Me and a couple of fellas are going to be attempting the Tomb of Horrors. I've played it once before, albeit it was a bit unserious and we died nine times before we even got out of that bloody corridor. I've heard so much crap about this mod and, having experienced it myself, I wonder: is there a "perfect party" for it?
It's going to be a party of either three or four, at level nine, 3.5 rules. We figured a tank, a rogue, a wizard and potentially a healer of some sort. Is that a good setup? Is there even any reason to try to powergame ToH, or should we just go around Searching every nook and cranny in there?
I'm supposed to be play the tank, mostly because I never usually do. Any advice on what I should play? I figure that loads of HP and saves is the way to go for the ToH?
Any tips would be greatly appreciated! Without spoilers, please!
Searching as few corners as possible in order to advance is the way to go in tomb of horrors. It contains a huge amount of things which will nearly kill you or just kill you flat out. There are not that many enemies if I remember correctly, the big challenge is the DM vs. Player insta-death traps you will encounter. some of these will kill you by searching for them. Bring plenty of 10 ft poles for the spheres of annihilation.
Crusader Tank is a good call if I remember correctly. They have a crazy maneuver recovery mechanic, but I seem to recall a guaranteed DR 3* ? They get to couple that with some things like "when you hit the monster, heal yourself", and become an awesome tank pretty early with a d10 hit die. You are seriously likely to have double the hp of some of the people in the party, with built in Damage Reduction and Healing.
Looking it up...
You have 2 of these five available at any time (you take anything that says "hit more" and the "every time you hit, you heal" ability):
Crusader Strike - heal d6+1 damage on a successful attack.
Vangaurd Strike - allies get +4 to hit target
Steely Strike - +4 to you and enemy to attack each other
Stone Bones - get DR 5
Steely Wind - attack 2 opponents
and
Martial Spirit - heal 2 with each successful attack.
So you can reliably hit an enemy and heal 2 damage every round or take significantly less damage. Every time you are hit for 5 damage, you get a bonus to hit the enemy back (and bonus chance to heal).
You should be pretty much immune to monsters from a decent couple of levels.
The other good alternative to a frontliner that our party has found is a summoner. Summoners can usually pad the front line with some decent creatures that have resistance to whatever the enemy is. A relatively straightforward build is:
Human Cleric of <nature god>
Domain - Summoning (+2 CL on summoning)
Domain - Planning? (Extend Spell)
1 - Domain Spontaneity (Nature)
1 - Spell Focus Conjuration
3 - Augment Summoning
6 - Divine Metamagic (Extend or Quicken, depending on preferences)
9 - ?
A level 1 you can summon 4 round duration monsters for a big win. Fill those slots with spells like Summon Monster and Summon Undead, and you can swap them out for either Healing or Summon Nature's Ally, so all of your bases should be covered. A 4-round long CR 1/2 creature as a round casting is decent. We have always played that Summoning is a Standard Action, rather than full round, so feel free to take Rapid Summoning if you play different.
Level 3 is the "all monsters get +1 to hit and damage, +1 to fort saves, and +1 hp/die" level. Those extra hp are usually kick-ass, especially for your frontliners like zombies (zombies have double the hit dice that they are supposed to have).
Level 6 is where you get to blow Turn Attempts for summoning. As we know, Turns are pretty worthless unless you have undead hanging around, and even then they kind of suck as you go higher in level. Quicken Spell 1x/day is a decent ability to have, but I would go with Extend. Clerics have lots of good extendable spells (Magic Weapon, Magic Armor, and even things like Darkvision are things that are nice to have last double). Extend has the flexibility for keeping your Planar Ally spells hanging around for significantly longer as well.
In general, this character is always handy to have in a party.
There is no purpose whatsoever in being a tank in ToH. 90% of things that will interact with you in any way are DNS traps. Being a meat shield just makes you die. Being a searching character just makes you die. There are simply too many bullshit things that will kill you if you interact with or look at them in any way. Having a trap monkey or an arrow soaker is a complete waste of time.
