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Kalko posted:No, actually, weaknesses can only be discarded from your hand by random effects or by effects which specifically say to discard your entire hand. To build on this, the rule of thumb in Arkham is that "cannot" is absolute. If a card says that you "cannot" do something except by this specific method then that's it, end of story. Some item weaknesses specifically have a "cannot" clause to them, usually to force you through some kind of hoop (see the Necronomicon, the King in yellow act 1). Others, like the tarot weaknesses, have no such protection while they are on the field. Once you get The Devil out of your hand you can pitch it to Corrosion at your earliest convenience. The same is true with the Clasp of Black Onyx if you pick it up, there's nothing stopping you from discarding it once it's in play. The wrinkle is, as Kalko says, the basic rules of the game state that you "cannot" optionally choose to discard a weakness from your hand. If an effect hits cards at random from your hand it can potentially get rid of a weakness for you, but you cannot choose to discard a weakness in your hand to the effects of Corrosion. Meanwhile, hidden encounter cards (including hidden weaknesses) can't leave your hand at all except by their specific rules text. An amusing side effect of this is that if you have an item weakness that takes up a hand slot and has a "cannot" clause and end up in a Straitjacket in the aforementioned scenario the end result is that both of them stalemate and the item weakness hovers in play despite not having a slot to hold it in.
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Jan 22, 2022 05:48
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GreenBuckanneer posted:So dunwich expansion is the one to get if you're just starting out, according to the reddit? Dunwich was the first cycle of expansions they released after the game launched, and as a result it has a lot of cards that are now considered to be fundamental to deck building. It's also the first existing cycle to be reprinted in the two box format.
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Mar 6, 2022 02:56
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GreenBuckanneer posted:Yeah, I read the reddit buying guide and it suggests waiting for that, looks like it'll be $100 or so for both, and it sounds like you want both. To the first, the new model is that all the player cards come in one box and all of the scenarios come in another. In other words, you don't actually need the box for the Dunwich campaign if you don't want to play it. On the other hand I still recommend it, its design is a little bit archaic compared to the more recent campaigns but it is still quite good. You just might want to give yourself a few extra XP after every scenario since Dunwich is notoriously stingy on that front. The second, there is no inter-campaign continuity in Arkham.
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Mar 6, 2022 04:37
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Batterypowered7 posted:How does Stella Clark compare to a lot of the other Survivors? I like the look of her gimmick and hope she's not overshadowed by someone mechanically similar but entirely better. Stella is extremely powerful and easily one of the best Survivors in the game. She's definitely one of the best solo investigators and is arguably the single most durable character in the entire game. Stella flat out it does not care what the game does to her, she can walk it off no problem. Even putting aside that her ability is incredible (it's not the original reason it's there, but it will probably single-handedly keep Drawing Thin on the taboo list forever), Neither Rain nor Snow is an unbelievably powerful card, made even more so because you can recur it with Resourceful and grab them all back with True Survivor.
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Mar 6, 2022 06:07
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Batterypowered7 posted:Any of the Parallel/Novella investigators any good? Parallel? Basically all of them but Daisy are good. Novella? The only investigator who remains purely a novella character is Gloria and she's pretty good. She's generally better at lower player counts, but she has a niche and can do things in it pretty well. Speaking to the alternate signature cards, Roland and Jenny have cards that are arguably better than their base stuff, Norman's are arguably worse, it's a tossup for Carolyn, and Silas and Dexter are probably willing to use both.
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Mar 6, 2022 18:20
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Xlorp posted:Maybe there's a need for 'Reinforcement Pack' encounter sets that are frequently used / leveraged between campaigns. And hard use / wearing out / eaten by a grue casualties during play. Eh... I don't think so? In large part because they just recently printed the revised core set with all the encounter cards again. As for Rats, I remember someone made a custom alternate version of them where they just had Surge, which was such a good idea TCU used it! (also they said they were inspired by TCU, so that may be more causal than coincidental).
