Another broken combo

By AVEC2, in Arkham Horror Second Edition

Roland Banks and the Press Pass

Assuming he passes his personal story (which isn't hard), if he has fewer than four Clue tokens, he gains one Clue token during the Upkeep. On turn 1, he doesn't use his Press Pass and he gains one Clue token. On turn 2, he uses the Press Pass and gains two more. On turn 3, he does the same thing, bringing his total up to five Clue tokens. He doesn't need anything but the Press Pass and his own Intuitiveness to make this happen, so he literally cannot be stopped. The best part is, he can go through a gate with no Clues and he'll have five by the time he returns to Arkham. And if he has to spend Clues in the Other World, no biggie. Once he returns to Arkham, he can just hang out with a Explored token until he's back up to five.

I realize the Press Pass is exploitable in all kinds of ways, but this is just ridiculous. William and Roland are currently wiping the floor with Tsathoggua. William cares not that the Science Building is closed.

Rex Murphy has more fun shenanigans to pull with the press pass. It's not uncommon to net 5 clues in one turn with him.

avec said:

I realize the Press Pass is exploitable in all kinds of ways, but this is just ridiculous.

...and the very next time this happens in one of your games, we promise to treat it as the game-shattering threat that it is. Your concern is important to us. Please stay on the line.

It doesn't "break the game" if it requires a grand statistical coincidence. (Which I'm sure you can now compute for us?) But you indeed have my heartfelt condolences for your easy win.

gui%C3%B1o.gif gran_risa.gif gui%C3%B1o.gif gran_risa.gif gui%C3%B1o.gif

The problem here is not the combo. As we're all aware, it's the Press Pass itself.

The fact of the matter is that Press Pass is too strong, period. There should have been just one copy of it, and it should have cost about $7. If you get one, good for you! Imagine what Patrice can do with the thing straight out of the box.

To give you an idea how screwed up I feel this item is, you may recall all the fuss I caused constantly about "Call Ancient One" and its potential exploits. I threatened to take it out of my set but wound up leaving it in the end. However, I still removed one copy of Press Pass. It is the only card I've taken out of my set.

Again, y'all keep throwing out EXTREME circumstances. What if Patrice...? What if Roland...? Okay...what if Vincent? Or Bob? Or Mary? Or the other (conservative estimate) 40+ Investigators that don't have some Clue-gathering trick?

Is it reeeeeeally that one extra Clue per turn RUINS your games? (Hunh...I think I say that about Mandy too: "One extra reroll?") And are your games really so forgiving as to allow you a Press Pass use EVERY turn? How often do you actually see a Press Pass in our towering Common Item decks?

Yes, I don't get it. Is this a Speed Arkham thing? Is it because I never have the great amount of unstable locations in use? Funny how I never thought about that until just now: when you put out the maximum amount of unstable Locations in order to mass-produce Gates, aren't you also providing a more fertile ground for Clues to grow? Out of twenty Locations, how often are you unable to place a Clue per turn because there's a Gate there? (When FFG started sprinkling Clues on stable locations, that must have hurt.) Maybe I've just never seen a time when a Press Pass wasn't a welcome help in a Clue-scarce game.

1 card in X...Y Investigators in 48...whatever extra odds needed (like Roland's story, or maybe Tony's story, etc.) to manage such exploits...it feels just like that ancient day when Mandy helped Joe shotgun Yig in one blow. Lucky, not broken. But then sometimes "lucky" seems to be a fairly profane word around here.

(Call Ancient One is a STUPID card. It is a "mechanics" card, a metagaming card, a card that has NO BUSINESS being in a cooperative game. Yes, ha ha, great for a laugh, but the only time it is ever used is because 1) you're losing so bad, you want an extra advantage (in which case you don't deserve it), or 2) you have a loophole you want to exploit, like Hastur on a zeroed Terror Track (in which case you don't deserve it). Not to mention how blasphemously theme-breaking it is. STUPID CARD.)

Well... Press pass isn't such a big deal to me since A) I almost never use Mandy B) I basically never use Patrice C) Rex is a mixed blessing (or a mixed cursing to be a bit more accurate) D)I almost never shop for common items, so it rarely comes up in games. It's pretty strong with Roland, but I wouldn't say it's "broken." Just very strong. If you get lucky enough to get it in the early game. It's not like the common deck is so small (and there are only two of them), so you'd have to rely on luck to get one (or a really large team of item hunters, in which case you could have probably won in an easier way by some other technique).

I do loathe Call Ancient One though... I don't know why they didn't just call it Summon Win.

jgt7771 said:

avec said:

I realize the Press Pass is exploitable in all kinds of ways, but this is just ridiculous.

...and the very next time this happens in one of your games, we promise to treat it as the game-shattering threat that it is. Your concern is important to us. Please stay on the line.

It doesn't "break the game" if it requires a grand statistical coincidence. (Which I'm sure you can now compute for us?) But you indeed have my heartfelt condolences for your easy win.

gui%C3%B1o.gif gran_risa.gif gui%C3%B1o.gif gran_risa.gif gui%C3%B1o.gif

Er, it actually is happening right now. William and Roland vs Tsathoggua. William started with a Press Pass. Then he thought, hey, what if I give it to Roland? Well, what's happened is that the clues on the board have pretty much dried up, but neither of us care. See, the thing is, once Roland collected five clues to pass his personal story, he found that he didn't need to collect any more clues again EVER. He can go straight from gate to gate, sealing them pretty much automatically.

