So we recently had a player get this insanity where he wins if the other investigators lose. It resulted in him purposely killing himself forcing the scenario to end. I looked up the errata and it seems they have added to the base rules where if an effect doesn't specifically say you will lose you don't win so in our case, everyone lost including the insane player. The issue I have is that the other players have no real agency to stop an insane player from causing issues. So even if he can't "win" by suicide, he can force a scenario to fail without any way of stopping it if he has been outed as a traitor so that no one wins. I like the idea of having this card because it means any insane player could potentially be working against the team. However the fact that you really can't do much outside of not letting them do puzzles or important NPC conversations means they have a lot more power to screw with stuff and can't be really stopped if they don't want to be sneaky.

I think a good house rule to this card is that once you get it, if you are ever defeated you reveal your condition and you do not count as a defeated investigator. This works thematically since once someone is a traitor why does the group care about them? Game play wise it means the other players can leave him or her to die or whatever if they KNOW that player has gone bad but it also means that with that option they can potentially let a good person killed (who they thought was fishy and couldn't trust) which would mean they would lose leading to more trust/distrust dynamics. Has anyone else had issues with this sort of thing?

The only boardgame trust issues I have is when playing Dead of Winter where I firmly believe any player making a slightly dodgy decision must be the betrayer.... But at least you can exile them!

Yeah my issue is basically that there is no real mechanic to deal with a player that you know is trying to scuttle the mission as in other games where someone might be a traitor. It's a fringe scenario since most of the other inanities require the insane person to still win with the other players, just with specific requirements.

I agree! Even from a story telling standpoint if someone goes out of their way to do something that would betray others then the team would have no reason to mourn their loss. The fact that he went out of his way to commit in game suicide which lead to everyone losing since he couldn't win does make the end game a little on the weird side.

Yeah he wasn't happy about doing it either; just without the errata it was his best course of action since there wasn't really much else he could do to stop us from winning other than running to the other side of the map and hoping having one less person would tilt the game in the board's favor. It left a bad taste in everyone's mouths and no one was left happy, even the winner. It's why I'd like to potentially "fix" it because otherwise everyone has a blast with this game and that was a really bad way for a scenario to work out. Even with the errata it basically encourages a player that can't win to suicide bomb the game so that if he or she can't, no one does.

It kinda gets back into my problem with the insanity cards in general. Once you've seen one a single time, you know what that person is doing and can either help them or ignore them accordingly (gathering evidence, can't talk, etc) in future plays of the game and it really doesn't actually do much more than just annoy people. I kinda wish that they were all basically "traitor/not-traitor" with the stipulation that traitors could be killed without losing. That would result in a trust dynamic where you don't know if that person is trying to sabotage the group and if you make the wrong choice either way you lose as a group.

I am not sure I understand the problem. Seems you know that the player can't commit suicide so a similar misplay shouldn't happen because the character needs to stay motivated to win. Are you just upset that they can start messing with stuff? If you are then that is just a fact of playing with those cards. There are other insanity cards that can cause insta-loss conditions like the one that you just need to end your turn with one investigator in the room.

Playing with insane players is tricky because they could have something really awful or something you don't even have to worry about. It's important not to forget about the push mechanic if you need to keep your player in line.

In general I find the insanity mechanic to be great in theory but in practice, it has mixed results in terms of enjoyment. With the time given to complete the investigation often I find players are still more interested in completing the scenario than following the rules. Those times when they are pulled off it seems like a hollow victory and we tend to play through the scenario to see if we were at least on the right track. I think it is just tough mentally to take a loss like that when so much was invested in investigating.

The issue is that they really can't do much to mess with stuff outside of a few actions that pretty much immediately out them as the traitor. At that point you can't do much other than shove them or steal items from them. Even then it's dumb when the person that is obviously no longer on the team causes a scenario loss when they are eliminated. If that player doesn't care about "winning" and just making sure since he or she has already lost that everyone else fails that errata doesn't stop him or her committing suicide and ending it with literally no way to stop it. The knife insanity has some player agency where you just make sure you aren't in a room alone with a knife holding insane person and even if it goes off the game is over instead of watching as the traitor kills himself and then you lose for no good reason.

It's just a negative experience all around and was wondering if the fix I proposed has been tried by anyone or sounds like it would make that card better. Basically there's no real game mechanics for having a traitor and how that player is supposed to act as one and how the rest of the group is allowed to react. It's like they crammed the haunt from Betrayal at The House on the Hill in but didn't commit.

Personally I'm not convinced the get-one-turn-more-then-the-game-ends system for dealing with eliminated investigators is all that good in the first place. I kinda enjoy the idea of one lone insane investigator making it out alive, with all the others dead or worse.

