D&D YouTubers Misunderstanding the Tomb of Horrors: A Hater's Chronicle

     I don't watch a lot of Dungeons and Dragons YouTube. Lots of it is advice I've already learned from forums and mates on discord, other parts are engaging with the game in ways that I'm not interested in, and lots of it is people who, in my opinion at least, aren't very good writers, and use stock footage and clips from bits of media to substitute in for their lack of good ideas. What really rankles me more than anything else however, is a combination of intellectual laziness and ignorance of the history of the medium. Is this gatekeeping? Maybe. If I'm feeling generous I'd say its rooted in my own training as a historian which has made me couch how I present information and opinion, but it also has to do with the responsibility of being one of the faces of roleplaying games in pop culture: half a million people have seen Zee Bashew's video on Blades in the Dark, where he complains about the issue of Doskvol being too lore dense, citing things like the names of hours and days of the week *cough cough cough* or how Blades is essentially a board game with the GM's head functioning as the board. That sort of thing could very well put people off from a small indie game they might otherwise love, and while those are small takes in the grand scheme of everything going on in 2025, this is what I've decided to complain about today. (Also we stan tehsnakerer in this house). 

    I do, however, occasionally see and enjoy bits of it, like XP to Level 3's Bad Homebrew series. I've got pretty strong bonafides as a Matt Colville stan, and so on and so forth. However, the YouTube algorithm then leads me to other videos. Like, say, XP to Level 3's video on the Tomb of Horrors. Or Runesmith's video on the Tomb of Horrors. If you look up "Tomb of Horrors" on Youtube, those are going to be among the highest results. 

Yes this is my YouTube algorithm I tested it on an incognito search as well

    Now, I'll start off by admitting my interest in old rpg stuff is probably higher than the average bear. One of my favorite one-off games to run is Boot Hill 2E, which my buddy Brad described as the RPG equivalent of the Eraserhead baby. But that's kind of okay, because these two aren't talking about the original version of the Tomb, they're talking about the Fifth Edition version released as part of Tales of the Yawning Portal. Each video goes room by room in an exaggerated swagger of comedic frustration, picking apart the dungeon and why it sucks. I don't really wanna go point by point, because the simple answer (setting aside WotC's own structural editing problems) is that the tomb is a relic out of time. So let me ask you a question:

Is it possible to play a game wrong?

    The immediate knee-jerk reaction to that is obviously "No." The prevalence of Rule Zero in the community (and even among folks like Gygax directly contradicting rules they wrote in their rulings at the table) means that obviously not. The game world is a fictional space, and if everyone agrees that something happens then that something happens. Something something Magic Circle. But, to paraphrase the great Hbomberguy, there are absolutely ways to play that are less fun or at least engaging than others. This can be a case of simply engaging in uninteresting play, or play that fails to meets your expectations or doesn't gel with what you enjoy. Both of our YouTubers had that clash of expectation, being much more Elfkissers than the sweaty wargamers Gary was throwing at the tomb at Origins 75. Tomb of Horrors was made in a different play culture, one found nowadays in the long-dying-but-never-quite-dead OSR culture. Exploration of the environment takes place in a much more "Mother May I" game of verbal exploration of the ludic space, and there's often a pretty large dose of black humor when it comes to things like character mortality. That's in part due to the life-is-cheap sensibilities of most Appendix N, and also because Dungeons and Dragons started as a bunch of buddies grabassing around while Gary acted smug behind his filing cabinet. 

    What XP and Runesmith have found is that inherent tension due to how the game used to be played and how it is played now, but because the only history they actually have on the Tomb is whatever they cribbed from Wikipedia, they backwards-project modern play sensibilities and simply dismiss it as bad (see Runesmith discussing bringing items in the dungeon to Magic Item Shops, a thing which doesn't exist in either AD&D or 5E, but does exist in video games). They're not entirely at fault for this though, because we also need to look at Wizards of the Coast, who have seemingly forgotten:

Not everything should be remade

   

     There's a line in the XP to Level 3 video that gets me, where he talks about the 5th Edition Tomb getting an "Update." I don't like that word, it brings to mind the Disney remakes that, in an attempt to smooth over anything objectionable about the originals, become soulless in the process. The Tomb of Horrors is hilarious, it is dickish, it is mean, it is unfair, and it is so perfectly an object of its time-both in terms of the play it expects and the people who created it-that it is to my mind impossible to move into any edition of mainline Dungeons and Dragons released after I was born. But of course, memberberries move units, and nostalgia is a powerful industry , to the point that the Tomb keeps getting rereleased. But it doesn't help that the original context isn't there beyond that the tomb lives in fame/infamy, without the stories of what it meant to try to conquer it.

    

    Honestly we're due for a new remake any day now, albeit I hope it'll come with some adjustments to bring expectations more in line with modern sensibilities. Maybe it'll be a time loop, or a simulation. If you were gonna introduce it to your own players today, I'd recommend the 30 Kobolds Variant, for peak comedy. Because as time moves on, and the game moves further and further away from dungeon crawling, sometimes its nice to take a trip back and see why "The World's Greatest Roleplaying Game" has "Dungeons" in its name.