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Mar 12, 2022 00:01
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Jimmeeee posted:I'm also not super interested in the character progression aspect of it. Is it possible to put together a deck for a character and play through a whole campaign without changing the cards? Or do the scenarios get progressively harder so you'll be getting your rear end kicked by the end? The game explicitly expects that over the course of the campaign you will upgrade your deck. There is a difficulty curve in the game such that enemies and locations become harder the further you go into said campaign. It's possible to finish a campaign with the same deck you started with, but that's generally just going to make it harder to succeed than it needs to be. The thing to remember is that a lot of very cool and very powerful cards are gated by an experience cost, unlike Marvel Champions you can't just put any card from your class in the deck, the strongest, coolest, most exciting cards are pretty much all going to be high-level and only become available in a campaign once you get the chance to change up your deck. Another thing that is different between Marvel and Arkham is that Arkham restricts card access by character. Unlike Marvel were you can have any character choose any aspect, Arkham has strict guidelines on what cards a particular character can play. Furthermore, a character's unique cards are going to be, at most, four cards (and for most people it's only going to be two) so your Faction cards represent a huge portion of your character's abilities (note that at the same time there's enough variety in Faction cards the characters generally avoid feeling same-y). You can definitely make ready built, pick up and play decks for characters, but it's not possible to make an interchangeable, good all-around core of Aspect cards to swap around between characters like you can in Marvel.
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Mar 12, 2022 19:55
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bagrada posted:Arent there also rules for starting with a deck with experience cards? You just have to add more weaknesses or something? Or is that just for stand alone scenarios and not campaigns? Those are the rules for running standalones and aren't meant to be done for campaigns, though you probably could TBH. There's also a couple of characters who start with XP and In The Thick of It which gives you a starting bonus at a cost.
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Mar 12, 2022 20:31
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GreenBuckanneer posted:I tried using vicious blow on a fight check in order to do two damage, but then the token on vicious blow I picked is a -1, and if i fail the skill check that's 1 horror damage, no damage to the boss, which means the following enemy phase he gets to do 2/2 damage to me, which maxes out my horror hit points and I fail. Two points here: First, unless I'm mathing completely wrong if you committed Vicious Blow and and pulled a Cultist token (the dude with the robe) you succeeded. 4 plus 1 from the Skill Icon on Vicious Blow minus 1 from the Cultist equals 4, which equals the combat value of the Ghoul Priest so you succeed. You were playing correctly and winning on ties, right? Because players win ties in Arkham Horror. And good thing too, huh? Because the Ghoul Priest has Retaliate as a keyword meaning that if you fail an attack against him he will immediately counterattack. Secondly, judging by your board state you had no weapons. That's an extremely bad place to be if you are trying to fight monsters, Arkham explicitly balances monster health and combat values assuming you have something to fight with besides your bare hands. quote:I think the only way he would have won is by resigning, but I'm not sure I can do anything to improve my deck from there vs a resign or a loss, other than just not calling it one or the other, the effect is the same. So, I assume I just have to keep going at it until I luck out on better hand draws. Resigning usually does not cause permanent trauma to your character. Being defeated does. If all else fails, make a run for it. quote:There's other aspects I don't quite understand, like, i assume that "taking control" of Lita would mean she gives me extra health/horror, and that when dealing damage to myself, ideally I want to do damage to the equips that have such things so the investigator themselves don't die (in other words, if Lita has to die for Roland to survive, then RIP, sucks to be her.) This is mostly correct. When you take damage or horror you can generally distribute that damage to any Asset (of which Allies are a type) with health or sanity as you like. This is how Arkham models armor as well, it's just an Asset with health on it. The only exception is damage or horror that is explicitly Direct damage or horror, that goes straight on your character. quote:I forgot to put supply tokens on First Aid, so just assume there's 3 tokens there, I didn't have the action economy to actually have the time to use it (I had used it, then decided if I didn't attack that would mean I'd have an attack of opportunity, which would have put me to 4 horror, and then phase 3 is just basically another 2 horror on top of that unmitigated (unless you have a card like Dodge, which I had used the previous turn to move to the Parlor without fighting the Priest the previous turn since I had him and another ghoul engaged on me) and because of Frozen in Fear it meant that I only really had 1 action anyways instead of 2 that turn, because of attacks of opportunity if I didn't fight an engaged enemy.) Healing in Arkham, especially in solo, is usually not very good. There are some exceptions to that, some characters really like healing and some healing cards are VERY strong, but in general cards like the baselevel First-Aid are extremely inefficient. As to the rest of your post, there is a reason that many people suggest playing two-handed, that is playing two characters at once. Arkham is rather nasty in true solo mode. GreenBuckanneer posted:Wait, I'm supposed to pull from the bag for skill tests even on investigating for clues?? Correct, you pull from the bag whenever you make a test. That's actually one of Roland's strengths though, he automatically gains a clue without a test whenever he kills an enemy. Were you doing something differently?
