I have tried multiple times to beat RttNotZ and RttDl back to back with the same investigator keeping trauma and xp. I have never beaten them combined. Is it even possible?

Never tried those two back to back, but I did do a Solo Jenny through Dunwich, and then followed up with a Forgotten Age campaign, and she won (though heavily tramua'd - Thermos was very useful by that point!).

https://arkhamdb.com/decklist/view/8155/forgotten-age-final-jenny-barnes-transfer-from-dunwich-1.0

Alright now that I know its possible my hope is restored. Someday I will ddefeat every campaign in a row.

We did a 2 player run of NotZ followed by Dunwich (followed by Carcossa too).

My Daisy only made it half way through Dunwich before she died for good and needed replacing. But my partner's Leo survived both the fist two and half way into Carcossa after that before meeting his end in the asylum. Story wise, it fit. After living through all that, I understand why he never made it out of that place.

3 hours ago, nicozinos said:

Alright now that I know its possible my hope is restored. Someday I will ddefeat every campaign in a row.

Two in a row is certainly possible, maybe even three. But all of them, with the same investigators? Not gonna happen. You could be the most skilled player in the world, play on Easy, and have insane luck, and eventually your investigators would still die somewhere along the way. Every campaign piles trauma onto your investigator after the final scenario. There will eventually come a point where the trauma exceeds your max health and/or sanity and your investigator just straight up drops dead the moment the campaign is done.

There are some workarounds for that, sure. The easiest would just be to swap dead investigators out at the end of the campaign for new ones and continue on from there, while keeping the investigators that have still survived that long. Or alternatively, you could play around with some house rules to mitigate the trauma your investigators received. One of the ideas me and a friend had was to use a combination of spending a large amount of XP and gaining a random basic weakness to remove trauma. It prevents your investigator from dying outright, certainly. But at the cost of XP (which by campaign's end isn't especially useful anymore) and bogging down your deck with dangerous weaknesses.

I was thinking of implementing rules similar to those in TFA where I can spend 5 xp to heal 1 trauma.

5 hours ago, Annette Soleil said:

Two in a row is certainly possible, maybe even three. But all of them, with the same investigators? Not gonna happen. You could be the most skilled player in the world, play on Easy, and have insane luck, and eventually your investigators would still die somewhere along the way. Every campaign piles trauma onto your investigator after the final scenario. There will eventually come a point where the trauma exceeds your max health and/or sanity and your investigator just straight up drops dead the moment the campaign is done.

There are some workarounds for that, sure. The easiest would just be to swap dead investigators out at the end of the campaign for new ones and continue on from there, while keeping the investigators that have still survived that long. Or alternatively, you could play around with some house rules to mitigate the trauma your investigators received. One of the ideas me and a friend had was to use a combination of spending a large amount of XP and gaining a random basic weakness to remove trauma. It prevents your investigator from dying outright, certainly. But at the cost of XP (which by campaign's end isn't especially useful anymore) and bogging down your deck with dangerous weaknesses.

Last year on Labor Day weekend we decided to do a marathon to see how many campaigns starting with TNotZ we could get through and used the same investigators. We almost got through Carcosa, but finally bit it in the last scenario.
We did try something similar recently, where we played the same investigators through all the standalones, making a “quasi campaign” out of them, starting off with 0XP. We didn’t do them in order of release, though. For some semblance of cohesion, we did them based on what we felt was the most logical geographical progression. It was actually pretty fun. We did manage it... by the skin of our teeth.

7 hours ago, player5667253 said:

I was thinking of implementing rules similar to those in TFA where I can spend 5 xp to heal 1 trauma.

I think that's what we did as well, but do bear in mind that xp is largely useless around the time you complete your first campaign. If you're only running the rule that it costs 5xp to heal a trauma, you're very quickly going to reach a point somewhere in the second campaign where you're decked out with all the best cards and completely free of trauma for the rest of your campaign marathon. Which makes the game significantly easier in several ways. During the earlier, easier scenarios of a campaign, your upgraded deck will steamroll everything the game throws at you, allowing you to get optimal resolutions that make end-game scenarios easier. And more importantly, the uselessness of victory points allows you to hyper focus the objective, making the game even easier. And you'll still likely wind up with more than enough xp to completely heal every trauma by each campaign's end.

That's why my friend and I opted for also trading traumas for weaknesses. Sure, the game still becomes easier in some ways by allowing you to have a fully upgraded deck at all stages of the campaign, and also allowing you to focus the objective and not worry too much about victory points. But you're also dealing with additional threats from within your own deck on a more frequent basis, to help mitigate the reduced difficulty.