(" Again I say, I do not know what has become of Harley Warren; though I think—almost hope—that he is in peaceful oblivion, if there be anywhere so blessed a thing.")

Removing that mechanic would make the insanity cards a bit more fun, be it trying to stab your fellow investigators, sacrificing yourself for the greater good or trying to get the other investigators to lose.

The solution here with saying that eliminated traitor investigators not triggering a failed investigation sounds good enough, though as said, I would rather remove the entire 'game ends just because someone dies' thingy.
It's supposed to be a horror game, of course people are gonna die! In my opinion, in a perfectly balanced scenario it should most often end with a sole survivor, driven half mad from the terrors he or she has seen. Basically the game should rather often end with a close up of the survivors terrified face, then zooming our, revealing that they are now in a straight-jacket and locked in a padded cell!

I want to play with other people, so games where players can drop out while the others continue for hours do not work for me - playing is fun, not playing or watching others play not so much. I like it that the game does not end immediately, but soon once someone is taken out.

This is why a lot of insanities do not work for me - I want to play the game and do not really care about "winning" it. Spoiling the game for others and for myself by ending it early does not feel like a win, even if some little cardboard thingie says that I've won.

11 hours ago, Samea said:

I want to play with other people, so games where players can drop out while the others continue for hours do not work for me - playing is fun, not playing or watching others play not so much. I like it that the game does not end immediately, but soon once someone is taken out.

This is why a lot of insanities do not work for me - I want to play the game and do not really care about "winning" it. Spoiling the game for others and for myself by ending it early does not feel like a win, even if some little cardboard thingie says that I've won.

Yeah I agree with this entirely. Nothing is worse that having to sit around while you have been dumped from a game, even if it is just effectively since you can't really do anything. The insane player didn't want to spoil the game and actually would have rather seen the resolution. In a story based game like this, making everyone else unhappy and "winning" just doesn't really work and is negative for everyone, including the winner.

Has anyone else proposed a way of just taking out the insanity cards altogether and just crippling insane players with a similar effect to wounded where it's just the same disability for everyone and not random? I agree in theory it's a neat idea to have insane players act differently but in execution it's either a minor annoyance or ruins the experience.

1 hour ago, Radish said:

Has anyone else proposed a way of just taking out the insanity cards altogether and just crippling insane players with a similar effect to wounded where it's just the same disability for everyone and not random? I agree in theory it's a neat idea to have insane players act differently but in execution it's either a minor annoyance or ruins the experience.

Maybe something of a rework in the app where insane players do something random on the mythos phase. Similar to starting a fire you select when a player goes insane and then during the mythos phase the app might have you do something like steal a random item, start a fire, attack another investigator, or run to the opposite side of the board.

Of course I don't think that something like this will come to be.

That's a really good idea.

I really like the insanities when they change the game or make it more challenging.

It is fun when players do not trust each other and second-guess each move. It is fun when players try to sabotage the game and the group has to stop them or to win despite their efforts. A group can even decide to help their comrades with their madness - you think we have to gather every clue in every room? - you want to carry all the stuff yourself? - Ok, let's do that.

Even sacrificing yourself stupidly or backstabbing the group can make for memorable moments when it is near the end of a scenario, the boss fight, the final push, the desperate race to stop the ritual. It only becomes dumb if it happens halfway through the game, when there is still lots of stuff undiscovered and it is entirely unclear what is even happening.

So if I draw an insanity that suggests I should short circuit the game, I tend to either ignore it until a dramatically appropriate moment or I try to play it kind of obvious so the rest of the group can try to stop me.

I would be ok with that more if the game was designed around it. Like the traitor outs him or herself and then you basically have an additional bad you have to fight at the end. As is the game just doesn't so you get into the situation where a traitor dying ends the scenario, you have to get yourself killed at the very end, or adding "if you get 6 fires on the table the game ends for no real reason." Of all the parts of this game that are really good, the insanity stuff feels half baked and thrown in without really considering them.

A rather easy workaround would at least be that insanity card events do not trigger an end-of-game thingy.

I think my rewrites would be:

1.) Pyromania should just be like Narcissism. If there are 6 or more rooms on fire at the end of the game, you win, otherwise you lose.

2.) One of the Thousand, the elimination of either the traitor or any of his victims do not trigger an end-of-game. The game should be over rather fast after the traitor has killed his first victim anyway, so no long wait for dead players.

3.) The elimination of a investigator who had the For the Greater Good insanity does not trigger an end of game. Let people be heroic!

4.) Forbidden Words only affect the investigator, not the player. The investigator cannot conduct interactions that require speech, like talking to non-player characters or casting spells. This is after all a social cooperative board game, something based around humans speaking to each other. Make the card a slightly worse version of 'Suspicious' (the no-effect card), not something that isn't all that fun for anyone.

I think that's it.