It’s worth mentioning Return to the Tomb of Horrors here. It frames the Tomb in a whole campaign. Although so far, I think the tomb itself is the weakest part of that book.

I only have the OSE SRD to hand, not the actual B/X rules, although I understand that they are largely the same: https://oldschoolessentials.necroticgnome.com/srd/index.php/Dungeon_Adventuring#Traps

Searching a 10’ square takes 10 minutes, you have 1-in-6 chance of finding the trap (elves and thieves have more) - whole not written there, I would say this is for a generic search. If you’re doing something particularly appropriate for discovering the trap, the chance should be higher or automatic.

When you trigger the trap, there is a 2-in-6 chance it actually goes off.

Re: Needle trap: my point was exactly about skill based play: The Tomb of Horrors is targeted at experienced players, who would almost certainly see the needle trap coming, given how prevalent they were in those days.

I’m with you on the attrition. I think some of the other readings are overly literal or unnecessarily harsh.

The way I see it, there is actual writing on the floor tiles. It’s in small print so you need to be close and it will be widely spaced. If you want to read the whole thing, you have to move along the whole path quite closely, falling into a few pits along the way.

The kill chance of the needle traps is only that high on paper. If the players are that high level and not expecting poison needle traps on every lock, they have been playing a different game.

I don’t know how it is in 1e, but in B/X there is always a 1-on-6 chance of spotting a trap and there is some paragraph about a trap not triggering 50% (?) of the time. From what I read, nobody seems to use that m, but it’s in the rules. I think that might be appropriate in this case, because it gives a chance that someone in the back line (or multiple people) fall in the pit at once.

In my version, I expanded on the idea of the demons that show up when you go astral or ethereal. They also come in after about a day to repair damage to the tomb and reset (most) traps. Resetting the traps is mostly a curiosity, since the players know how they work the second time. But they may actually run into the demons themselves who would not like to be disturbed in their work. That can add an element of danger and dissuade the players from wasting time. Of course they can just rest outside of the tomb, as long as they have actually found the way out.

Very interesting post. My group is in the tomb right now, playing Pathfinder 2 and using The Alexandrian’s version.

The time wasting aspect is definitely visible, and that it’s about real-world time and not in-game time. There is nothing stopping you from calling it a day after an in-game hour of non-stop spellcasting and coming back tomorrow.

Another aspect which made a huge difference is the capacity for regenerating HP. There was very limited regeneration in 1e, whereas in Pathfinder, if you’re not under time pressure, you can heal back up to full indefinitely. I have tried to give the traps additional effects beyond HP loss.

Using this opportunity to plug https://github.com/ihhub/fheroes2

It’s the open source reimplementation of HoMM2. It’s fully playable, although the reimplemented AI plays much, much smarter than the original, which can be an upside or a downside for you.

There is also an android version, it works great on a tablet!