Sure, you could theoretically just... up the difficulty setting from Normal to Hard (or Hard to Expert) on subsequent campaigns, but... eventually that difficulty is going to cap out. And plenty of people play on Hard or Expert already without upgraded decks.

Alternatively, if you don't heal traumas at all, I like the idea of being able to keep going with that investigator while having the option to "retire" them between campaigns (or possibly between scenarios) and replace them with a fresh investigator. That way your lineup changes more gradually. And while by the end of your final campaign, you've got a completely different lineup compared to where you started, the changes in that lineup would've happened more naturally from game to game, giving a greater sense of narrative cohesion. Personally that's something I'd like to try someday, but finding people to play with is always the issue.

2 hours ago, Annette Soleil said:

I think that's what we did as well, but do bear in mind that xp is largely useless around the time you complete your first campaign. If you're only running the rule that it costs 5xp to heal a trauma, you're very quickly going to reach a point somewhere in the second campaign where you're decked out with all the best cards and completely free of trauma for the rest of your campaign marathon. Which makes the game significantly easier in several ways. During the earlier, easier scenarios of a campaign, your upgraded deck will steamroll everything the game throws at you, allowing you to get optimal resolutions that make end-game scenarios easier. And more importantly, the uselessness of victory points allows you to hyper focus the objective, making the game even easier. And you'll still likely wind up with more than enough xp to completely heal every trauma by each campaign's end.

That's why my friend and I opted for also trading traumas for weaknesses. Sure, the game still becomes easier in some ways by allowing you to have a fully upgraded deck at all stages of the campaign, and also allowing you to focus the objective and not worry too much about victory points. But you're also dealing with additional threats from within your own deck on a more frequent basis, to help mitigate the reduced difficulty.

Sure, you could theoretically just... up the difficulty setting from Normal to Hard (or Hard to Expert) on subsequent campaigns, but... eventually that difficulty is going to cap out. And plenty of people play on Hard or Expert already without upgraded decks.

Alternatively, if you don't heal traumas at all, I like the idea of being able to keep going with that investigator while having the option to "retire" them between campaigns (or possibly between scenarios) and replace them with a fresh investigator. That way your lineup changes more gradually. And while by the end of your final campaign, you've got a completely different lineup compared to where you started, the changes in that lineup would've happened more naturally from game to game, giving a greater sense of narrative cohesion. Personally that's something I'd like to try someday, but finding people to play with is always the issue.

How exactly did you trade traumas for weaknesses? Did you just draw an extra random weakness for every trauma earned? Perhaps it would be more balanced if you lost all your earned xp at the end of every campaign but the xp recieved from the final scenario ( usually a bit extra if you get a favorable outcome) can be used to heal trauma ( the 5 xp rule) or start with better cards for the next campaign. At least this would mean you have to get through a whole campaign before healing to full again.

9 hours ago, player5667253 said:

How exactly did you trade traumas for weaknesses? Did you just draw an extra random weakness for every trauma earned? Perhaps it would be more balanced if you lost all your earned xp at the end of every campaign but the xp recieved from the final scenario ( usually a bit extra if you get a favorable outcome) can be used to heal trauma ( the 5 xp rule) or start with better cards for the next campaign. At least this would mean you have to get through a whole campaign before healing to full again.

I believe what we did was that for each trauma removed, we would have to spend 5xp and add a random basic weakness to our decks. It was the most balanced idea we were able to come up with at the time.

I'm not sure what you mean by "losing all earned xp". Are you saying to effectively reset each investigator's deck to its 0xp status? I mean, theoretically, yes. That could work. But at that point, why not just restart the next campaign with the same group of investigators, but without any xp or trauma? Removing all xp aside from that earned from the final scenario actually just feels like a handicap. Because then you could only either remove the trauma, or buy back some of your upgrades. On one hand, you're back at 0xp only cards but with a small handful of unhealed trauma. On the other, you've got a couple nice upgrades, but suffering from a potentially crippling amount of trauma from scenario one. Either way, you're still resetting the majority of your deck to level 0. I feel like that kind of defeats the purpose of carrying your investigator over to a new campaign if you're just going to reset the majority of their deck anyway.

