Dam said:

Sorry for confusion - when I said "by placing the sixth seal" I just meant that we won a sealing victory. We only actually had two seals down when Patrice appeared, although one person was already on their way through a gate with an Elder Sign. As soon as Patrice showed up, everyone else lunged through gates, and one person had Find Gate I think (I can't remember exactly how it went down). But it really was only possible because Patrice could share out clues.

mattherobot said:

Yup I think playing multi-investigator solo, as I do will accentuate this. But i think it is an issue anyway.

Going slightly OT, but sticking with the multi-investigator solo thing: it has occured to me that while I think the developers made a great job of QU, I don't enjoy playing against him as I end up looking upon the 1st investigator as an expendable resource, something I don't like doing. I know some folks look upon their investigators as expendible stepping stones anyway, but I've never played with retiral or replacemant rules pre-IH. And I don't like feeling that way about the little cardboard guys.

I think I'd enjoy QU much more in a game with only one or 2 rather than 4 invetsigators, or in a multiplayer game. Where I'd feel differently about the targeted investigator

- Mariana the ex-nun cultist

Dam said:

I probably did not elaborate enough here. Yes, the ability gives 1 clue to the first player during Upkeep. That means the card is generating 1 clue per turn, two if Rex is first player. In a four player game, that means you need 8 rounds to get 10 clues from the PS alone. Since it costs 10 clues to get the PS, it will take those 8 rounds until the PS gives you as many clues as you spent to get it. Other clues you can get from the board or from encounters do not figure into that equation because you will get these anyway.

Morgaln said:

True, but I reckon that this actually does make it worth it.

Technically it is ten clue tokens spent, but only because Rex gets extra ones - and two clue tokens on Rex Murphy's character sheet are NOT the equivalent of two extra clue tokens on the board. The ones on Rex's sheet are less useful, simply because they can't be used by anyone except Rex Murphy. You can call it '10 clue tokens' if you want, but many of those clue tokens will probably have been generated by Rex's special ability, and so they weren't available to anyone else anyway. Of course, Rex's curse means that those clues are probably only worth half a clue each, so really it just depends on how worthwhile you think it is for Rex to have actual clue tokens to spend on skill checks. Whether or not he can get rid of his curse is obviously a big factor there.

Also, in many situations, getting a 'drip-feed' of clue tokens throughout the game is probably worth more than just having the equivalent number of clues lying around on the board. Rex spends four turns grabbing clue tokens in the early game; it might take quite a few turns to "get those clues back", but the alternative is to have other investigators rushing around picking up those clues in the normal way, which requires much more effort (when the investigators could be off closing gates instead) and, crucially, can fail - if a gate opens under a clue, or a tough monster blocks the route.

I almost never use clues for skill checks on a cursed character, unless it is a matter of being devoured or not; and I certainly don't think clues are useless on Rex just because he is cursed.

I actually find it more useful if all those clues are with one character, because he will be able to seal a gate with it. There's perhaps a difference in how I play Rex. If he has five clues, I'll send him through a gate, if possible, and more often than not, he comes through and will seal the gate. I never collect clues just for skill checks, they are almost exclusively meant to seal.

I don't get your last arguments. How it is more effort for multiple characters to pick up the clues than it is for Rex alone? Multiple characters can pick them up in far less time. And closing gates if you can't seal them is inefficient unless you have a very low gate limit. Also, how is Rex supposed to collect a clue with a tough monster in front if someone without a curse can't reach it?

thecorinthian said:

Just to elaborate on this: ten Clues collected by Rex is the same as five Clues on the board, the value of which varies depending on how many Investigators you have and how many are ignoring Clues. In a four-Investigator game where all Investigators are collecting Clues and Rex is in play five Clues on the board are worth six, or seven if Rex can get to two of them. So you're actually breaking even in terms of raw resources after four to six rounds, depending on when Rex becomes First Investigator.

The real power of Rex's PS, though, is that the Investigators don't need to spend time collecting the Clues. Time is the significant resource in AH; the whole game is about trying to do as much as possible before the GOO awakens. Each Clue an Investigator receives from Rex's PS represents a turn where the Investigator was able to control monsters in play, enter a Gate or go shopping instead of detouring to pick up a Clue. I don't think people realise just how strong that can be.

Strange; I see it just the other way around. I agree that time is a critical factor in AH, but solving Rex's PS costs you a lot of time. You already had those clues and then gave them away, and it will take time to get them back.

Morgaln said:

Hmmm... I may have become confused there...

