Tomb of Horrors (Macchiato Monsters)

I made (and ran) this dungeon as an introductory dungeon for players new to trpgs. You can find it here. In addition to giving players a feel for how powerful a variety of mid-level characters can get (giving them something to look forward to in future campaigns) it serves to introduce them to problem solving in a roleplaying setting, encouraging players to envision their surroundings and experiment cautiously rather than relying on genre cues or finding the one answer the DM intended.

Why Macchiato Monsters?

I'll probably do a full writeup of my opinions in this space at some point, but I think D&D 5E is a really bad way to introduce people to trpgs. Sure, it teaches people about things like Ability Scores and other features that've been copied into dozens of other popular trpgs, but I think far too much of the rulebook focuses on the 'game' aspect of an RPG, while 'roleplaying' gets left by the wayside.

As a test of this theory, I've run a bunch of games for people who are first timers to trpgs in the system Macchiato Monsters. Results have been spectacular, and players who previously thought trpgs looked too intimidating felt right at home.

Why Tomb of Horrors?

Onto Tomb of Horrors, a classic dungeon from the DM vs Player era of TRPGs. The dungeon is a meatgrinder, designed by a twisted lich who just wants to see people suffer in pursuit of its treasure.

I love this dungeon, but not for something I think it was necesserily trying to do. I love this dungeon because it encourages problem solving, not puzzle solving.

If you don't understand the difference: puzzles have one solution with one way of arriving at it. Problems can have multiple solutions, and often have multiple ways of getting there.

As an example of a problem, let's say someone invisible was in your room, and you wanted to reveal them. Sure, you could cast Reveal Invisible Creatures or something, but what about throwing a bag of flour into the room? What about tossing a bucket of water down so you can see the invisible figure's footprints? You could swing a long, heavy object around, but what risks might that carry with it? If you chose to fill the room with flour, I hope nobody's planning on lighting a match. See how a simple problem ends up with multiple solutions, each of which has to be weighed up against the others?

So many of the encounters in the Tomb of Horrors beg you to think of them as puzzles when they're actually, secretly, problems. Combine this with how much the dungeon punishes mistakes, and you have an excellent recipe for teaching players to think about the world around them (instead of just thinking about a puzzle on the terms you give it to them).

This is excellent, because trpgs are uniquely positioned to enable freeform problem solving, unlike videogames which often suffer from having to have all their solutions hardcoded in. As such, it's a huge shame that DMs often resort to chucking in a filler puzzle in their dungeon instead of a problem. I can find endless riddles and puzzles online, why stuff them into a medium they weren't designed for?

The Brand New Dungeon

This version of the Tomb of Horrors does the following:

• Problems which present as puzzles are now more numerous, and provide fair ways of discovering their nature before instantly dying to them
• Puzzles which (as far as I could tell) had no solution and gave you a 50/50 chance at character death or losing all your items can be solved using Acererak's Riddle
• That does make these elements puzzles and not problems, but now the players have to think about telling the difference between the two, not mindlessly follow genre cues to tell them apart
• Acererak's Riddle now has a coherent meaning to it, and is prominently displayed near the start of the dungeon

While I think XP to Level 3 fundamentally doesn't understand (or value, to each their own) the aspects described here that make this dungeon fun, their video on the dungeon was instrumental in shaping this edition of it, so I wanna give a shoutout to them.