John Wick has written an article describing the Tomb of Horrors as the Worst Adventure of All Times. Personally, I disagree. Although back in 1999 I wrote a review of the Tomb which was critical of its many flaws and shortcomings (particularly by modern standards), even then I wrote that the module tantalized me “because it accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do”. My interest in the module eventually culminated in 2005 when I wrote a 3.5 adaptation which sought to make the module more usable by presenting it in a format easier for DMs to use (while also clearing up some of the design flaws). The result has been a really great one-shot scenario that has provided nearly a dozen different groups with some incredibly memorable experiences.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, of course, and if John Wick considers it to be the “Worst Adventure of All Times”, that’s certainly a thing he’s allowed to think. I can’t object to that.

But you know what you’re NOT entitled to? Your own facts.

So what I do object to is the fact that Wick’s article is filled with the most ridiculous lies about the Tomb of Horrors.

SPOILERS FOR THE TOMB OF HORRORS

My players picked the entrance with the long corridor rather than the two other entrances which are instant kills.

No they’re not. Lots of things in the Tomb that will instantly kill you, these two things explicitly are not that.

The devil’s face has an open mouth just big enough for someone to fit inside. The booklet told me to say that.

It does not tell you to say that.

Told me to encourage players to climb in.

Bullshit. In fact, the module tells you to do exactly the opposite. It tells the DM specifically NOT to give helpful hints or mislead players into taking certain courses of action.

The actual text from the adventure:

The mouth of the green devil’s face is the equivalent of a fixed sphere of annihilation. Anyone who passes through the devil’s mouth appears to simply vanish into the darkness but they are completely destroyed with no chance to resist.

That is not actual text from the adventure. I actually made a point of going through every version of the Tomb of Horrors that I own (and I’m pretty sure I own all of them) to make sure that Wick hadn’t just accidentally grabbed a quote from the wrong version of the adventure. This text doesn’t appear in any of them. As far as I (or Google) can tell, Wick just made this up out of whole cloth.

(This is also where I went from scratching my head about Wick getting his facts wrong to deciding that I was going to write this exposé. Because there’s no way that you just accidentally make up an imaginary quote. That signals that you’re deliberately lying.)

If we walk down that corridor and try to open one of the two doors, a stone wall drops down, trapping us in. The walls then collapse on us, crushing us.

The fact that the stone wall doesn’t drop down but instead comes in from the side of the passage is a largely inconsequential inaccuracy. But the entire second sentence is a lie.

I didn’t tell them about the secret passage at the bottom of the pit at the very beginning that allows you to skip a third of the dungeon because it isn’t a trap, but it’s there anyway, and you should find it and save yourself the trouble of trudging through a third of this worthless, piece of shit adventure.

Taking that secret passage doesn’t “skip a third of the dungeon”. It actually leads you into a dangerous combat and then a series of painful traps before dumping you out in the exact same location that you’ll end up if you puzzle out the correct exit from that room.

If you do finish the adventure, to prove the whole thing is nothing more than a way for a sadistic prick to get his jollies off, as a final “FU” from Gary, the treasure in the lich’s tomb is cursed.

Sort of true, but not really. While the final treasure does include three cursed weapons, the vast majority of the treasure is not cursed.

After repeatedly telling bafflingly unnecessary lies about what the text of the module actually says, Wick then tells us a couple of stories about his experiences with the module: The first is about how he ran the module for friends in grade school, one of them beat him up for killing them, and then they ostracized him for an entire year. The second is about how he joined a convention game of the scenario many decades later, watched the other players kill themselves, and then had his character take their stuff, leave the dungeon, and retire on the proceeds from selling it.

Those stories could be true. Unlike all the bizarre lies he chooses to tell about easily verifiable facts, I have no way of fact-checking his personal anecdotes.

But you know what?

I don’t believe him.

The handling of distance in roleplaying games can be roughly broken down into two types: First, there are systems which calculate and manipulate the specific measurements of the game world (measured in feet or meters or whatever). Second, there are systems which handle movement and distance through some form of abstract mechanic.

Let’s refer to these as “precise” systems and “abstract” systems, respectively.

When executed properly, abstract distance systems are really just formalizing the way that people handle “precise” distance without using some form of visual reference.

For example, imagine that you’re playing D&D without a grid or battlemap and the GM says, “They’re about 20 feet away from you.” What’s the GM really saying there? There’s no tape measure. He imagined the scene, eyeballed the distance in his head, and gave a figure that’s basically in the right ballpark. He could have just as easily said 15 feet or 25 feet.

In general, the GM is going to make these decisions based on one of two criteria:

(1) A visualization of the game world (“they just came out of the tree line and that’s a fair distance away, let’s call it 150 ft.”); or

(2) A mechanical assessment (“a typical PC should need to run for at least two rounds before reaching them; they can run 120 ft. per round, so let’s say it’s 150 ft. away”)

When using an abstract system, a GM should be able to use these exact same criteria.

