Also, I never really got a reply on him:

I think the ability is pretty flavorful, wouldn't you say?

kroen said:

kroen said:

Faith is a pretty nice character. She completes tasks, shops, hands off items to other characters, moves around Arkham at ridiculous speed and eventually collects enough clues to try her hand at sealing a gate herself. Decent and not overpowering addition to a team.

Seduction is just not een playable. It's not that t's way oerpowered - although it is - it's that it's completely incomprehensible. I do not at any point want to hae a discussion about whether a Dark Young has a ***** or not. And I certainly don't want the results of such a discussion to be rules vital. Similarly, I don't want to have a discussion about whether a 1920s "Bank Teller" is likely to be a man or a woman. That's just a game destroying conersation to een have. Cards in Arkham do not have a Male/Female signifier and it is too late to add one in now.

-Frank

Thanx about Faith, but you got seduction all wrong. By "location or gate encounters" I meant "location encounters or gate encounters", I just wanted to save space. This ability can never work on monsters waiting for your at the location, it only works during encounters, and even then it doesn't work against a monster that's appearing, as it says.

The Gambler is a great idea, although he probably shouldn't have such an extreme luck track. Make it 2-5. Remember, if the investigator is sitting on an Arkham location having encounters, he is unlikely to have to make more than one skill check per turn, so being able to use a 3-6 skill track for it is a bit much. It is flavourful, but adjusting skill tracks (and having to live with some skills being low at any one time) is a major part of the game. If you want to leave his luck at (3-6), drop his speed to (1-4) and leave all the other stats the same. The Luck ability is amazing, which will make up for him having rubbish other stats. Alternatively, you could make the ability only work in Arkham, now in OWs.

Altair 's an ok idea, although the special ability could do with re-phrasing. Same thing again really: having the ability is good enough, the skill in question doesn't need to be 3-6. It would be a huge advantage even if the skill was only 1-4.

I entirely agree with Frank about Sydney Bristow. When I said the character was 'mad', I didn't mean it was overpowered, I meant that there's no way to ever work out how the ability should be resolved. Many, many 'minor characters' in AH aren't specified as male/female. Plenty of them are , but have you gone through and counted? There are going to be lots of men (most of the allies are male, for example), a few women (not many women in HPL's fiction, after all), and a huge number of 'undecideds', like the patrons at Hibb's Roadhouse and the students at MU and so on. Sorry Kroen, but this is the first investigator of yours that I really think ain't gonna fly...

Avi_dreader: someone did create a Terminator character, waaaay back (probably on the old forums). Iirc, it had 10 Stamina and ignored all Sanity-related things. Rather unsurprisingly, it didn't work.

kroen said:

It's very overpowered. How many situations do you have more than one encounter a turn? Pretty much the only one is fighting. Being able to have a base stat of six for every encounter roll? If you bumped his max luck down to four, maybe.

thecorinthian said:

::Laughter:: that's exactly how I would design one, and that's exactly how I would expect it to turn out ;'D

That's ok, although it's a very very very very good starting weapon. It's a bonus of between +5 and +8, giving him a starting Combat skill of between 8 and a fearsome 14.

Usually a weapon that powerful would have some downside (like being one-shot-per-combat, or costing money to reload).

It should say 'Physical Weapon' on the item card.

Yeah, my bad.

Although, it only really strong for investigators with high fight, like him. Even then it's not broken- if he wats to get to +14 he will have no will and he will fail all horror checks. Usually an investigator with 3 sanity will keep his will at highest, so in this case the gloves will give him +5, just like a Rifle. And the downside is that unlike the Rifle, which you can give to anyone and it's +5, if you'll give the gloves to anyone who likes to keep his will on highest so he has 0-2 fight, the gloves will only grant +2 to +4. Overall I think it's pretty balanced, and even if it's slightly better than Rifle it's okay, as many weapons are strickly better than others (knife/bullwhip;lamp of azaroth/gladius of carcosa, etc.)

The boxing gloves are broken if you intend to fight the final battle. Especially if you get yourself some allies and skills.

-Frank

Frank said:

Umm no.. most investigators have a max fight of 4, so it's +6. for the ones with fight 6 it's +8, but then again so is brazier of souls, and the exhaust makes no difference in the final battle. only difference is that brazier isn't dependant on your fight. So no they're not broken. Powerful? sure. Overpowered? doubtly.

I hate to say it, guys, but I think Kroen's right about this one.

They'd good but they're not broken.

I'd still be inclined to reduce it to a straight-up +X rather than adding +2 on top as well, but that's just me.

There's also the question of theme to be considered. Surely boxing gloves make a person's fists less dangerous? Then again I suppose you're less likely to injure your own hands while using them. But it is a bit of a stretch that in the right circumstances they are significantly more deadly than a shotgun blast...

Edited to add: Hey, how about this: "Physical Weapon. +X to Combat checks etc. All dice rolled while using Boxing Gloves are treated as coming from a Physical Weapon."

So it's all Physical, your own Fight too, not just the bonus. You halve (or lose) the whole lot. That reduces the Final Battle problem, given the number of resistant/immune AOs. Might create rules problems with some other cards, though.

