I'm sure this is covered somewhere,(it's in the rules from what I recall, I can't find 'em at the moment) but what exactly is the difference between retired investigators and those that were devoured in final battle, and when can investigators choose to retire?

Also, does the number of successes required to remove doom tokens from the AO's sheet during final battle decrease as investigators are devoured? I've always played it that it does not decrease. So, for instance if in a three-players game, if one investigator is devoured during the AO fight, the remaining players will still need to roll three successes to remove a single doom token. What made me doubt this is one of those special gate encounters that pits you against an Ancient One, This particular one is a dual-colored blue/yellow encounter that puts you versus Shub-Niggurath. It says: since there's only one player in this combat, you only need one success to remove a doom token.

A retired investigator is an investigator who, after gaining a total of two or more Injury / Madness cards, decides to retire. This issue, and the difference between a retired investigator and a devoured one are covered in the Dunwich Horror rulebook, pag 6:

"A player may voluntarily retire an investigator with two or more total Injury and/or Madness cards. The player simply skips his turn, announces that the investigator is retiring, and draws a new investigator as though his old investigator had been devoured. However, effects that trigger from having an investigator devoured (such as Glaaki’s ability to raise the terror level by 2 when an investigator is devoured) do not trigger when an investigator retires"

Besides, remember that being devoured during the final battle and during the normal game implies different thing: you do not draw another investigator if you're devoured during the final battle, while you do it normally during the "normal" play. Also, being devoured during the final battle does not weaken in any way the AO. In a three player game, you need three successes in order to remove a doomer. If one of your investigators is devoured, the surviving ones still have to collect a total of three successes to remove a doomer.

Double coloured OW cards triggering OWs battles with Cthulhu and friends are something different: they say that you have to fight as a single man the AO you casually encounter (dude, they told you not to ring the bell in R'lyeh and say you went there for dinner, didn't they? ::laughing:. And this has some logic per se, I mean, you are alone in the OW, your mates are doing something different somewhere else, so how can they reach you in the OW to help you? Dual coloured cards imply you have to deal with the AO as if you were playing a 1-investigator game final battle, that's it!

Hope this can be of some help :.smiling::

Yea, thanks.That's the way I've been playing. I forgot that retirement only relates to Madness/Injury accumulation. Can a retiring investigator choose not to start a new investigator(say, just before the AO awakens) and simply abandon the game, and if so, does that affect the final battle?

zealot12 said:

I don't think rules allow this kind of tactic (too easy retiring some investigators in order to have an easier final battle; try to go against Quachil with an 8-investigators party, or just with Patrice + Joe...). Or, at least, I'll never allow this to happen. If a player is fed up with the game and prefers having a walk, no probs, but his / her investigator(s) is (are) carried over by the remaining players

What you're talking about is essentially removing an investigator and dropping the whole investigator count by 1. Bear in mind that this is entirely in the realm of "house rules."

If you need to do that because someone has to leave and nobody will play his character for him, then oh well that happens sometimes. The idea is that the game should still be fair for the investigators (or rather, no more or less difficult than before) by adjusting things like the gate and monster limit accordingly. If, however, you're doing it as a tactic to help you win final battle, then that is certainly not fair. Not everybody can be helpful in final combat, and that's part of the challenge.