This cost/benefit thing is doing my head in, so I'm going to spell it out (to help myself understand it, more than anything else):

Costs of passing the story:

- X clue tokens from the board, where X is half the difference between Rex's current number of clues and 10, rounding up. (Everyone following this so far? In order to get up to 10 clues, Rex has to pick up half the number he needs to gain, because they double when he gets them.)

- Y+1 player-turns, where Y is the number of turns it takes to collect X clues. The +1 is for the assumption that it'll take a turn to get back to the Newspaper, although obviously this could take longer, even though the Newspaper is quite accessible. HOWEVER: if the players were going to go and pick up the clue tokens anyway, the 'Y' part of this isn't really an extra cost, since the players would have had to spend that many player-turns regardless of what they were going to use the clues for.

Benefits of passing the story:

- Z clue tokens, distributed to the players directly at a rate of one per turn, where Z is the number of turns until one of the following occurs: Rex Murphy is devoured, or the investigators win.

- Rex Murphy is blessed. The exact value of this is very variable, since it can be worthless (if Rex was already blessed) or it can be brilliant (if the investigators really, really need Rex for something).

Conclusion!

Early in the game, X and Y are likely to be almost the same. If there are still plenty of clues scattered around, Rex will probably be able to pick up one clue per turn, and as many game effects will speed this process up as will slow it down. The longer the game goes on, the bigger 'Y' will get, because gates wlll remove clues from locations, and monsters will have had more opportunities to block routes across the board. However, as I said above, 'Y' isn't really a factor in determining whether it's worth spending clues on the story, since Y is the same regardless of what the clues are being used for. If the group considers the collecting time to be a serious waste anyway, then obviously they don't care about not having the X clue tokens.

Whether or not the personal story should be attempted really comes down to two things:

a) how confident the investigators are in their estimate of the value of 'Z'. If Rex starts collecting clues for the story on the first turn, X and Y are both likely to be about five. A typical AH game lasts many more then double that many turns, so Z will almost certainly dramatically exceed X, meaning that the total clue tokens gained will be far more than the number spent, so it's a no-brainer - it's definitely worth going for. It's very, very likely to 'pay for itself', and there's also a good chance that it'll bag you a profit of a dozen clues or more across the course of the game. Unless the AO is going to rise in the next four or five turns, it's well worth it.

b) how much control you want over clue token distribution. Rex's story will probably result in more clue tokens being available in total across the course of the game, but you'll have a lot less control over whether the extra clues go. Personally, I think you're sufficiently likely to get a lot of extra clues from it that this shouldn't be considered a serious downside - after all, most of the game's clue tokens are still available as normal and you can pick up those however you like.

Morgaln said:

Perhaps, but who's losing the time? The skilled, heavily armed characters you want to kill things with, or the guy who's Cursed and can't do very much?

Morgaln said:

I just don't understand this assessment. You loan 10 clues away and you get them back eventually. You also get $5 and get rid of the curse. Rex can't effectively seal gates while he is cursed, so he needs to ditch the curse to really get into play. All he has to do is go pick up clues from places with only 1 Clue for three turns and then he can go to the newspaper and cash out. When he does that, he gets a big pile of money and the people already in otherworlds start getting clues. Then Rex becomes a clue hunting non-cursed machine with a giant pile of money.

Rex gets clues like no one's business, but he always needs someone to buy him a Bless before he is worth anything. With his personal story, he can buy his own bless in exchange for spreading he clues he gets to other players who aren't cursed. And he gets five dollars. It's a total no brainer. 10 clues just isn't a big cost to someone who starts with 4 and gets an extra Clue every time he finds clues. Get the right encounter and you can easily have enough to cash out on turn 2. The personal story permanently changes Rex from a guy who collects clues until someone else takes a gate trophy to the South Church on his behalf and then becomes awesome and seals two gates to a character who fixes his own darn problems.

-Frank

thecorinthian said:

Another cost, and I don't know how you'd quantify it, is that while you get the 10 clues back, you get them back somewhat later on. Two early seals worth of clues is worth more than two late seals, because it keeps the number and severity of monster surges down, keeps you away from the open gate limit, gives you more free turns when nothing is going wrong (unless the Innsmouth board is in play), and gets some early gate trophies in (assuming you don't go for closing without sealing much) which can then be traded back for even more resources.

If we get "Good Work Undone" with two seals down, it probably loses us the game because stopping it slows us down too much and not stopping it is even worse. If we get it with five seals down, we sigh and fix it, and then probably still win.

On the original topic, we randomly drew Mandy and Patrice vs Bokrug. We'd got one of the Beings of Ib paid off and then the 3rd Act came up - if we'd paid it off the first time, then they'd have woken up with all 4 Beings on, and we'd still have lost. There's "powerful" and there's "guaranteed win", and quite a way between them...