Numenera, for example, breaks distance down into four categories: Immediate distance (anything up to about 10 ft.), Short distance (anything up to about 50 ft.), Long distance (anything up to about 100 ft.), and Extreme distance (anything beyond that).

So now the GM can use the same basic process:

(1) The archers came out of the tree line. The PCs are really far away from the tree line, so that’s an Extreme distance.

(2) The PCs shouldn’t be able to reach them in a single round, so they must be at an Extreme distance.

ZONES

When not using a precise visual reference, the other thing a GM needs to keep track of is the relative position of the various characters in a combat scene. This is relatively easy if there are only a few characters, but as the number of characters grows it will eventually surpass the GM’s capacity unless (a) they’re some kind of savant, or (b) they figure out shortcuts. One of these shortcuts is to simply group characters together: You know that Gwen and Cassie are engaged in melee with the ogre, so all three of them are in one group. There are a couple of PC archers standing a few feet behind Gwen and Cassie, so that’s another group. And then you’ve got six goblins running towards the party from across the room. (This way you’re only tracking three groups instead of eleven characters.)

Another common form of abstract distance mechanic are Zones. (We’re using those in Infinity.) And what zones basically do is formalize the mental process of grouping characters together: Gwen, Cassie, and the ogre are all standing near each other (they’re in the same zone). The two archers are a little bit off to one side (one zone away). And the goblins racing towards them are still a couple zones away.

One of the common problems people seem to run into with abstract distance systems, in my experience, is that they try to translate the abstract system back into specific measurements. Then they run the specific measurements back through whatever mental process they use for abstracting it in the theater of their mind, and then they try to translate it back into the abstract mechanic. The result tends to be like a drunk centipede trying to tap dance — they end up tripping over themselves a lot.

Okay, so if all these abstract mechanics are basically doing the same thing as the “theater of the mind”, what’s the point of them?

First, it gets away from the false deity of “precision”. Precision is great if that’s what you want and if you’re using a visual representation (usually miniatures) and mechanics which allow you to take advantage of that precision. But if you’re not, pretending that there’s any real difference between 125 feet and 130 feet is an illusion.

Second, it can eliminate irrelevant mathematical calculations by cutting directly to the mechanically relevant distinctions.

Third, these mechanics can also serve as a nice, flexible foundation for other mechanical features. For example, you can define zones with various effects that can make it easier to manage strategically interesting terrain without using battlemaps.

Anselm’s ontological argument, which appears in his Proslogion, is frequently misunderstood. For reference, the argument basically breaks down like this:

• God is a being than which none greater can be imagined.
• A being that exists as an idea in the mind and in reality is, all other things being equal, greater than a being that exists only as an idea in the mind.
• Therefore, if God exists only in the mind, we can imagine something that is greater than God (i.e., a God who exists in reality).
• And, therefore, God physically exists in reality, not just as a concept in the mind.

This thing gets trotted out on a fairly frequent basis by Christians who smugly think they’ve made atheists look foolish by proving that God exists. And you’ll just as frequently see atheists respond to this by claiming that Anselm’s argument makes no sense because he’s presupposing the existence of God. He’s just begging the question!

In reality, everybody involved in that discussion is radically misinterpreting Anselm’s intent.

Anselm’s argument presupposes the existence of God because he was dealing with a very specific ontological question of whether or not God was possessed of a physical reality or if he existed only in the human mind.

He argues that God must exist physically and not just in the mind, because God must be greater than any alternative we can imagine (by definition). And if he existed just in our minds then we could imagine him doing that AND physically existing, and therefore he can’t exist only in our minds.

But the entire argument is based on the supposition that God (as defined as “thing which is greater than anything else we can imagine”) actually exists. As such, it can’t tell us anything about the actual existence or non-existence of God. Only that, if God is a thing which is greater than anything else we can imagine, then we can be absolutely certain he doesn’t just exist in our minds.

Similarly, one could say, “Let us accept that a Star Destroyer is the coolest ship that we could possibly imagine. Do Star Destroyers physically exist or are they only imaginary creations of our brains? Well, a Star Destroyer that actually existed would be much cooler than one which is only imaginary. And since we can imagine a Star Destroyer that actually exists, it therefore follows that Star Destroyers do physically exist, by definition, since Star Destroyers are the coolest ship that you can possibly imagine.”

If you already accept that God / Star Destroyers actually exist and you’re simply trying to put some boundaries on what that existence means, this argument is useful. But the minute you try to use this argument to “prove” that God and/or Star Destroyers actually exist, you’re left with a meaningless tautology.

Anselm’s Star Destroyer

“The players have ruined my adventure!”

I see a lot of GMs say this. It generally means that their players have done something that they didn’t expect. And now what are you supposed to do?!

Well, unless it’s a convention game (or some similar situation where there is a strictly limited amount of time available), my answer is invariably going to be, “Let’s see what happens.” (While doing a little happy dance in the back of my brain, because this is what makes RPGs so cool.)