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Mar 14, 2022 19:57
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Anonymous Robot posted:How do y’all handle enemy spawns with multiple options: ie, when an enemy spawn is “any empty location,” do you place them strategically or disadvantageously? We’ve been operating with the “grim rule” in mind, which makes a sort of sense: if the enemy is trying to thwart us, then if there’s a choice between two different spawns, they choose the meaner one. You are explicitly allowed by the rules to place cards strategically and so the game expects you to do so. The grim rule is explicitly only there for keeping the game going. If you can't figure out which of the options is correct you choose the bad one and look it up later to keep things running smoothly.
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Mar 14, 2022 20:44
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Batterypowered7 posted:Can you split the damage? Like if you're gonna take 2 sanity harm, can you assign one to Agnes and the other to an ally? Yes. Anonymous Robot posted:Similarly: does Steadfast factor in asset health/sanity, or no? Only the total Health and Sanity on your Investigator.
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Mar 22, 2022 02:46
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DeceasedHorse posted:Miskatonic museum is possibly the worst scenarios in the game in my op in I’m, so I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Miskatonic Museum had an interesting hook to it and I think it is probably for the better it was made, but it didn't age particularly gracefully. You can actually see that in a good number of Dunwich scenarios where they were understandably experimenting with the forms that a scenario could take given the youth of the game. Extracurricular Activities put advancement in the encounter deck, The House Always Wins pushed you away from combat at first and required you to investigate in different ways, Essex County Express had a nifty top-down design, and so forth through the rest of the scenarios. What I think is interesting is looking past Dunwich to all the things that they kept versus what they didn't keep. For instance, The House Always Wins feels like a direct predecessor to later parlay heavy scenarios like The Last King or At Death's Doorstep. Scenarios like Blood on the Altar where you're going around looking for something to progress the scenario seems to be the dry run for about half the scenarios in The Dream Eaters. And the final scenario with a highly mutable map and a technically optional boss enemy feels like a spiritual predecessor to a lot of things they would do in The Forgotten Age and beyond. Meanwhile, what got left behind? Well, Miskatonic Museum with its singular enemy that basically gave fighters nothing to do a lot of the time.roundly ejected, even comparatively combat light scenarios make sure to give your fighters something they can do. By the same token, they generally stopped totally mandatory skill tests as per Where Doom Awaits, the game is generally a lot more careful to allow more than one way to get through certain obstacles. Undimensioned and Unseen with its obnoxious enemies you have to kill a particular way also got pushed away. You see some of it in scenarios with immortal enemies like A Thousand Shapes of Terror or a Phantom of Truth, but how you interacted with them was much different and much less frustrating.
