Quote from: Ravenswing;881902But, withal, I think Warthur called it: that if you weren't a TSR fanboy, you had no way of knowing that TOH was a tournament module intended to produce TPKs.  

Unless, you know, you read the text in the module.  The part where it says that it's a tournament module.  And the part where it says it's a thinking module, not for hack and slay, and if you're not willing to use your brains to figure the module out you're gonna have a bad time.

All that is in the module text.  That's not required of a "TSR fanboy", that's basic reading skills.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;882066that's not required of a "tsr fanboy", that's basic reading skills.

Apparently Gygax thinks reading is FUN!

Quote from: Orphan81;881982Thing is, John Wick doesn't have a big forum presence. He doesn't post much on any forum. Also, despite being loud and obnoxious, his Kickstarter is most likely going to crack a million. Sometimes you can be an opinionated asshole and get away with it if your stuff is high quality.

Stefan Porkony and Dwarven Forge bust a million on every KS they do.

Reaper's Bones kickstarters are down as some of the most successful KS's of all time.

Wick pulling a mio. in impresses me not in the least.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;882066All that is in the module text.  That's not required of a "TSR fanboy", that's basic reading skills.

But, but ... that assumes one is literate enough to have read the DMG, with its advice that a DM is supposed to read, digest (and perhaps annotate and even revise) a module rather than being the blind leading the blind!

I've never liked the idea of D&D tournaments, frankly.  I've always found the notion inane.  (This is not the same as a convention game.  Tournaments are specifically to find a WINNER.)  But D&D players went to GenCon and saw the historical miniatures tournaments and their prizes, and they wanted prizes too.

SO how the hell do you figure out who is the "best" D&D player in four hours?

The easy way is "the last one to die."

This explains much about tournament modules.

Quote from: Doughdee222;881759Well, this is why 12 year olds shouldn't GM

Wait, WHAT?!

The elimination tournament dungeon is just another kind of game you can play with the D&D rules set.

You can do the improvised wilderness game using the Wilderness Survival board.

You can do the kinds of things you might have used Chainmail for (even more of that with Swords & Spells or Battlesystem, maybe War Machine for engagements you don't want to set up in such detail).

You can run a player-vs.-player competition similar to Wiz-War (although I think that card/board game is better for its purpose).

Quote from: Orphan81;881982Thing is, John Wick doesn't have a big forum presence. He doesn't post much on any forum. Also, despite being loud and obnoxious, his Kickstarter is most likely going to crack a million. Sometimes you can be an opinionated asshole and get away with it if your stuff is high quality.

This is more true than should be. Its sometimes appalling to see people willfully throw money at what are sometimes crooks, liars or worse. Moreso with the ones that back a product aware the designer or publisher is scum or robbing someone.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;881992Yes!  God, Yes.  It's like one of those terrible, old computer point and click adventures where you have to check everything, but except only ONE choice won't kill you.

Fair enough but its a role playing game. There are more ways to check something out than jumping in head first and seeing what happens. In the case of the Devil mouth most of them are pretty intuitive. To the point of being thins many groups would do anyway. And they won't get you killed.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;882072SO how the hell do you figure out who is the "best" D&D player in four hours?

The easy way is "the last one to die."

This explains much about tournament modules.

And/Or scored the most points. Hated that.

Quote from: Phillip;882077You can run a player-vs.-player competition similar to Wiz-War (although I think that card/board game is better for its purpose).

See my comments elsewhere on the double blind event I attended that ended with me as dead, then an otter, then last man, er otter, standing of the group, then dead again.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;882066Unless, you know, you read the text in the module.  The part where it says that it's a tournament module.  And the part where it says it's a thinking module, not for hack and slay, and if you're not willing to use your brains to figure the module out you're gonna have a bad time.

Thinking module != "deathtrap".

And declaring yourself a tournament module is one thing, explaining what in the blue fuck that actually means is another. A description of how the tournament in question was constructed and how the design of the module interfaced was badly needed and not presented.

Quote from: Nexus;882082There are more ways to check something out than jumping in head first and seeing what happens.

Are there? Are there really? I guess maybe if all your players are freaking geniuses or learned at the feet of Ernie Gygax or something. No ordinary person could possibly think of doing anything other than leaping head first into a demon mouth to see what happens. A demon mouth in a trap-filled dungeon. Of evil. :rolleyes:

If Wick's point was, "Golly I don't think spheres of annihilation are fun" I'd agree. Never found that aspect of Gygaxian dungeons to be much fun. So as a DM I didn't put shit like that in my dungeon. But acting like there was absolutely no way anyone might have known better than to leap headfirst into the demon's mouth is stupid.

Quote from: Phillip;882055It was already SOP; that's the point, for crying out loud.  The no-brainers get weeded out early.  If you had actually played up to 'name' level, you sure ought to have learned such elementary things.  (If you hadn't, then a simple fight could also wipe you out while you were trying to tell your high-level elbow from your arse.)

But it was run as a "tournament module" with, so far as I can make out, no qualifications required to play, and had ample first-timers playing in the actual tournament.

The module doesn't give any guidance for running it with less experienced players except for suggesting that they should be given a couple extra magic items. That isn't really enough to give them the sort of experience which would make them come up with the sort of SOP that has been outlined (like the "toss an iron spike in and cast Locate Object" gambit).

Either the published module should have specifically said "You really shouldn't let people who haven't actually played D&D to high levels play this", or it should have relied less on assuming highly-experienced players. Running a tournament that assumes that people have a reasonable level of D&D experience makes sense because the point is to designate a winner, but that comes back to the point that the module doesn't provide any explanation of how tournament play using the Tomb was intended to work.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;882072I've never liked the idea of D&D tournaments, frankly.  I've always found the notion inane.  (This is not the same as a convention game.  Tournaments are specifically to find a WINNER.)  But D&D players went to GenCon and saw the historical miniatures tournaments and their prizes, and they wanted prizes too.

SO how the hell do you figure out who is the "best" D&D player in four hours?

The easy way is "the last one to die."

This explains much about tournament modules.

And, I suppose, the last to die is often the guy who stands back and does as little as possible all session.

Quote from: Nexus;882082Fair enough but its a role playing game. There are more ways to check something out than jumping in head first and seeing what happens. In the case of the Devil mouth most of them are pretty intuitive. To the point of being thins many groups would do anyway. And they won't get you killed.

Okay, I've been picking at Wick's account a lot already, but your comment sets off another alarm bell in my head. I've heard the story of the group that all climbed one-by-one before. It's one of those humorous accounts like the Head of Vecna. Yet, I was part of a large gaming community in the early '80s, when people were playing a lot of the now classic modules.

Of all the ways that people died in the Tomb of Horrors, I never heard of an actual group that TPKd by climbing into the mouth. Those stories always happened to some other group somewhere else. It was like a D&D urban legend. Yet both times Wick ran/played, of all the ways the group could have died, that exact same urban legend played out. It just sets off my BS detector.

I'm just going by the gaming community I was part of back then. Have other people here found that to be a common way that whole groups died?