Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Why you need to run Tomb of Horrors

One word: Catharsis.
A good DM does nothing but keep their PC's alive. A good %95 percent of the time none of your players will die and after level 10 the chance only goes down to %85 percent tops depnding on what kind of a game you're running. And yes every single goblin you play is trying to kill the PCs but in reality if by some horrible will of God the PC should be on the brink of death by the hands of my CR 1/8 toad I can assure you the DM will find a way to save you the embarassment.
For this reason the Tomb of Horrors is beautiful. Not only can the Tomb be easily found online legal and free for most any version (cept 4.0 but that's running around $20 on Amazon) but it was originally written by the gaming messiah Gary Gygax himself. Furthermore the sad sorry lot that calls themselves players will die by their own hand. Not to give a single piece of the dungeon away the players will die. They are tasked with complex traps and puzzles and a few nasty monsters that will destroy the sorry lot of animated meatbags. Best part of their demises will be the fact that there are always hints to there upcoming dooms and even then PC's will usually be granted one free save before they are devoured by howler monkeys. And when those howler monkeys picked the last shiny kidney stone from your sorry remains the DM will begin to silently giggle behind their screen.
Now the extreme difficulty of this dungeon does give some issues for up and coming players. Its suggested for 4-6 lvl 9 players but higher level players can't hurt especially because much of their success hinges on their own metagaming common sense. Since the PC's will die, maybe all at once and sometimes their corpses and gear can never be recovered, you'll have to make some sort of societal contract. This isn't hard to do, as Dungeon Master you will receive the catharsis of having your howler monkeys eat the PC's entitled corpses and in return the PC's will get revived at no cost, they will only lose the gear they found in the tomb, or perhaps most logical the PC's build temporary, expendable characters just for fun.
If you're a DM at least read it you'll at least get some nice ideas for your next personal dungeon crawl.

1 comment:

  1. Along with this idea comes the concept of writing mini-campaigns, right? I mean, it's difficult and all, but a PC can't get angry at their DM for writing a campaign meant to kill them. It's like a friendly war. If your friends kill you, everything's okay. Plus, it makes it that much more entertaining for the DM.

    Moral of the story is, I wish people had the time to do it...

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