But you don't have to use the gloves... in the enemy has physical resistance/immunity than simply don't devote hands for them... anyway, they show their true power only in the final battle, because in the game itself most investigators would rather set their will to higher than fight, and even in the final battle they're the same power level as brazier, and even that to a 6-fight investigators.

kroen said:

A large monster comes out— something nasty like the Dunwich Horror. You give him 3-4 clue tokens and toss those into his horror check. For his combat check he rolls with a +8 boost, (+10 if you got him a +2 fight ally, so you'd have eighteen dice for combat ::cough cough:: a little overpowered).

kroen said:

I find fault with that argument sir!

WHen you say 'most investigators would such-and-such', do you actually mean that that's what you would do? My approach to Horror checks is often to pass them solely using clue tokens, or just ignore them and take the Sanity hit - because there's a upper limit on how much Sanity you can lose from failing a Horror check, whereas you can keep failing the combat check until you die!

Avi_dreader said:

Plenty of monsters have a resistance or an immunity - the Dunwich Horror usually among them. Even if you get to eighteen or more dice, resistances and/or modifiers will usually get you down well below the number of dice required to expect five successes. That's for investigators with a 3-6 Fight track. I stand by what I said at first - it's a really, really good item, but in most circumstances it's not better than a lot of the existing items. I'll take the Tommy Gun over the Boxing Gloves, any day.

Exactly. You have to take other things into account (such as clues). Kroen has said many times that he keeps his Will maxed, but I don't think this is a common strategy. In our group street sweepers do nothing of the sort. With a Will of 2-3 you can pass most Horror checks using 0 or 1 clue. That means you can keep a fight of 3-4 on most combat characters. In that sense the gloves are still not overpowered though.

But as Avi points out, the "average" situation is not what's important when looking at a custom item. If the character is a street sweeper he will have quite a few clues available for combat, which means he can keep his Will even lower. Plus there's the slew of items, skills, and abilities that prevent or repair Sanity damage, all of which will of course be given to the 3-Sanity street sweeper. In a real game (in our group anyway) this boxer guy would have no less than 5 Fight most turns.

And let me tell you, a street sweeper with 12 dice on combat checks is HEINOUS. It's not broken, but this guy is unnecessarily good at one thing. I think this character is like a lot of Kroen's other investigators. They're good ideas, but they tend to be min/maxed. Lore/Luck are often both 0-3, and primary stats are always 2-5 or even 3-6. That makes for characters who are extremely good at what they do, but honestly it's not much fun because the game becomes very easy. And since it's obvious what the character is meant to do (stats are so lopsided), the fun is reduced even more.

On t'other hand, Kroen does post an average of five million new pieces of fan content on this boards per day, so at least there's a constant source of inspiration there. Sure, not all of them work, but the man is full of ideas. Boxing Gloves aren't going to seriously break the game, I don't reckon. That Alias character, however, was bonkers.

Let's have some characters whose stats are entirely 1-4, rather than min/maxed. I'll try to think of some. But we don't really expect fan content to be half as carefully designed as official stuff, do we? *cough*goldenscarab*cough*

Don't take it as an insult, Kroen. I honestly mean it when I say your custom stuff is almost always very good ideas. But like most custom submissions, they could do with some feedback and tweaking for balance. A group of people is much more likely to come up with a workable version than one guy doing it all.

The min/maxing is just a trend I've noticed. The ideas are great (necromancers and so forth). Some of them are just pigeon-holed into certain roles, or maybe slightly too powerful, etc. These are not bad problems; in fact, they're exactly what feedback and constructive criticism are here for! Be open to it and do not be discouraged. Be glad there are people who are interested and take the time to help. A lot of the people here have literally hundreds of games behind them. Listen to them!

Here you go. I'm a big fan of the Expedition Leader because he's a sort of 'blank' investigator who's specialism is determined by the Ally he draws at the start of the game (although his special ability is also kickass). Here is yet another one in my ongoing attempts to create ally-themed investigators who actually work.

Hey, that's pretty good! Something that will finally get some use out of the Corruptions, anyway.

You're up to your old tricks with the skill tracks again though. What the jeepers sort of speed/sneak track is that? I get what the point of it is, but it's a bit restrictive; if an investigator has extreme skill tracks, all it really does is annoy players who don't want to play the character in that particular style.

Waaaaay to much equipment though, surely? Strange Eons values a Cult of the 1000 membership at $10, and (for this character, at least) I'm inclined to agree. By my reckoning, this guy's got at least $30 worth of stuff and no special downside to counterbalance it all.

He has a corruption, that gives him an extra 5$ to spend.

(smacks self in face)

Ok nevermind then.

BUT...he's a bit of a jack-of-all-items, having one of each thing. I'd scrap the Unique and give him another spell, or scrap the Common and give him another Unique.

thecorinthian said:

I agree with this (well, except for the part about the gloves— I still think they're too easily broken *especially* on this character who can do several fights a turn) and Sothis' remarks.