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Apr 16, 2022 06:13
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LifeLynx posted:First teaser for The Scarlet Keys! No cards, just a redacted dossier of one of the big bads. Or allies? I'm not familiar with the Scarlet people lore at all. To be fair, that's because there isn't really any lore set down about them at this point. They originated as a cycle of neutral cards back in the original Call of Cthulhu LCG. Their gimmick was built around board control and also playing Conspiracy cards, which were essentially alternate objectives that you added into the game yourself that did various effects for various reasons. Everything we "know" about them is that they have where an accessory that's bright red as distinctive proof of membership and that they all have some amount of power and influence in some association with each other. What may be mildly noteworthy is that Amaranth, the lady in that tweet, had the subtitle in the old game as "opener of the way" and she (like everyone but the Red Gloved Man) and had the trait of being a "Servitor" which was handed out to people who were loyal worshipers of one of the great old ones, but given that the whole host of them are all Neutral who exactly they work for is not totally clear. Nyarlathotep is a safe bet, but neutral Ancient Ones also include Iod, Tulzcha, Tsathoggua, and Nodens so take that as you will. Curiously, the Red Gloved Man had the trait "independent" which is used for beings who explicitly were not in the service to one of the great ones, so make of that as you will as well.
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Apr 26, 2022 00:26
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LifeLynx posted:Nyarlathotep is neutral? I thought he was the most evil. Also the most in tune with humanity to where he could tempt people with super powers in order to do his bidding, so I'm not ruling him out. "Neutral" in the sense he (and the members of the Congress of keys) wasn't a part of one of the eight other factions of the game. Nyarlathotep was not Agency, Miskatonic University, Syndicate, Silver Twilight Lodge, Cthulhu, Hastur, Shub Niggurath, or Yog Sothoth who were the eight "colors" of the game. However, his various Masks appeared in every single one of those factions and his original printing back before it went LCG is the closest the game had to a true multi-faction character (he was kind of every single one of them at once).
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Apr 26, 2022 01:50
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Xlorp posted:Where in the world is Cthulhu San Diego R'lyeh.
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Apr 26, 2022 17:51
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LifeLynx posted:If they didn't print Lola, people would be begging for a neutral investigator. There's hope that Charlie Kane will be the next neutral investigator, but I don't know what that could mean. My tea-leaf reading is he can use any ally, and possibly has bonus inherent ally slots, but he himself just has bad stats. Alternately make him a Rogue and let someone else be the Neutral(?) character.
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May 7, 2022 03:54
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KPC_Mammon posted:Zoey gets a free use of dynamite every time a swarm shows up. It is amazing. Then you can drop "I've Had Worse" and get even more money.
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Jun 20, 2022 19:58
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Orange Devil posted:Those customizable cards look like they need a lot of experience invested before they become good. I do hope the upgrade at least applies to every copy included in your deck rather than having to upgrade them seperately. The upgrade on Word of Power makes it seem like customize bonuses are global to all copies, so hopefully. On the other hand the Asmoday pre-order page touts "48 upgrade sheets", which suggests it comes with multiples of the same one so maybe not? Or it could just be one for each printed copy of a customizable card so players don't need to share, which suggests 24 total (assuming two copies of each). Relatedly, said pre-order page: (  )Officially reveals Kymani Jones AKA Waylay with legs. It's an odd ability, and doesn't play well with Deep Ones, but I know someone at my group who will jump at the chance to kill people by juking them. Also shoutouts to the Shoggoth basic weakness whose full text is obscured. Meanwhile I'm also excited for the possibility of having a real rear end Eldritch Horror style world map! Also judging by the card numbering, the order of investigators listed on the back of the box possibly tells us Vincent Lee is going to be a Seeker and Daryl Simmons is a Survivor (likely the elusive Survivor 5/Seeker 2 character at long last).
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Jun 30, 2022 19:47
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Beyond the Veil is a bad card and there's a reason they backed way the gently caress off on the penalty for the handful of cards like that in the future.
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Jul 6, 2022 05:28
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Orange Devil posted:Definitely the kind of card you probably don't take with you on a blind run but can include for specific campaigns. Can't imagine you'd want to pack more than 1. Took the words right out of my mouth. This is the epitome of a card you grab off of Adaptable for extremely specific scenarios. Like I can imagine pulling this out for Blood on the Altar, especially in a multiplayer game where dropping it in the secret room might be incredibly powerful. It also has a couple of niche applications for something like Curtain Call where you can predict in advance where a boss is going to appear.