Even if you walk through by the shortest possible route and touch nothing there is a quite sizable number of times that someone on your team will get killed. Often with no save or die roll. The important thing is to have bodies you don't mind losing. Remember that if you drop a summon monster spell you can drop a larger number of lower level things. You'll lose a lot of Celestial Giant Centipedes or whatever, but that's fine.
The final battle is brutal and involves a lot of people dying, but again there's no hit point damage so meat shields are pointless here too.
Seconded on the summonings; particularly Summon Undead as undead creatures are flat-out immune to half the traps.
However, it's worth noting that the errata'd version of Divine Metamagic only allows you to apply the feat to a metamagic feat you already have, which means you'll need to pick up Extend or Quicken at 6th and Divine Metamagic at 9th. Another straightforward Summoner build is a Focussed Conjurer with the Augment Summoning class feature at 1st level in place of Scribe Scroll. Abrupt Jaunt in place of a Familiar will get you out of a load of trouble. Segue into Master Specialist at 4th level to improve your abilities further; you'll get all sorts of toys for practically no cost. Make sure you grab Metamagic School Focus (Conjuration).
If you want to take summoning to the max, use Arcane Disciple to get lesser planar ally onto your spell list and go into Thaumaturgist any time after 7th level, although it isn't strictly necessary. The other option is to use the second instance of your Expanded Spellbook class feature to pick up lesser planar ally at 9th level without burning a feat, although this means that if Thaumaturgist is your thing you won't qualify at the level you're starting... and note that the Thaumaturgist's 3rd-level class ability to Extend Summoning *stacks* with the Extend Spell feat so your beasties will hand around for a long, long time.
There are several good ways to get a summoner; sorry about the extended ramble! All I really wanted to do was agree with Sun Tzu that it's a very good way of handling the gamut of traps you'll face
The fact 'DNS' has caught on as standard terminology amuses me greatly.
On an on topic note, I recall an ad for this campaign where the DM clearly had no fucking idea what he was doing, and therefore assumed four box design actually fucking meant something. 'We need a tank!' says the DM, as those who know better rotate on the carpet, cackling incessantly.
How does find the path work in conjunction with the dungeon, when you're told what to touch, what not to touch, what passwords to speak, the timing in your movement?
How do you replace characters? Is there a way to exploit this to raise your equipment value quickly?
Come see Sprockets & Serials
How do you confuse a barbarian?
Put a greatsword a maul and a greataxe in a room and ask them to take their pick
Rightyo, it seems that summoning is the way to go. If I take a cleric the others will probably be ok with it, being a semi-tank or something. Especially with tons of summons. As for DNS, what does it stand for?
The DM is our usual DM and kinda likes to play DM vs. Players (trying to kill us most of the time) but with a twinkle in his eye. One of our players have never played D&D (he's that potential fourth player). As for how we make the characters, we have pretty much free hands, except a gentleman's agreement not to brake the game. Powergaming to the max is quite alright though, and expected.
Seeing as there is quite alot of different builds, which one do you people think I should go for? SunTzu's build seems quite solid, tho I'm not expert at these things tbh.
Fuchs wrote:Get the leadership feat so you have lots of disposable trap detectors?
Yeah, pretty much. The best thing you can do is either hire a bunch of expendable commoners or just use lots of summon spells to get things to set traps off for you. Most of the traps are just straight up undetectable, so having an actual rogue won't help much. It's much easier to just constantly send in summons to set the traps off for you.
If anything your party should be a bunch of clerics loaded to the brim with augury, divination and commune spells, because you'll need to use them a lot at the parts where you have to interact with anything.
Or, if you really want to get screwed over every time you try to do something and end up in a nearly hopeless boss fight with characters dying every round, you could play Arkham Horror...
But yeah, divination + minions is king if you actually want to get through without dying.
The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor from stealing bread, begging and sleeping under bridges.
-Anatole France
Mount Flamethrower on rear
Drive in reverse
Win Game.
-Josh Kablack
Sajber wrote:Seeing as there is quite alot of different builds, which one do you people think I should go for? SunTzu's build seems quite solid, tho I'm not expert at these things tbh.
I don't have access to my books right now, but...
Clerics and druids tend to have a better class chassis than the wizard (for what that's worth). The divinations aren't too bad, as RC mentioned, for avoiding painful impending doom.
