There's been some discussion going on over on Reddit about the rather brutal difficulty level of the current campaign. Now on my 7th attempt to survive the boundary beyond, I feel the difficulty, and in places the unfairness, of these scenarios is killing my enjoyment of the game.

In particular :

- The addition of a -5 token off of the bat means you will fail a lot of tests, even if they are boosted to a good level. Coupled with all the other negative token in a relatively small bag, expect to fail a lot of tests.

- Brutal treacheries which slam you in the face with no skill check. Looking at e.g Lost in Time and Arrows from the Trees here - no skill check, just some random bad crap happens. Seems like a new (bad) design choice which negates any skill.

- Overly tough monsters - and a lot of them. In addition they all seems to have retaliate, hunter or alert which means combined with my first point, you are going to take a LOT of chip damage.

- The Exploration Deck mechanic. This just isn't fun and just increases the number of treacheries that you draw, meaning more chip damage and investigator defeat.

- The supplies mechanic just doesn't work - you are making a random choice based on next to no information and then punished with trauma etc for making the wrong choice.

I'm all for the game being a challenge, but when you essentially take out any skill to beat the challenge, the whole thing stops being fun.

15 minutes ago, Ohnomycocoa said:

There's been some discussion going on over on Reddit about the rather brutal difficulty level of the current campaign. Now on my 7th attempt to survive the boundary beyond, I feel the difficulty, and in places the unfairness, of these scenarios is killing my enjoyment of the game.

In particular :

- The addition of a -5 token off of the bat means you will fail a lot of tests, even if they are boosted to a good level. Coupled with all the other negative token in a relatively small bag, expect to fail a lot of tests.

- Brutal treacheries which slam you in the face with no skill check. Looking at e.g Lost in Time and Arrows from the Trees here - no skill check, just some random bad crap happens. Seems like a new (bad) design choice which negates any skill.

- Overly tough monsters - and a lot of them. In addition they all seems to have retaliate, hunter or alert which means combined with my first point, you are going to take a LOT of chip damage.

- The Exploration Deck mechanic. This just isn't fun and just increases the number of treacheries that you draw, meaning more chip damage and investigator defeat.

- The supplies mechanic just doesn't work - you are making a random choice based on next to no information and then punished with trauma etc for making the wrong choice.

I'm all for the game being a challenge, but when you essentially take out any skill to beat the challenge, the whole thing stops being fun.

Having narrowly missed out on getting a successful resolution on the first scenario, then getting absolutely slaughtered by the second in our blind play through, I absolutely sympathise. It’s not fun to feel like you’re getting punished for decisions you made with little to no information.

However, this game has never been based on the presumption of ‘winning’ every scenario. Apart from a handful of notable exceptions, losing a scenario or two doesn’t end the campaign, just makes subsequent scenarios more difficult. I think the issue with FA is that the bar does seem to be set higher. Now, personally, I think that’s a narrative choice they’ve made, to demonstrate that going into a jungle ill-prepared, following Alejandro (who I’m fairly certain does not have my best interests at heart) is a very dangerous thing to do. That should be the case, right? It certainly felt good to get back to weird old Arkham for the third scenario! It’s also making my group quite nervous about heading back into the jungle for the next scenario. It’s just a very different feel.

Ultimately, I think it’s healthy to have very different feels for the campaigns. Each one is likely to appeal to different types of players to varying degrees, and that’s a good thing, I think.

My party got hammered on our first two scenarios (total of over 10 trauma and 1 lousy XP each). In the third scenario we finally managed to get a hold of ourselves. Now, we dread going back into the jungle.

Good times

1 hour ago, Ohnomycocoa said:

There's been some discussion going on over on Reddit about the rather brutal difficulty level of the current campaign. Now on my 7th attempt to survive the boundary beyond, I feel the difficulty, and in places the unfairness, of these scenarios is killing my enjoyment of the game.

In particular :

- The addition of a -5 token off of the bat means you will fail a lot of tests, even if they are boosted to a good level. Coupled with all the other negative token in a relatively small bag, expect to fail a lot of tests.

- Brutal treacheries which slam you in the face with no skill check. Looking at e.g Lost in Time and Arrows from the Trees here - no skill check, just some random bad crap happens. Seems like a new (bad) design choice which negates any skill.

- Overly tough monsters - and a lot of them. In addition they all seems to have retaliate, hunter or alert which means combined with my first point, you are going to take a LOT of chip damage.

- The Exploration Deck mechanic. This just isn't fun and just increases the number of treacheries that you draw, meaning more chip damage and investigator defeat.

- The supplies mechanic just doesn't work - you are making a random choice based on next to no information and then punished with trauma etc for making the wrong choice.

I'm all for the game being a challenge, but when you essentially take out any skill to beat the challenge, the whole thing stops being fun.

Without a ton of spoilers, the encounter deck is made up based on what prior choices and successes you have been able to make. In our game, there were not serpents or arrows from the trees or very many enemies with retaliate/hunter. Instead, we got an encounter deck CHOCK FULL of cultists who were constantly putting doom on various places that WE had to hunt down or simply run out of time.

Both are difficult situations, but might be better suited to different groups. We were often locked down by various card effects and that action limitation plus the doom appearing everywhere was both threatening and made it incredibly hard to fully investigate locations. We ended up with only 1 location fully investigated at the end. And this was on Easy.

I made the executive decision to bail as soon as we could because I wasn't sure we would be permitted to continue on failing.

I wont be commenting on Boundary Beyond (havent had a chance to play it yet) but many of the things you touch on happen in the first 3 scenarios, so I can comment relative to those.

Tough treacheries with no skill check are nothing new. I mean, remember Pushed into the Beyond, Beyond the Veil, and heck, Ancient Evils? Fortunately a lot more classes are equipped with some sort of treachery cancellation now. In addition to Ward of Protection, there is Forewarned and A Test of Will. Or you can just deal with the effects.

Monsters: maybe you're specifically referencing the Boundary Beyond. Otherwise... maybe? I certainly recall getting murdered by swarms of mobsters and Conglomerations of spheres in scenario 1-b of Dunwich. Many of them have nasty effects too (retaliate, melee suppression). I'm not sure the current crop of enemies is much worse than the previous iterations, except, maybe, for Vengeance. And I think Vengeance is allright, because it gives you some incentive to evade rather than murder everything in your path, and I sort of like that. As long as it doesnt go overboard.

Exploration deck can often be worked around with some of the special items you can bring with you into the jungle (see next point). If not, you're going to draw more treacheries.

Supplies: Well, this one I do agree with you on, at least somewhat. And that does add to making the Exploration deck pretty brutal, so I agree there too. There is pretty much no way to know which items are going to be useful and which ones are not, unless of course, you have already played through the scenarios. When the Supply mechanic was first introduced many people said something along the lines of "that's interesting, but it's going to lose a lot during repeat playthroughs". I think it's actually way more fun on repeat playthroughs, because you can make those kinds of decisions with some information available, rather than going in blind. So yeah, this is pretty tough if you're doing a single run straight through the campaign, and I can definitely see why it would be frustrating. You can really mitigate this by starting over, knowing what you know now. I know that isn't the advice anybody is looking for, but it's all I've got on this one.