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Jul 9, 2022 22:59
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Orange Devil posted:It does, it's not completely dead. Cornered to the rescue once again! Anonymous Robot posted:What’s the deal with the EOTE characters? Seems like they start as one class and grow into another? Seems challenging. That's the basic trick to them. And because it is a little bit challenging every single one of them has incredibly optimized stats and very powerful effects to get around some of the strangeness of their deck profiles. At the same time it's also worth remembering that Edge of the Earth brings in multiclass cards with a vengeance, and there are a number of extremely strong options in both 1 and 2+ colors that "just so happen" to line up perfectly with how the characters level up. Shoutout's Astronomical Atlas, Norman's 3XP signature card.
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Jul 12, 2022 20:35
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KPC_Mammon posted:Isn't this the first non-rogue zero xp card to give ammo? Yes, it is. And it's a really interesting level 0 ammo card. Nebrilos posted:When are they going to nerf Cyclopean Hammer? There's supposed to be a new Taboo list coming soon. It wouldn't surprise me if they chained it HARD, or just bit the bullet and made it Exceptional. The hammer would deserve it.
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Jul 22, 2022 06:43
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Kalko posted:
Without another modifier it looks like the "first time" Per Test. For every test. Period.
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Jul 29, 2022 03:18
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Nephthys posted:Not a lot of tools help them I think. As it currently stands? Not really. Of the tools that are already out, most of them are designed to boost investigation, which might be an ask considering they have base 2 Knowledge. Or maybe you do want to lean into it and try and stack Knowledge to get off their intrinsic Waylay effect? Either way, of the current list I think the off-Green Tools that do the most for them most immediately would be Riot Whistle, as it lets them pull enemies off other people to set up an evasion/possible evade kill. It also feels like they're who the Pocket Multitool was made for. Thieves' Tools are nice, but they're also already Green so they don't need to flex to pick them up.
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Aug 5, 2022 21:56
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Fun fact: there are two cards that currently exist in the game that use Evidence. Darrell can't use one of them. The other is also a camera.
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Aug 12, 2022 03:08
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Nebrilos posted:Can anyone explain what Sixth Sense and it's upgrade do if you pull a symbol? The text is kind of ambiguous. Sixth Sense (0) lets optionally you choose a connecting location to pull a clue from instead of where you are currently investigating. You only get one clue, but you can pull it off that different location and/or use the shroud of that other location if you like. Sixth Sense (4) explicitly lets you pull multiple clues from multiple locations as you investigate in the second location in addition to your own location. Sixth Sense (0) lets you choose one or the other, (4) gives you both.
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Aug 13, 2022 20:45
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Nebrilos posted:If I decide to investigate the other location, do I have to pull a second token? No. If you decide to investigate as if you're at that other location you apply the effect of the token and resolve the test as normal, though the difficulty may change if you use a different shroud which could let you succeed when you otherwise would not have. Either way, that token is what you've got.
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Aug 13, 2022 21:55
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Doing Trauma also has the knock-on silver lining of ensuring other players start the game with some damage he can immediately heal to hand out On The Mends.
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Sep 4, 2022 13:31
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I love that to make Healing better AH decided to take the same tact as Etrian Odyssey and give you a reason to proactively overheal. And boy howdy is it a hell of a payoff to overhealing. Shoutouts to Carolyn who can just turn horror healing into resources and +2s. And double shoutouts to Carolyn with Pete and Vincent with Jessica since they can do it passively!
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Sep 9, 2022 19:29
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Nebrilos posted:That is a really big envelope. Gives a sense of how much 10 resources really are.
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Sep 16, 2022 19:26
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My position is that Shrivelling was already facing serious competition from Brand of Cthugtha. It being lapped by The Service Weapon isn't exactly news sadly.