If your DM will let you play a Tome of Fiends Summoner, that's an excellent choice since your entire purpose is getting lots of tiny meat shields to set off traps and soak hits.
You'll want to take the following feats:
1 - Spell Focus (Conj), Augment Summoning
3 - Attune Domain (Oracle)
6 - ?
9 - Dominions of the Infernal
The ? can be filled in with things like Memories of Death (so you don't lose levels from dying) or more Arcane Disciple/Attune Domain/Attune Sphere, or really anything.
Just take nine levels of Summoner.
Your approach is: for traps, send out your minions with summon monster/nature's ally/undead/frost beast I and II (which are automatically Extended and last 18 rounds). If there's combat, you have your summoned cohort out and drop walls and more summons with your actual actions. Good choices for the cohort would probably be a Tiger or Deinonychus (for Pounce), grapplin' bear, or ninja Earth Elemental (for death from below). You also use your summon ability to grab various outsiders when you don't think mook swarms or dinosaur cage matches will cut it.
I'd like to point out that any kind of extra-dimensional travel will get the army of demon housecleaners on your ass. As if the place needed the excuse.
Seems like ToH would be one of those rare situations where warlocks are actually good... though I'm not sure what level they get that godawful summon undead power that's rubbish for anything but triggering traps. Does flight help avoid traps any?
Warlocks can pick up The Dead Walk at 6th level if you care, but you've got to have a handy supply of stiffs to make your zombie buddies out of. You'd be taking that at the cost of being able to fly though. You couldn't even pick up Fell Flight with the Extra Invocation feat until 11th level, by which time you'll be dead.
Flying often doesn't help in ToH. A lot of shit just happens when you move through something or other. Or sometimes when you look at shit. And to make it even more fun, the good choices are sometimes completely indistinguishable from the bad choices.
This doorway takes you further into the dungeon. That doorway just erases you from reality. Fuck you, go play Halo.
If this isn't played as a one-off, just for laughs sort of game, expect a lot of hurt feelings.
Oh, sorry. If you are actually using something like the above build for killing tiny monsters, there is the PERFECT feat for you:
Level 9 (assuming you are alive) - Summon Elemental Reserve feat - Complete Mage page 47 (you have to have 4th level spells)
- Infinite summons of small, dieable monsters. Pick an elemental, you get a small sized one for 1 round per highest level summoning spell you have, at a range of 30 feet. This scales to Medium (at 6th level spell) and Large (at 8th level spells). Icing on the cake too, +1 CL to Conjuration(summoning) spells.
So, you are talking a +FOUR CL on summoning (it matters for those pesky dispel checks).
As a side note, you get to be a cleric with magic armor and weapon, 3/4 BAB, Heavy Armor, and the human skill point. Carry your heavy crossbow, morningstar, dagger, heavy steel shield, and you can beat things up with the best of them. Turning is just the icing on the cake in an undead-heavy campaign.
You prioritize Wisdom, because that is the money.
Con is always good, and you never regret it.
Dex or Str (dump 1) depending on whether you want melee or ranged. You should go ranged, but dumping dex doesn't really hurt because you have touch attacks for most ranged stuff. You can conceivably dump both of these.
Cha will power your Divine Metamagic, and you can skate by with 10 here if all you are doing is extending your summons. However, having extra Extends for Greater Magic Weapon, Magic Vestement, Status, etc. is hugely helpful. Remember kids, and extended hour/level duration lasts all day (even at level 6, 12 hours is most of the day).
Int - try to keep this at a 10 minimum, you have a good skill list and 2 sp/level hurts you.
Human Cleric of <nature god>
Domain - Animal (Knowledge Nature is a class skill)
Domain - Planning (Extend Spell)
1 - Domain Spontaneity (Animal)
1 - Spell Focus Conjuration
3 - Augment Summoning
6 - Divine Metamagic (Extend)
9 - Summon Elemental
The finer points are:
Summoning at +3 CL at level 1, +4 at level 9. Summons should last an entire fight.
Can summon Undead, Monster, or Nature' Ally. Also, can use the Planar Ally line.
