mageith said:

Hehe, gotta love double-meanings .

mageith said:

Guilty! And Wendy never lets me forget it either. Once I was properly trained how to use Wendy, I rarely lose with her.

mageith said:

The best designed? Really? Do you think an investigator with maximum speed/stealth of 3/5 is even close to being equivalent to one with 5/3?

What I meant was that pairing speed/sneak is a more natural pairing that fight/will and espcially luck/lore though I think the overall mechanic is good. I'd like to see more investigators like Trish with different pairings.

To answer your question, I'd rather have a faster investigator. Speed is the most used skill and so a speed of 3 handicaps an investigator nearly every turn.

To go further than your question, I'd rate the importance of skills in this order: speed, sneak, luck, will, fight, lore.

Without regard to special skills and fixed items, I'd say the best investigators based on their stats alone are Wendy, Finn, and Rita. These are quite playable without any special skills and/or items.

At any rate, you said you had some house rules in mind to make sneak more prominent.

mageith said:

No Joe? Apart from Rita's +1 Will, exact same stats and Joe gets 3 Focus vs Rita's 2.

Dam said:

Welllll... A four will investigator is *much* better at passing horror checks than a three will investigator. Three focus is nice, but it can be done without through careful planning. Good luck trying that with will though. Maybe. And since I am responding to a post by Dam... BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA! ::Cough cough:: sorry, I couldn't really think of anything to say.

Avi_dreader said:

Of course, we're talking about Joe here, as in Joe "fail, what fail, I'll just use Clues for more dice" Diamond . On Joe, Focus 3 seems overboard, especially since I tend to stick Luck at max during setup and never bother with it afterwards. Mainly it comes handy when tweaking Fight from min to max during the Upkeep of the turn you are about to return to Arkham and make a close roll.

Dam said:

Yeah, but they were talking about a hypothetical situation where only stats were used, not abilities or items.

Avi_dreader said:

Does Wendy really stack up that high based on pure stats? Or Finn?

Wendy is one of the most min/maxed characters. She has bad will and fight, but with +3 points in speed/sneak (and her special ability), she pretty much never has to fight. There's some validity that sneak might be too powerful if it's easy to get, and Wendy's the best argument in that regard. She also has good luck, and enough lore to cast spells, if she has to. She may not be a great gate closer once her elder sign is gone, but any turns that might be lost there because of the lore check, she can more than make up by sneaking by monsters at (near) full speed.

Talking about house rules, here's two things that have been floating in my head lately;

• If you fail your evade check, combat starts normally. You only get damage if you try and fail to flee from combat.
• The first time you move into the street each turn, you must pass a sneak +0 check, or the flying monster with the highest (most difficult) awareness rating moves to your location.

The first point addresses the problem, as I see it, that sneak attempts are high risk/low reward most of the time. If your preferred destination is blocked by a monster, there's usually three choices. You can fight, you can sneak, or you can go somewhere else. To reliably sneak, in many cases, you'd have to lower you speed so much that you can't get where you wanted to go anyway. In such a case, fighting is preferred if you have a decent chance of success. Or, you can't hope to beat the monster in a fight. Then, if you fail the sneak check, you'd most likely end up insane or unconscious, so going somewhere else entirely is preferable, leaving the monster for someone who hopefully can take care of it.

Normally, I'd only choose to sneak if reaching to location is so urgent, that it's worth the likelyhood of having to burn multiple clues. Having to get into a gate to seal would be such a case, but we rarely have so many clues that we can afford burning 2 or more, and still have enough left for a seal.

Now, with that first point, you can try to sneak with almost no drawback, if you can fight the monster. You only have to make sure you actually have a positive sneak after the awareness modifier, which means lowering your speed. That should be enough of a drawback.

The second point is a bit less elegant, and might do with some further tweaking. But it would make sneak checks a lot more common, make flying monsters more of a nuisance since they can now frequently hinder your movement, and it'd help clear the night sky when you're near the monster limit.

Hannibal Rex said:

If you fail your evade check, combat starts normally. You only get damage if you try and fail to flee from combat.

Sounds more "realistic," but will make the game slightly easier. There will never be reason not to attempt an evade check. However the evade, take damage first out of order response to evade checks confuses lots of newbies. OTOH hand it does make the Nightgaunt encounter more "realistic." You will now have to face your Horror before crawling onto it's scaley back.

The first time you move into the street each turn, you must pass a sneak +0 check, or the flying monster with the highest (most difficult) awareness rating moves to your location.

Also more "realistic," If you are going for realism, perhaps it should be each time you enter a street space. If the flyer enters your space, do you get to attempt another evade check or does battle begin? If so, it would be a tricky way to bring the flier down for someone else to dispatch.

I really like these rules, but I think they should be used together.

It might be more realistic, but it sounds like it would be a lot more dice rolling. A mechanic like that could really slow down the game.

avec said:

There'd me more dice rolling if there were fliers in the sky, but I think overall there'd be less fliers in the sky because some investigators would pull a Muldoon and deliberately stand in the streets waving their arms to bring down the nightgaunt, byhakee especially mi-go. So overall the result would be just little more total dice rolling. The main slow down might be that fact that a Servitor or Wraith could attack anytime and investigators would move their speed down to get through the streets, especially if drawing a flier means an immediately battle or triggers another evade check.

On the other hand, there'd be a lot more successful evading from rule 1 which could speed up the game.

Feh. It would ruin the strong easily evaded monsters. If you want to create a guardian that lets you do that, fine, but personally I think it'd spoil the game. I'm happy with sneak as it is now. Possible, but not easy.

I've very much in favour of keeping the "take damage when you fail Evade" mechanic. Without it, there'd be virtually no reason ever *not* to try to Evade. Also it adds Stamina damage to the game, something that doesn't happen often enough relative to Sanity.

One point that I don't think anyone's made yet: + Speed items (of which there are far more than +Sneak), effectively increase your Sneak score. I agree that a speed of 1 or 2 is generally useless, making it hard for most characters to get a good Sneak, but if you have a Ruby of Rlyeh, speed 1 is perfectly do-able.