Flavors Of Overly Difficult

Hey, so I have a chance to make up for one of my missed days. Good times.

Everyone who is even vaguely old-school as regards RPGs knows about the Tomb of Horrors. It was an old AD&D module, designed to be run at conventions and tournaments. It was supposed to be so difficult that to have your characters survive through it would be worth major bragging rights.

And it was seriously difficult. There were traps that set up patterns to avoid them... and then broke those patterns to mess with you. There were nested secret doors that led to dead ends. Even getting in was tricky, because there were two false entrances to the dungeon. Hell, there was even a false ending, with a false boss fight and an illusionary self-destruct of the tomb.

Here's the thing, though. Most of it was not the kind of difficult you could solve with clever or reasonable thought. Most of it was the kind of completely arbitrary Death-No-Save nonsense based on choices you made. And there were so many bluffs and double-bluffs that those choices were essentially blind ones. So getting through was impressive, but in the way that throwing a coin ten times and having it come up heads every time is impressive.

Even the end-boss, Acererak the Demi-lich was a unique home-brew (at the time) monster with entirely arbitrary invulnerabilities and responses to spell effects. There was no way to know or to deduce how to defeat it. Which is the rub, because dealing with the unknown is a fine way to test people's skillz, but only if their skillz are at all applicable.

The ToH was originally designed to defeat some specific and very clever players, who as it turned out, when faced with the thing, just cut the Gordian Knot and sent a huge number of disposable creatures in first, since most of the traps would kill any warm body no matter how badass, but only once. Or at most ten times as the pit slowly filled in with corpses.

Contrast that to the 3rd-edition equivalent module, The Red Hand of Doom. That's a genuinely very difficult adventure. It is filled with fights where the PCs are just plain outgunned. It's like they wrote it, then just said it was designed for lower-level characters than it actually was.

But while TRHOD is difficult, it's not difficult in a totally unfair way. It doesn't have Death-No-Save traps that are mysteriously unfindable by Thieves like TOH. A party of adventurers that are super on top of their game can beat the thing. There's just a really small margin for error and a lot of opportunities to screw up. Which makes it, of course, an actual test of skill.

So if someone has legitimately taken a character through TRHOD, then they actually have bragging rights as an awesome tactician. If someone has legitimately taken a character through TOH, you should let them pick your lottery numbers.