere annihilates anything it touches, so if you put a ten foot pole into it it will be annihilated. If you jump into it after that it's on you imho
Did you just make Tomb of Horrors a roguelike? That's how it sounds to me. Like Nethack with permadamage for Rodney, right?