Tomb of Horrors (Am I a jerk?)

[Mandarin]

Here was the situation. I was invited to a 2-3 shot tomb of horrors module. We were told we would be level 14, and get 2 uncommon and 1 rare item. There would be 4 of us, and to feel free to min/max if we want because we should not expect to live long. None of us had done tomb of horrors and were excited because we have heard so much about how hard it was over the years.


I was going to roll a wizard, but someone else really wanted to so I went with a rogue instead because we needed a trap/skill monkey and I had never rolled a rogue before.

I made a high elf arcane trickster, dumped my intel and bumped up my other stats instead. (Magic items were robe of eyes, +1 longbow, and helm if intellect to bump my intel up)

I took expertise in thieves tools, perception, investigation, and stealth.

Long story short. My passive perception was 27, my passive investigation was 24, 29 when detecting secret doors thanks to the dungeon delver feat. I could not roll under 24 or 25 thanks to reliable talent. I simply went in front of the group percieving or investigating everything. We got to the point where the dm realized I could not physically fail any of the trap checks or miss a secret door since I was checking every wall, ceiling, or floor. He said, "Well guys, I might as well just read you all the things you are going to find because you can't not find them."

I felt really bad for breaking the module, I feel like they should say something like... don't let players roll a rogue with expertise in perception and investigation... especially not an arcane trickster that can open everything from 30ft away and has a 25 minimum using thieves tools. Am I a jerk?

[Sigreid]

No, I don't think you were a jerk. Your DM told you to build to try to defeat a legendarily difficult module that was originally designed as a competition to see who would die last. You did that. And there are still areas in that dungeon that a high perception won't save you if I remember right.

[sithlordnergal]

A jerk? No, not from what I can tell. Your Rogue was highly optimized, with really high passives. Not only that, but I've played ToH a few times, there are traps in there that don't care if you find them or not. Like, congrats, you found the pit trap, doesn't matter though cause the door is at the bottom. Good luck on your check to climb down. Not only that but there are also secret doors that can only be found in very, very specific circumstances, even with a crazy high passive or active check. As for activating traps, more of them require things like specific item interactions. The deadliest trap requires you to literally put on a cursed item, otherwise you literally cannot detect one of the doors.

If you did easily get through everything, then your DM failed to read through the traps properly. Cause most of the traps can't be lock picked. You can't open certain doors no matter how high your Thieve's Tools check is, you HAVE To sacrifice a magical item to the door. It doesn't matter HOW high your passive Investigation is, the buttons on the wall in the room you teleport to won't give you any extra info.

[kingcheesepants]

I'm not sure Tomb of Horrors was ever good but it definitely doesn't hold up too well. My group also did it and I found the experience to be pretty similar. Not much there is actually difficult, it's just a lot of traps that do a lot of damage and have a fairly high DC. And then some traps that are less puzzles and more just trial and error. Like randomly teleporting you places or whatever. There are a few decent ones but mostly pretty meh. A proper trap/puzzle dungeon should require a lot more than simply having good perception and showing reasonable carefulness and skill in thieves tools in order to beat. There should be some actual puzzles and riddles that require some thinking and a little more than saying does a 25 disable the trap? I'd say it wasn't your fault whatsoever, you made an effective character. It was your DMs fault a little bit (he could have still given you some challenge even if you can see everything and disable traps from a distance). But mostly it was the fault of a badly written module that was intended for another era.

[Mandarin]

A jerk? No, not from what I can tell. Your Rogue was highly optimized, with really high passives. Not only that, but I've played ToH a few times, there are traps in there that don't care if you find them or not. Like, congrats, you found the pit trap, doesn't matter though cause the door is at the bottom. Good luck on your check to climb down. Not only that but there are also secret doors that can only be found in very, very specific circumstances, even with a crazy high passive or active check. As for activating traps, more of them require things like specific item interactions. The deadliest trap requires you to literally put on a cursed item, otherwise you literally cannot detect one of the doors.

If you did easily get through everything, then your DM failed to read through the traps properly. Cause most of the traps can't be lock picked. You can't open certain doors no matter how high your Thieve's Tools check is, you HAVE To sacrifice a magical item to the door. It doesn't matter HOW high your passive Investigation is, the buttons on the wall in the room you teleport to won't give you any extra info.

Yeah we hit those too. We did have to use our noggins on some of those, and others I think we simply failed and kept going another way. It felt like a LOT of those were just either trial and error, with no real brain power edge to it... simpy keep trying different combos. Or it was blind luck. We did find the magical ring thing and we knew what it needed based off the riddle... so we just backtracked and kept checking other stuff till we found one.

When we hit the few combat scenarios (He said we were about 60% done) we went right through them without any hiccups. Literally the only damage I had taken was from friendly fire messing around because they were bored.

