What's the point of the musician's (from the Dunwich preview) ability? Sure, a 0 for the skull result when the token with a skull on it is drawn is nice, but that ability is completely negated by the fact that you can turn all the skulls to elder sign +1 with his second ability.. Am I missing something here?

Maybe his deck has some cards that give some bonus to the first ability...

What's the point of the musician's (from the Dunwich preview) ability? Sure, a 0 for the skull result when the token with a skull on it is drawn is nice, but that ability is completely negated by the fact that you can turn all the skulls to elder sign +1 with his second ability.. Am I missing something here?

You have that a bit backwards -- you can treat elder signs as skulls.

So, when you draw an elder sign, you can either take Culver's +1 and whatever benefit is produced by drawing an elder sign through various cards in play or in hand, or you can change it to a skull with a 0 modifier if you wish -- presumably because you have card effects that trigger off skulls.

So, for example, we know that the first scenario treats skulls as -X, where X is the number of ghouls. If you have a beneficial effect that triggers off a skull, it might not be worth failing to trigger it, but if you can change that -X to a +0 and pass the check with that additional effect triggering, you're in good shape.

This is one of those things where we really need to see the card pool.

It's the other way around: He can turn Elder Signs into Skulls. Presumably we'll see some player cards where that's actually a benefit (some already-spoiled cards do have special effects when you pull certain tokens, but they're generally negative). It's also possible that you'll want to trigger the scenario's/difficulty's special Skull effect badly enough to take the -1, or that some future weaknesses and Mythos cards will penalize you for drawing Elder Signs.

I also think that there will probably be spells that give additional effects on skull rolls that the player might want on occassions. Perhaps his unique card allows him to get some benefits without the drawbacks of the skull results.

I'm sure his character specific asset card will have some excellent synergy with skull results.

I'm sure his character specific asset card will have some excellent synergy with skull results.

I like your optimism