(mild spoilers for Unspeakable Oath, City of Archives, and Where Doom Awaits)
So, after 2 unsuccessful runs at Unspeakable Oath with William Yorick and Caroline Fern, on our 3rd run, we gave ourselves an extra doom on the 1st agenda. Then, on the third Act, when it became clear that there was still just no way we were going to make it out (we didn't find Daniel until the 4th Patient Confinement room), we decided that the resign was in the entrance, not all the way in the Garden - and even then we gave ourselves an extra few actions to make that work, b/c we were so frustrated and exhausted.
Our decks and characters were just not built to succeed this scenario. Googling indicates that we're not the only ones who struggled with it.
It's odd though that the scenarios that always seem to be the most difficult (for me, City of Archives and Where Doom Awaits) are the ones with the campaign fail conditions - though perhaps it's the campaign fail, rather than the 'pick yourself up and continue' present in most scenarios, that makes them seem more difficult. While I enjoy the cruelty of the game, these scenarios often have conditions where, if you don't have a deck built to withstand them, you are basically screwed before you even begin. WDA I accepted the bleak ending (and didn't replay, or advance to the last scenario), because it was so close to the end of the campaign, and it made sense for the narrative of my Investigators' journey to die on that hill. But CoA forced me to set aside half of my deck, making the scenario ruthlessly difficult, and I had to play it 3 times before I could continue, and it was only my foreknowledge of the agenda/act decks that let me advance.
We were LOVING Carcosa until this scenario, and we're pleased to continue now that we've just kind of house-ruled our way out of the Asylum, but it leaves a bad taste in the mouth when I've gotta do that. It breaks immersion in the game world. And just from practical terms, we wanted to advance the story, and instead had to give almost two entire play sessions to this one stupid scenario.
I get that many people feel that you should bend the rules because it's supposed to be fun, but my own feeling is that you can only bend the cruelty of Arkham so far before you break it. How do others of you balance the fact that the game is *supposed* to hurt your investigators, with these scenario conditions where victory is basically impossible and losing means the campaign is totally over, and you can't experience the rest of the story? (I assume the other campaigns also have similarly frustrating potential failstates).