I dunno, I know there are some things high ckecks wont help... but with the high checks... the other challenges seemed few and far between.. and not particularly punishing as long as you didn't do something stupid like walk into something unknown without checking it out first.

[Ortho]

Not really. You were told by your DM to min/max a character for an infamously difficult module, and you did just that. Heck, I'll go one further and say that I'm not even sure if you min/maxed - a rogue with Expertise in Perception is a character that I can easily expect to see in normal play (minus the items, of course).

The only real eyebrow raise I can see here is dumping Int knowing you would get a Headband of Intellect to make up for it.

[Unoriginal]

Lvl 14 is definitively too high for the Tomb of Horror.

[Democratus]

Tomb of Horrors is a jerk. So you go ahead and be a jerk right back! :smallcool:

[J-H]

You are not a jerk.
Your character is not imbalanced. You're doing what rogues are supposed to do.

If there's a mismatch, it's on the DM's side with starting levels and the module selected.

No biggie.

[Deathhappens]

You are not a jerk, but it is highly probable that your DM is an idiot (or, at the very least, did not have the faintest idea how to run ToH).

[Sigreid]

You are not a jerk, but it is highly probable that your DM is an idiot (or, at the very least, did not have the faintest idea how to run ToH).

Idiot is harsh considering the current culture of D&D runs counter to the murder dungeon philosophy the original ToH was developed with. That's not a bad thing. It's just different.

[Pelle]

I don't think Tomb of Horror was designed for the modern playstyle of roll a check (or use a mega high passive perception) to find the traps. It was designed when the players were supposed to be clever and describe what their characters were doing instead to find the traps; thus it doesn't translate well to the modern version of D&D.

[OldTrees1]

Your character is exactly what the Tomb of Horrors expects. I ran a similar character (Dungeon Tour Guide named Dun) though the Tomb of Annihilation.


My advice to the DM, and to authors of trap riddled tombs, is to take advantage of the party knowing about the traps. Let the party know about the traps and then figure out what to do about it. That mindset taught me to make interesting traps that get the party involved.

[MaxWilson]

Long story short. My passive perception was 27, my passive investigation was 24, 29 when detecting secret doors thanks to the dungeon delver feat. I could not roll under 24 or 25 thanks to reliable talent. I simply went in front of the group percieving or investigating everything. We got to the point where the dm realized I could not physically fail any of the trap checks or miss a secret door since I was checking every wall, ceiling, or floor. He said, "Well guys, I might as well just read you all the things you are going to find because you can't not find them."

I felt really bad for breaking the module, I feel like they should say something like... don't let players roll a rogue with expertise in perception and investigation... especially not an arcane trickster that can open everything from 30ft away and has a 25 minimum using thieves tools. Am I a jerk?

Don't feel bad. If your DM seemed annoyed, there's a good chance he's just annoyed at the Tomb of Horrors 5E's simplistic conversion, not at you. In the original Tomb of Horrors (AD&D) there is no such thing as passive perception or investigation or anything like that (in AD&D it's up to the players' brains, not the dice, to deduce things) so trying to just pick DCs out of a hat without changing the structure of the adventure is doomed to failure. And it's a controversial adventure anyway--a lot of people find it boring, and you've just discovered why.

Don't feel bad.

[Keravath]

1) You aren't a jerk. The DM explicitly asked you to make a character like this.

2) I played a similar rogue/warlock multiclass through Tomb of Annihilation (3 levels of blade pact since I wasn't sure there would be any magical weapons - turns out that was fairly accurate).

3) Traps are not fun content in general. Players do not enjoy "Walk down corridor, make a save, oops that was 10d8 acid damage since you missed seeing the little holes in the ceiling". On the other hand, puzzle traps and traps that require some thinking to disarm and which can't be bypassed by a thieves tool check can provide some interesting challenges. If the DM expects the players to walk into a dungeon hitting all the traps then the DM doesn't understand how the players like to play the game or what they will do to avoid traps.

Finally, for AL purposes, Tomb of Horrors was a tier 3 with an average party level or target level of 13. So a level 14 party was probably ahead of the power curve so combat encounters likely needed adjustment upward in difficulty (especially since the characters were "optimized" with magic items selected to fit the character's strengths).

[Demonslayer666]

No, you aren't a jerk, but you were not challenged appropriately.

I would have upped the difficulty on some stuff enough to make it at least require a roll (not automatic).

[Kurt Kurageous]

I don't think Tomb of Horror was designed for the modern playstyle of roll a check (or use a mega high passive perception) to find the traps. It was designed when the players were supposed to be clever and describe what their characters were doing instead to find the traps; thus it doesn't translate well to the modern version of D&D.

Absolutely true. 1ed D&D was almost all that. YOU had to figure it out, not point to some feature on your sheet that made it possible for you to roll a die. Sure, a few things here and there (mostly on the thief class) were determined by dice.