Can spontaneously cast healing spells or Summon Natures Ally spells.
+1 skill point/level
Summons get +1 to hit/dmg, +1 hp per die, +1 on fort saves (level 3).
Choose to extend a summon (3+cha mod) times per day, at the cost of a turning attempt.
Summon small (or larger) elementals at no cost (provided you have a single 4th level spell left)
---
You are a cleric, you get turning 3/4 BAB (Divine Power makes this 1/1 BAB when you need it), heavy armor/shield and simple weapons. You fight with a Morning Star (or Heavy Mace) and Heavy Shield in melee, and a Heavy Crossbow (which you keep loaded) at range. You make holy water, and can throw it at undead/incorporeal.
Also, you have reasonably good blasting up to level 5-6 against normal enemies, and up to level 12 against undead and evil outsiders, through the Light of X line of spells. These do double damage against undead and evil outsiders (4d6 at level 1-2, 8d6 at level 3-4, 12d6 at level 5-6). This means that at level 4, you can do level-appropriate damage with a below-level-appropriate spell, assuming you are keeping highest slots for summons. No save versus this effect (SR though).
A sample level 4 spell breakdown with 16 Wis looks something like:
0 - Detect Magic, Detect Magic, Mending, Light, Light, Purify Food/Drink
1 - Deathwatch*, Light of Lunia, Lesser Vigor, Sanctuary, Summon Undead I.
2 - Hold Animal*, Summon Undead II (SPC), Light of Mercuria (SPC), Summon Monster II
----
Any spell may be swapped for a Summon Natures Ally or Healing. * indicates domain. Light of X also emits light, and last 10 min/level, so you should have a backup light source always ready.
The above should be enough for most situations. Animalistic Power (subject gets +2 STR/DEX/CON) from PHB2 almost made the list, and it makes it next level.
ERROR - the Summoning Domain gives you Summon Monster spells, and you don't want those. This has been fixed as above with the Nature domain. This means that your level 1 summons only last 2 rounds now, and that you only have +2 CL on Summoning at level 9. Drat!
Thanks for all the tips! I ended up with a summoning druid with alot of Handle Animal skill points, 20 sheep and Leadership... It was quite a fun ride (we played it last night), we had one rogue and a cleric apart from myself. At first I kind of dismissed virgileso's take on the profession(shepherd), but then I checked out the Handle Animal skill, to see what it can do.
11 cohorts, 20 sheep, all blindfolded and with some cotton stuck in their ears made for quite a new experience, for us players as well as the DM. He didn't really expect it! Bring a load of sticks, just throw them in front of a sheep at call "fetch!" seemed as good a way as any to find out where those pesky trapdoors were located and the cohorts could pull any dangerous-looking levers for us. Expendable sheep are also good for those heavy-trapped altars with diamonds on them as well. Searching every single 5 ft-square seemed to be what the rogue liked doing best, which made for quite a slow play, bu very enjoyable even so.
In the end, we got to a room with a lich (the big bad boss, but of course some sort of lesser variant of himself) and a bright and shiny mace - which the rogue promptly started bonking the lich with. He died, the roof collapsed, we got out via a Dimension Door (Cloak of Mountebank or whatever it was called) even though some demons tried to bite our heels, and that was the end of it. The entire dungeon was destroyed. Drat. After conceding semi-defeat ("But we DID survive...") the DM told us we were apparently supposed to disbelief the cave-in. Riiiiight.
Anyway, thanks for all the posts, just wanted to tell you how it fared. Have a good one!
The cave-in IS an illusion, but the GM apparently responded the wrong way. According to the book and tradition, if the players all GTFO, the DM is supposed to ask them if they thought the module was too hard and call it a night.
Nicely done with the sheep though. That's one of the better ToH stories I've seen.
Bring a load of sticks, just throw them in front of a sheep at call "fetch!" seemed as good a way as any to find out where those pesky trapdoors were located and the cohorts could pull any dangerous-looking levers for us. Expendable sheep are also good for those heavy-trapped altars with diamonds on them as well. Searching every single 5 ft-square seemed to be what the rogue liked doing best, which made for quite a slow play, bu very enjoyable even so.