What do you think of this change?:

Yenreb said:

Hmmm... I didn't even notice it, but you also gave him 4 clue tokens as starting equipment basically. That's.... Pretty strong... To me, the one reason I'm not saying this character is insanely overpowered is because of the corruption card that removes two sanity every time it comes up (and he only has three sanity). If you want to make this character a bit more inflexible (but probabably more flavorful and more importantly, balanced), give him zero focus. That'd be unusual (and of all the characters, he could probably get away with it because of Corrupt Strength, which I expect is how players will utilize him). Mmmm, another way to hamper him a bit would be reducing his speed to three. You should also probably reduce his sneak to zero at the highest movement level (especially if you give him four speed). Assuming he has an average of four corruption cards at all times (and I'd imagine he'd have more), he'd be unstoppable at sneak checks (in addition to having a decent speed— granted, he'll still be overpowered with sneak checks, with or without that one point, but, I'd do without it).

Strange Eons doesn't let you do a Focus of 0. I went in a different direction instead.

Here's the new Jesse:

Yenreb said:

Heh... For a second my first thought was "Oh dear god no," but then I looked at the card more carefully and noticed that you dropped down the clues, and speed. The first thing I saw was Corrupt Strength (which really confused me until I noticed that you pumped up the focus to three). I still think this guy'll be pretty powerful (especially if you don't use him mostly for fighting, and not so much for gate sealing). Buuuut, it's hard to say :') ::laughter:: I could easily see this guy has having eight fight and six will (as a base stat, without weapons being counted yet). Anyways, good job, I think he's more or less balanced, in an imbalanced sort of way :') and would definitely make an interesting game for someone playing with him (heh... actually, I know exactly how I would use him to break the game ;') well, maybe not exactly, but there's a few unique items and spells that could fix his sanity problem, and once that's done, he could theoretically out-tank Daisy.

And a couple of investigators that require the expansion I'm currently working on:

If you find them intriguing, you might want to check my custom expansion, the Sea of Horror: new.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp

@Kroen

Leroy is a bit overpowered... As things are, he basically nukes Dexter in terms of quality (as he can dive through the spell deck pretty quickly. If you want to balance his character better, make it so he can't exchange more than one spell per turn, and have the cost of doing that be two focus. And why does he have two skills? ::Shrug:: make those changes, and he'd still be overpowered, but not as much ;')

As for the other two, they have special items from your expansion, so I can't really critique them as I do not understand their context.

Avi_dreader said:

Yeah, I believe I'll change Leroy to one spell per turn at the cost of all his focus, so he can use only one of his two abilities each turn.

And btw, you might want to check my expansion There's a link right under the two special characters. Even if you don't plan of playing with custome expansions ever, it's still interesting.

Cheers.

Yes, but some of the Corruptions are really nasty. Watch out for Creeping Doom, which brings out the Red ones faster, and then things like Fate and Fortune, The Skin Crawls (depending on the GOO or Herald), Uncontrollable Rage, and Weakness of Mind. Oh, and Vessel of the Mythos simply devours you as soon as you draw it, unless you somehow have only one other Corruption. And if that's the case, you're playing Jesse wrong.

This is a character I made to play around with the idea of someone knowing how to beat the AO. His first turn can be spent looking for an Elder Sign or by jumping through a Gate. He also plays well with others by helping them find there way through the strange gray mists of LiTaS (unless of coarse Yog-Sothoth is the AO in which case the other player is kinda screwed. Comments very welcome.

Yenreb said:

There is a way to do it, though it is intentionally non-obvious.

Thelric said:

Fair enough. I'm sure nearly anything can be done in Strange Eons, including my idea of an investigator whose skill sliders are all 0/2/4/6. But I didn't feel like putting forth the effort of figuring out how to do 0 Focus. Instead, I modified an existing ability to reduce Jesse's focus in a way that makes his focus effectively 0 (or maybe 1) once he's really started going. As Mark Roosewater loves to say, restrictions breed creativity.

kroen said:

Yikes, Preston is horrible. Are you trying to make a Priest who is worse than the Nun? Trading a clue token to prevent a sanity damage is a horrible deal. If it were two or three, it would be a maybe.

Henderson's pretty cool, once you can get him blessed.

I don't know, I think that Preston is pretty decent, as he have 7 stamina and his low sanity is nglected by the fact he can prevent horror damage if he has clues. Anyway, I wasn't trying to make a tier 1 investigator, so I think he turned out fine.