That being said, if someone can come up with a better idea, I'm open to it. The one my friend and I came up with isn't perfect by any means. There's a limited pool of basic weakness cards and if we just keep adding them in place of traumas, eventually we'll run out. Especially in 4 investigator groups. I suppose at that point our only option would be to take the traumas and be unable to heal them. Inevitably we'd also be faced with the inevitability of retiring certain investigators or allowing them to die (freeing up their basic weaknesses for their replacements).

In the end though, it's still just a card game. Unless you're playing in some kind of league or official capacity, there's no reason you can't play the game however you want. There's a certain allure to the idea of healing up your traumas and brute forcing your way through the game on subsequent campaigns, now that your investigators have buffed themselves up to their full potential. Feel free to make the game as easy or as difficult as you like.

I gotta be honest, it wasn’t until 3 weeks ago that I found out the game wasn’t meant to be played all in a row with the same investigators lol. Me and my group have went from NotZ and are now on the last scenario of PtC, we’ve lost 2 people (mark and Diana) with Mandy still holding on for dear life lol, I’m now playing (was playing Diana) as the millionaire (forget his name) and my buddy is playing skidds, what we do is just play on through gathering XP and when someone dies they build a deck of cards using the half the total XP we’ve gathered so far (so for instance, when our two characters died we had 52 XP to use). I find it the most fun to play, and we sprinkle a few “side quests” (carnival of horrors for instance) to take breaks from the main acts. I always felt the scenarios were pretty well balanced to do this as now the chaos Bag has a ton Of really nasty tokens and with all the trauma we’ve been piling on it kinda hurts after awhile.... we play on regular and with an extra 2XP per scenario rule, because we enjoy switching out cards more (we tend to go more for theme decks rather than actual function (like when I played as Diana I avoided “culty” kinda cards at first saying Diana didn’t want to use evil to fight evil, but as her mental trauma rose, I put more and more)) we all create small stories for each of our characters and decks and cards so we have internal stories to go over

15 hours ago, Annette Soleil said:

I believe what we did was that for each trauma removed, we would have to spend 5xp and add a random basic weakness to our decks. It was the most balanced idea we were able to come up with at the time.

I'm not sure what you mean by "losing all earned xp". Are you saying to effectively reset each investigator's deck to its 0xp status? I mean, theoretically, yes. That could work. But at that point, why not just restart the next campaign with the same group of investigators, but without any xp or trauma? Removing all xp aside from that earned from the final scenario actually just feels like a handicap. Because then you could only either remove the trauma, or buy back some of your upgrades. On one hand, you're back at 0xp only cards but with a small handful of unhealed trauma. On the other, you've got a couple nice upgrades, but suffering from a potentially crippling amount of trauma from scenario one. Either way, you're still resetting the majority of your deck to level 0. I feel like that kind of defeats the purpose of carrying your investigator over to a new campaign if you're just going to reset the majority of their deck anyway.

That being said, if someone can come up with a better idea, I'm open to it. The one my friend and I came up with isn't perfect by any means. There's a limited pool of basic weakness cards and if we just keep adding them in place of traumas, eventually we'll run out. Especially in 4 investigator groups. I suppose at that point our only option would be to take the traumas and be unable to heal them. Inevitably we'd also be faced with the inevitability of retiring certain investigators or allowing them to die (freeing up their basic weaknesses for their replacements).

In the end though, it's still just a card game. Unless you're playing in some kind of league or official capacity, there's no reason you can't play the game however you want. There's a certain allure to the idea of healing up your traumas and brute forcing your way through the game on subsequent campaigns, now that your investigators have buffed themselves up to their full potential. Feel free to make the game as easy or as difficult as you like.

Ok. I played through NotZ and TDL using what I said and your right. Essentially I am just playing the same investigator except I had one additional 3 exp card at the start of TDL. Their was one difference though and that is gained story assets/ weaknesses. These were kinda broken though because Lita Chantler is overpowered and allowed my ashcan to easily win every scenario but Essex County express. Maybe something with the chaos bag ( like keeping earned tokens throughout) would help balance the story assets?

How’d you only get 3xp? Also ya you save the tokens between campaigns (that’s how we do it anyways) our chaos bag on normal has 4 -5 tokens now lol.

7 hours ago, player5667253 said:

Ok. I played through NotZ and TDL using what I said and your right. Essentially I am just playing the same investigator except I had one additional 3 exp card at the start of TDL. Their was one difference though and that is gained story assets/ weaknesses. These were kinda broken though because Lita Chantler is overpowered and allowed my ashcan to easily win every scenario but Essex County express. Maybe something with the chaos bag ( like keeping earned tokens throughout) would help balance the story assets?