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Sep 26, 2022 04:44
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Kalko posted:(though I think most of them look for empty slots, right?) Yeah, there's a definite subtheme of "No Arcane Slot Mystic" running through the set. It's why the new Mystic Fight/Investigate/Evade cards are all hand slots and why most of the other Mystic cards are in the Body or Accessory slot. I think the only Arcane slot Mystic card is the Summoned Servitor, and that's why you can upgrade it so it no longer uses one. Not sure how high a ceiling it is in class, but there's some nice payoff for it in the 0-2 range so it may get more play from someone who has it as their subclass like Daisy (who, incidentally, made out like a goddamn bandit this time around.)
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Sep 26, 2022 06:33
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Jarvisi posted:Just spent a good hour building a deck for me and two friends to start a campaign with...only to end up being a prologue where you don't get to use those decks! Oops. There's a reason Return to TCU had a Prologue Random Result generator.
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Oct 3, 2022 04:36
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Golden Bee posted:...but he can’t take more than one upgrade for it... Oh if only he could, but you round up fractions for determining the level of customizable stuff. A single box makes it level 1...
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Oct 6, 2022 06:09
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Radioactive Toy posted:I'm thinking it's time to expand my Arkham collection a bit. I just have the revised base set, the blob, and the hotel. I'm thinking about getting the Edge of the Earth set, but any reason I should go for Carcosa, Dunwich, or wait for Scarlet Keys instead? Also good be interested in some of the standalone characters if any are fun. A reason to consider getting Dunwich and Carcosa is that both of those sets were early enough in the lifespan of the game to provide what you might consider "staple" cards. When I actually go back and look it is actually kind of amazing how many cards I would consider baseline came out months after the initial release in Dunwich or Carcosa. Some of them were folded into the Revised Core Set which is nice, but still... Edge of the Earth is also a really good pickup because it has a lot of very powerful and very versatile multiclass cards. The Scarlet Keys also has a lot of strong cards, obviously, (many of the customizable cards are very nice), but they tend to be a little bit more specialized than what you get from Dunwich/Carcosa. I would tentatively say you probably would get more across the board picking those up. As for the investigator decks, Stella and Winnifred are both fantastically fun characters in their own ways, but all the decks have good cards for the given class. Guardian is perhaps least served because Nathaniel is a rather specialized character, but if you're looking for a quick way to get a lot of options for one of the factions they do excellently.
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Oct 18, 2022 05:08
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Quote-Unquote posted:We house rule unlimited changing of 0xp cards after the first scenario, then normal rules. This is how my group does it. You can freely shuffle your level 0s after the first or second scenario in a campaign, then you have to pay. Anonymous Robot posted:How does Minh fare without access to Dream Diary? Every build I’ve seen stresses including it and prioritizing researching it. Differently. Back in the day Minh got along quite fine using the Neutral cycling Skills as her engine. You also saw a lot more Dark Horse builds, and Scavenging on her usually aimed to recur Strange Solution and the Survivor soak cards. Dream Diary's main effect was to strongly centralize her deck so the "optimal" gameplan focused more on Scavenging and Tomes since you needed fewer skills since you were guaranteed to draw a good on every turn.
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Nov 9, 2022 18:41
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I've always just houseruled it that Ancient Evils is Victory 0. Most Doom Clocks assume you get around 3 in my experience.
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Nov 21, 2022 21:32
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Anonymous Robot posted:Wages of Sin has a really fun concept but the difficulty tuning is way off. Very much so. TCU (and TFA) have a couple of interesting high concept scenarios that suck in execution.
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Dec 11, 2022 20:07
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Stagger_Lee posted:Thanks everyone for their help. Only half-related hypothetical: If I gave Akachi my Liquid Courage with Teamwork, and she used Spirit-Speaker on it, whose hand would it go to? Pretty sure the owner's.
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Jan 13, 2023 06:19
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The Majora's Mask comparison also stands out, because the other thing that game brings to mind is being way more open, exploration focused, and a little less linear. You're meant to repeatedly run day cycles to find all the things and there's a ridiculous number of side things to do and find.
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Jan 16, 2023 23:06
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