This conflict goes forward today as puzzles and riddles in D&D. If you have players that aren't into that, it's not going to work/be fun.

[Segev]

I don't think Tomb of Horror was designed for the modern playstyle of roll a check (or use a mega high passive perception) to find the traps. It was designed when the players were supposed to be clever and describe what their characters were doing instead to find the traps; thus it doesn't translate well to the modern version of D&D.

Exactly this. Tomb of Horrors was done two disservices in the TFtYP update: it was given numeric values to find secrets and traps, and it was not given a huge sheaf of hand-outs of images for the players to pour over.

Now, the first one is pretty forgivable; it would suck to be the rogue who heavily invested in detection only to be told that you get nothing. I actually think a cool way to handle this would be to have hand-outs with different thresholds of passive perception. You get each hand-out for which you have at least that threshold.

The hand-outs are important because those detailed descriptions are never detailed enough for what Gary Gygax expected his players to be poking and prodding. Every important visual that had specific things that needed doing should have had a full-color image you can give to the players, so they see EXACTLY what it looks like and can try to work with it. To elaborate on my earlier idea, you could have highlighted or circled things, or even hand-outs that are closer-in looks at specific areas of interest that "catch your eye," if you have a higher passive perception.

[MaxWilson]

Exactly this. Tomb of Horrors was done two disservices in the TFtYP update: it was given numeric values to find secrets and traps, and it was not given a huge sheaf of hand-outs of images for the players to pour over.

Now, the first one is pretty forgivable; it would suck to be the rogue who heavily invested in detection only to be told that you get nothing. I actually think a cool way to handle this would be to have hand-outs with different thresholds of passive perception. You get each hand-out for which you have at least that threshold.

The hand-outs are important because those detailed descriptions are never detailed enough for what Gary Gygax expected his players to be poking and prodding. Every important visual that had specific things that needed doing should have had a full-color image you can give to the players, so they see EXACTLY what it looks like and can try to work with it. To elaborate on my earlier idea, you could have highlighted or circled things, or even hand-outs that are closer-in looks at specific areas of interest that "catch your eye," if you have a higher passive perception.

This is an awesome idea. Would buy.

[OldTrees1]

Exactly this. Tomb of Horrors was done two disservices in the TFtYP update: it was given numeric values to find secrets and traps, and it was not given a huge sheaf of hand-outs of images for the players to pour over.

Now, the first one is pretty forgivable; it would suck to be the rogue who heavily invested in detection only to be told that you get nothing. I actually think a cool way to handle this would be to have hand-outs with different thresholds of passive perception. You get each hand-out for which you have at least that threshold.

The hand-outs are important because those detailed descriptions are never detailed enough for what Gary Gygax expected his players to be poking and prodding. Every important visual that had specific things that needed doing should have had a full-color image you can give to the players, so they see EXACTLY what it looks like and can try to work with it. To elaborate on my earlier idea, you could have highlighted or circled things, or even hand-outs that are closer-in looks at specific areas of interest that "catch your eye," if you have a higher passive perception.

I keep coming back to the Tomb of Horrors and I learn another lesson each time. Despite being really into the play around traps, there is a lot of improvements that could be done.

Awareness -> Observation -> Identification -> Puzzling -> Resolving
1) For the party to interact with the trap they need to become aware of it. That can be right as they trigger it (I suggest rolling initiative) or in advance when someone notices something not quite right.
2) Then the party needs to collect what information they can safely obtain about the traps. This might be time sensitive if the trap is springing, this is mid combat, or another time pressure.
3) They need to figure out what the trap is. They have information but it is possible to be mislead. Guess at cause and effect, range and magnitude, etc.
4) Solve the puzzle. A known trap is still a threat, but it can be solved like a puzzle.
5) Execute the solution.

By expanding how one views traps out like this you have plenty of room to bring in the other PCs while still letting the locksmith/trapsmith/dungeoneer/tour guide/guild thief/etc shine in their area of expertise. I really like the idea of the dungeoneer informing the party about the group effort to bypass the trap.

Handouts / elaboration on description sound like a good inclusion.

[jaappleton]

ToH is a legendary module.... for the wrong reasons.

Its an infamous module, not a famous one.

It was designed to be unfair.

5E, however, was not designed to be unfair. Its got some flaws, for sure, its not a perfect edition by any stretch. But its a hell of a lot friendlier to the players than older editions ever were.

So when you take something like Reliable Talent and put it in ToH... Well, it wasn't supposed to work together like that.

You're not a jerk. This is a combination of circumstance and expectations. The circumstance is that you're playing ToH in 5E. You expected, correctly, for ToH to be brutal. The DM expected it to be brutal. You were even outright told to optimize. And you did. And now you're succeeding. Which, when it comes to ToH, its not an expected outcome.