2 hours ago, Sooner535 said:

How’d you only get 3xp? Also ya you save the tokens between campaigns (that’s how we do it anyways) our chaos bag on normal has 4 -5 tokens now lol.

Prior to the Dream-Eaters campaign, I might've agreed with this idea, but... as per Dream-Eaters, you're forced to have two chaos bags. Not only that, but some of the special symbols are both beneficial and plot relevant, so carrying over all of those tokens would throw off certain aspects of that campaign. Not to mention the infestation tests from scenario 1B.

I'd actually neglected to take story assets into account, but that does raise up another issue as well, speaking in long-term. All those story assets are going to start padding out your deck, making it harder to find other cards in your deck that you desperately need, in the same way that the extra weaknesses will. Additionally, TDL has a ton of ally assets. Combined with Lita, plus whatever other allies your deck may already be running, some of them will end up being useless padding in your deck. I suppose with all the excess xp, you could just run two copies of Charisma on everyone though. Depending on your component limitations.

The way we fixed that is unless the game says explicitly to give an asset to another player on death (such as the man in the pallid mask) they’re lost on death. I know it’s not exactly a great way to get rid of them lol, but after you lose your original investigators you tend to be having assets only from the most recent campaign or 2 >.< one thing I’ve thought about doing for our next run through is either:

A. Remove our +2XP/scenario

B. Have it to when you die your next investigator “inherits” half the XP of your now dead investigator (so XP might become a problem again if you die 2-3 times) (think of it as a mentor ship?)

C. Have a combination of the two or something else?

ive noticed XP on certain characters is starting to lose its meaning around the grinning of carcosa (unless you die of course) so I think that should remedy the situation a bit? My current deck is basically done with about 70XP invested, can’t think of much else to get lol

16 hours ago, Annette Soleil said:

Prior to the Dream-Eaters campaign, I might've agreed with this idea, but... as per Dream-Eaters, you're forced to have two chaos bags. Not only that, but some of the special symbols are both beneficial and plot relevant, so carrying over all of those tokens would throw off certain aspects of that campaign. Not to mention the infestation tests from scenario 1B.

I'd actually neglected to take story assets into account, but that does raise up another issue as well, speaking in long-term. All those story assets are going to start padding out your deck, making it harder to find other cards in your deck that you desperately need, in the same way that the extra weaknesses will. Additionally, TDL has a ton of ally assets. Combined with Lita, plus whatever other allies your deck may already be running, some of them will end up being useless padding in your deck. I suppose with all the excess xp, you could just run two copies of Charisma on everyone though. Depending on your component limitations.

That is what I did with Ashcan. Two copies of Charisma. Adding story assets is optional so I don't think it will clog up a deck unless you let it. Also the chaos bag does get pretty messed up with keeping tokens although it can make things more interesting. The only problem I found is that eventually you have so many special tokens that some scenarios with chaos token effects that aren't terrible, actually become easier because the auto fail is like a 1/25 chance so it just turns into a calculation.

7 hours ago, player5667253 said:

That is what I did with Ashcan. Two copies of Charisma. Adding story assets is optional so I don't think it will clog up a deck unless you let it. Also the chaos bag does get pretty messed up with keeping tokens although it can make things more interesting. The only problem I found is that eventually you have so many special tokens that some scenarios with chaos token effects that aren't terrible, actually become easier because the auto fail is like a 1/25 chance so it just turns into a calculation.

Yeah, the issue about the Auto-Fail becoming less frequent is another problem.

This is just the issue with trying to continue using investigators across multiple campaigns. There are so many complications that pop up that, in the long run, make the game easier. (Or throw things off completely, in the case of the chaos bag, especially in Dream-Eaters.) None of them actually make the game harder , aside from your deck being potentially bogged down with story assets. But again, as you pointed out, including those are technically optional. Although if you do take any of them, you are stuck with them for the foreseeable future. (Unless someone gets killed in Blood on the Altar, anyway.) For the chaos bag, you could theoretically only carry over the numerical modifiers, and reset the special tokens each campaign. But you're still making the Auto-Fail less frequent. Sure, you've probably got some nasty -5 tokens in there now, but a fully upgraded deck should still be able to handle the possibility of those.

The only ways I've been able to come up with that allow you to keep using the same investigators across multiple campaigns without diminishing the difficulty by a wide margin is to either play as normal, keeping your traumas, or trade traumas for weaknesses. The former has the inevitable result of your investigators dying. The latter has the issue of component limitations and a lack of official sources to govern how to handle it.