I have played like three games with Patrice. they were terrible. we won each game incredibly easy and arkham is a stupid game unless u r battling for ur lives on the precipice of destruction. My friends and i dont play her anyomore.

cim said:

True, I kinda went a bit mad there by trying to put comparative values on everything.

Although you get the clues back later on, you get them back in a way which is 100% predictable, which can be useful. If you're trying to pick up clues on the board, it can go wrong... for example, you can have unpleasant encounters in the locations, or you can fail to evade monsters on the way to the clue. Also, obviously investigators can get clues while in OWs.

Basically, I think that if you pass Rex's story very early on, it's staggeringly brilliant, and if you wait too long, it'll probably still pay itself back but you're unlikely to get much advantage out of it. Incidentally, I was wrong about the story going away if Rex is devoured. It won't go away; it'll stay in play for the rest of the game, so the only way it can stop is when the game ends.

Personal stories stay in play even if the investigator gets devoured? Wow...that is great for Rex and helpful for some others like the Astronomer, whose story I passed the other day but got somewhat crippled later on, staying in because we wanted the story to go off if the AO woke up. Do they also stick around if the investigator in question retires?

mattherobot said:

I think so. I can't find anything to indicate otherwise. Once you've passed a personal story, it just becomes a sort of 'condition' card - unless it specifies otherwise. For example, some of them become allies, which I assume would be discarded like normal allies if the investigator was devoured.

This thread has gotten off topic, but there was a lot of discussion about Patrice beforehand. Some people mentioned that they don't optimally use Patrice and play more indivualisitcally, without maximizing player resources. If that works for your group, fine, but it would never fly with mine. Everything we do we do for the good of the collective. If that means giving away the Elder Sign you just picked up to someone better able to use it, then so be it. If that means spending most of the game in Kingsport on rift duty, bring it on. And if that means using Patrice as best you can, well, it pretty much goes without saying.

And Patrice used optimally takes a huge amount of the challenge out of the game, and with that challenge also goes much of the fun. The last thing I want is an effortlessly boring and tedious win; I would prefer a monsterous loss where everything collapses for us on turn one to that. No other character the entire games allows for the consistent easy victories that come with Patrice, because no other character can begin to approach her level of usefulness. Therefore I think we will remove Patrice from future games; she simply gives too great an advantage to the players, in my experience.

Well, I suppose it will come down to play style and personal decisions. We generally act for the greater good, but I still get the feeling that since we each have our own single investigator, everyone wants to be doing something. We don't play with the Kingsport board much, because it's not a lot of fun for the person who has to go up there and be on rift duty. Winning is important to us, of course, but not to the point that we'd ask someone to sacrifice their own good time to do so.

Our group usually draws one random investigator from each expansion, picking one (the others are your pool to choose from if you are devoured or retire). Lately, if Daisy or Patrice comes up, there's a bit of a groan -- we don't often want to use them since we've seen them so much already. We've been experimenting with the same choosing process, but picking for another player -- this results in some unbalanced teams given that you don't know what everyone else is choosing, but it means Daisy/Patrice/etc. will likely come up even less. I think we'll leave her in, but I like some of the solutions posited here rather than just removing her, if I had to choose between those two options.

mattherobot said:

I'm not sure why people are surprised by this. Tommy Muldoon's PS-pass, "Giving His All", gets discarded when the terror level next rises, and that card doesn't even enter play until after he's been devoured.

Jedit said:

I think I just assumed that the story card was 'attached' to the investigator, like a skill or an ally or a madness. Obviously I'm not the only one who made this assumption. And I don't think I'd looked through all the stories when I did, so the Rookie Cop problem didn't occur to me.

Also, the fact that an oddity/exception like that exists doesn't necessarily mean you're getting the rules wrong...this is AH after all...

Does this mean that the fail condition should be activated for a devoured invetsigator and placed into play (unless gettingh devoured triggers a pass)?

- Mariana the ex-nun cultist

Mariana the Ex-Nun Cultist said:

No. The story is attached to the investigator. The success or failure card is a condition card that is not required to be attached to the investigator.

-Frank

Morgaln said:

I've only played Rex once since I got IH (and the accompanying PS.) Got super lucky. I picked up a double (+1) on the first turn, then my encounter gave me another couple of clues (+1). On the second turn I got a clue (+1) and another clue graning encounter. By the time he ran to the Newspaper on turn 3, he had 15 clues, so completing the personal story that quickly was a no brainer, and paid off big in the long run.