In practical terms, it’s very easy for my players to do something which I hadn’t anticipated. But it’s generally very difficult for them to do something that I have absolutely nothing prepared for. I just don’t prep my scenarios that way. It’s more typical for them to do something unexpected and now the guy that I thought was going to be their patron is, in fact, their arch-enemy. But I still had the guy prepped, right?

So when the PCs have done something radically unexpected, most of the time I just keep doing what I was doing before: Selecting the tools built into the scenario and actively playing them.

In some cases, the PCs will end up tumbling into a section of the scenario that was prepped for a completely different type of interaction. (Common variations include “I didn’t think I’d need a stat block for that character” in relatively complex systems where stat blocks are time-consuming or “this will involve several dozen pieces moving in directions I didn’t anticipate”.) If this happens, I’ll generally call for a 5 or 10 minute break so that I can juggle the pieces into place smoothly.

For example: In my regular D&D campaign a long while ago, there was a situation where some allies of the PCs were going to get involved in a street war. But based on what the PCs were planning to do, it was pretty clear that they weren’t going to be directly involved in the street war. So I prepped that as a sequence of events that the PCs would hear about afterwards. Then the PCs shifted direction and ended up unintentionally right in the middle of the street war: So I took a 10 minute break to prep the additional stat blocks I needed.

In extremely rare cases, the PCs will manage to perform a complete scenario exit. When that happens, I will generally bring the current session to a close and spend the time necessary to prep the new scenario. (Generally you want to ad lib along the new path for a certain distance until the new frame is both clear and the PCs have clearly committed to it. If you imagine that the campaign is currently in Houston and the PCs decide to go to Dallas, you can probably get a fair distance down the freeway or all the way to the city limits of Dallas as you wind things down for the night. This is partly because it will help focus your prep for the new scenario. And it’s also because the players will sometimes abruptly reverse course and drive back to Houston.)

One example in my D&D campaign occurred when a PC landed on top of a randomly generated NPC after a failed teleport attempt. They became almost immediate friends and it turned out that the randomly generated NPC was on his way to a dungeon that he’d discovered. The PCs decided to tag along… to the dungeon that I had literally just created 5 seconds earlier. We were close to quitting time for the night in any case, so I wrapped things up and prepped the dungeon.

(The PCs then promptly decided not to go to the dungeon after all at the beginning of the next session and I had to scrap the entire dungeon. Which is the most prep I’ve had to scrap in the last 7 years of GMing.)

A more recent example occurred when I was running Eternal Lies: The PCs decided to aggressively pursue a two word reference in a letter that I hadn’t anticipated them glomming onto. In that case, we had enough time left in the current session that they booked their flights and, quite literally, got to the city limits before we broke for the night and I prepped a whole new scenario for them.

Something I discussed in The Art of Pacing is how scenes are framed and filled. The basic idea is that any scene in an RPG has an agenda (the question the scene is trying to answer) and the content of the scene is about trying to resolve that agenda. Most of your scenes will be about conflict: Two or more characters want mutually exclusive things and the scene is about which character gets what they want.

One problem GMs can run into once they understand this framework are non-combat scenes that end up being short and unsatisfying: The PCs have an objective. They briefly interact with the environment or an NPC. And then the scene is over and done.

First: In order for an objective to be interesting, there needs to be an obstacle preventing you from accomplishing it.

For example, let’s say that you have an objective of going to the corner store and buying a Coke. In general, that’s not going to result in an interesting scene because there’s no meaningful obstacle. But if there’s a team of ninjas hunting you through the neighborhood, it gets interesting. If you can’t leave your sister alone because you’re afraid she might commit suicide while you’re gone, it gets interesting.

For your combat scenes, the combat mechanics are generally taking care of providing interesting obstacles. But we could imagine a combat scene which was fairly boring: Imagine a single attack roll that resulted in all of the PCs’ opponents getting wiped out. (That’s not to say you should never have combat scenes like that, of course, any more than you should always have ninjas guarding the corner store.)

For your non-combat scenes, you need to figure out what the obstacle is. And you’ll get even better scenes if there are multiple obstacles, multiple objectives, or both. (In many cases you can simply set up the objectives of the scene so that they conflict with each other and, presto, you’ve got both.)

Technoir introduces a useful concept called “vectors”: You often can’t just jump directly to making an “I solve the problem” die roll. Instead, you have to make some preparatory rolls in order to establish a vector to the thing you actually want to effect.

For example: You want to shoot Victor inside his club. But you can’t just drive up outside the club and shoot him. First you’ll have to find some way to get inside (sneaking or fast-talking your way past the bouncers), then track him down, and then take your shot.

For example: You want to convince Michael to sell you the datachip. But first you’re going to have to get him to admit that he has it. Then you’ve got to convince him that there’s another way to save his sister. And then you’ve got to convince him that you’re offering him something worth the risk.

As with anything else you prep, you don’t want to fall into the trap of predetermining how the PCs are going to overcome the obstacles. Instead, just set the obstacles: Michael doesn’t want to admit he has the datachip. Michael needs it to save his sister. Let the players worry about how they’re going to overcome those obstacles.

Back to the Art of Pacing