Why bother spending the Clue to reduce Horror/Combat Damage when the Clue could be used to roll another die to prevent the Horror/Combat damage anyways?

dkw said:

Because rolling is never a sure thing... I once spent 8 dice for one misley success and I'm sure everyone in this forum has a similar story happened to them.

dkw said:

+1. Preston is amazingly inferior to Harvey Walters. And it's not like we are drowning in people ranting about how Harvey is overpowered. Even his equipment is kind of crappy. He gets a spell that he quite simply will never ever use. He just hopes that some other Investigator has some use for it. All the rest of his stuff is random, so there's no telling if any of it will help him.

Basically he has flat out the worst power. Even Amanda has a better power. And he has very little in the way of money or clues, and all his equipment is random and some of it is drawn from a deck that he can't benefit from. And let's not forget that extreme splits on Stamina/Sanity are bad and that Sanity is probably a little bit better than Stamina in any case. So he literally has the worst possible Stamina/Sanity split in addition to all his other failings. This is a character that has no upside. He would literally displace Sister Mary as the worst character.

-Frank

I look at things in regards to the law of averages, because no matter how many times you roll dice, for better or worse, you will eventually even out to the law of averages.

So, you could spend 3 Clues to reduce the damage by 3, or spend 3 Clues and have on average 1 Success. 1 more Success is usually what most people need to defeat that Monster or avoid suffering Horror Damage. Heck, with spending 2 Clues, you have a good chance to roll 1 Success.
I grew up around games that use 6 sided dice for everything. If in those games I could have rolled 2 extra dice for a 33% chance to succeed on either die to avoid a terrible fate, I would have taken it rather then only weakening the terrible fate I am already suffering.

Question for you: If you had the choice, would you rather spend 2 Clues to reduce the Damage to 0 AND have to Fight ANOTHER ROUND , or would you rather use those 2 Clues in an attempt to get the Successes needed to DEFEAT the Monster AND take it as a Trophy ?

Alright, alright, I'm changing them. But for the person who said Preston will not use his spell- what on earth are you talking about? There are TONS of spellcasters with 4 Lore.

It isn't the Lore, it is the Sanity that will keep him from casting spells.

kroen said:

Sure, there are lots of spellcasters with a Lore of 4, but how many of them have three sanity , a huge Luck , and frickin Focus of 1 ?!

If you have only 3 Sanity you can't cast spells very often. If you have a Luck of 5, you'll want to stay Luck aspected most of the time. If you only have a Focus of 1, it takes you 6 turns to refocus and then shift back. That's so ridiculous that people are not going to do it. Preston is going to set himself to Luck and never look back, because he only has a Focus of 1, and he literally cannot look back! There are Lore 4 characters who cast spells. They just have Sanity to burn and Focus to burn to go do other things when they run out of it.

Of course that's all moot, because the new power you gave him is off the hook totally insanely broken. He has a slightly version of any of the shopping powers. Except, it's a slightly worse than all of the shopping powers. His power is as previously noted noticeably and distinctly inferior to Harvey Walters. Except now he also has a noticeably worse version of Amanda Sharpe's power, and a noticeably worse version of Dexter Drake's power, and a noticeably worse version of Bob's power, and a noticeably weaker version of Monty's power. Some of those powers were already kind of OK. So having all five together is crazy nuts.

-Frank

Alright, I'm changing Preston, but I am NOT changing his Believer ability. Sure, it's not as good as Walter's ability, but it has 2 advantages: 1. It can ignore those annoying monsters' horror damage of 3 and 4 ENTIRELY unlike Harvey's; and the second advantage over Harvey is that Preston has anothet ability; Harvey only has this one ability. And now fianlly Preston has a unique ability. I also changed his possessions.

And my new character, hope he's not overpowered:

I really like James. Strange Eons is of course telling you that you're over budget for that character by 8$. Honestly, I think he might have a little too much in the awesome department. But probably not 8$ worth. Allies are great, but not having any clues or weapons makes him quite a late bloomer. Nice job.

-Frank

Frank said:

Tnx.

And actually those 8$ are right on track. You see, his ability is limited enough to warrant a +1 focus bonus (just like Amanda's ability). So instead of giving him a +1 bonus to focus, I "traded" that for 8$ and gave it to him (buying an extra focus point costs exactly 8$).

And not having weapons is neglectable giving the fact he can buy whatever weapon he wants (if he doesn't get bad lack at shops ofcours).

And, by you not replying on Preston I assume he's finally okay?