Also, the odds of randomly drawing Roland and randomly drawing a Press Pass? Yeah, I could compute that. But remember, jgt, the power to say that 2+2=4 does not rest with avec alone. It is your inheritance and your birthright. Be well.

It is a really good combo though...

avec said:

It is your inheritance and your birthright. Be well.

Aw, geez, really? Now I'm just gonna embarrass myself...

Are you playing with "everything" everything? How many Common Cards is that? A hundred? Can I just round that off? So, 2/100 or 1/50. And Roland, presumably, is 1/48. So I guess that's 1/50 * 1/48 or 1/2400. So a Press Pass-starting Roland happens once every 2000 games or so. (PLEASE don't make me figure out the extra odds of starting with Ryan Dean with a Press Pass; that can't be all that significant, can it?)

However, you said William got the Press Pass. So, I guess it would be quite a bit less than 1/2400, depending on number of Investigators with Common Item possessions. So that could go down quite significantly with each extra Common Item pull (1/2400 to 1/1200 to 1/800 to...) I'm going to assume it's not going to matter much that not all of the 48 Investigators start with a random Common Item.

Plus, it's impossible to calculate the chances of drawing a Press Pass DURING any game. Well, I suppose it isn't IMPOSSIBLE, but waaaay too much work to figure out.

So, I don't know...can we "round" it to, say, once in every three hundred games?

That's why I said the NEXT time this happens. I really am sorry that you're finding this particular circumstance so irritating, but since it's fairly unlikely to happen to you again, I don't see why it warrants "game-breaking".

................................have you tried taking the Press Pass away from Roland?

jgt7771 said:

avec said:

It is your inheritance and your birthright. Be well.

Aw, geez, really? Now I'm just gonna embarrass myself...

Are you playing with "everything" everything? How many Common Cards is that? A hundred? Can I just round that off? So, 2/100 or 1/50. And Roland, presumably, is 1/48. So I guess that's 1/50 * 1/48 or 1/2400. So a Press Pass-starting Roland happens once every 2000 games or so. (PLEASE don't make me figure out the extra odds of starting with Ryan Dean with a Press Pass; that can't be all that significant, can it?)

However, you said William got the Press Pass. So, I guess it would be quite a bit less than 1/2400, depending on number of Investigators with Common Item possessions. So that could go down quite significantly with each extra Common Item pull (1/2400 to 1/1200 to 1/800 to...) I'm going to assume it's not going to matter much that not all of the 48 Investigators start with a random Common Item.

Plus, it's impossible to calculate the chances of drawing a Press Pass DURING any game. Well, I suppose it isn't IMPOSSIBLE, but waaaay too much work to figure out.

So, I don't know...can we "round" it to, say, once in every three hundred games?

That's why I said the NEXT time this happens. I really am sorry that you're finding this particular circumstance so irritating, but since it's fairly unlikely to happen to you again, I don't see why it warrants "game-breaking".

................................have you tried taking the Press Pass away from Roland?





Hmmm, okay, I think I see the problem here. I'm saying that the combo is broken. I'm not saying that the combo breaks the game . We got the combo in a game that we're playing, it annoyed me, I posted about it. End of story. Sure, I could take the Press Pass away from Roland. I could also have William stop using his Gladius of Carcosa and his Carbine Rifle. But that's not really my style. I like to make the game hard and then play to win.

That's all I'm trying to say. We gave Roland the Press Pass and it worked so well that it sucked the tension out of the game. I'm not trying to tell you to do anything different when you play.

avec said:

Hmmm, okay, I think I see the problem here. I'm saying that the combo is broken. I'm not saying that the combo breaks the game . We got the combo in a game that we're playing, it annoyed me, I posted about it. End of story. Sure, I could take the Press Pass away from Roland. I could also have William stop using his Gladius of Carcosa and his Carbine Rifle. But that's not really my style. I like to make the game hard and then play to win.

That's all I'm trying to say. We gave Roland the Press Pass and it worked so well that it sucked the tension out of the game. I'm not trying to tell you to do anything different when you play.

Yeah. I got it ;'D

I don't like playing Jaqueline, Mandy, Patrice, or even Daisy for similar reasons (although I don't mind playing Daisy without alchemy, or in only a three investigator game vs. something very tough). And when I play Ashcan, I don't exploit his ability with 1 dollar.

avec said:

Hmmm, okay, I think I see the problem here. I'm saying that the combo is broken. I'm not saying that the combo breaks the game . We got the combo in a game that we're playing, it annoyed me, I posted about it. End of story. Sure, I could take the Press Pass away from Roland. I could also have William stop using his Gladius of Carcosa and his Carbine Rifle. But that's not really my style. I like to make the game hard and then play to win.

That's all I'm trying to say. We gave Roland the Press Pass and it worked so well that it sucked the tension out of the game. I'm not trying to tell you to do anything different when you play.

Ah. Okay, gotcha. I overestimated your "rage". Oops.

Then...I don't know...there's only two choices: A) Remove the combo, or enough singular aspects of it to keep it from happening again; or B) accept that, as blazingly nasty as you've made the game, there are still going to be a few lucky happenstances that will thwart your attempts to get burned, and be zen about it. Because I think that, as much as I've witnessed dozens of masochistic veterans here vent about how darn easy "Circumstance X" made last night's game, you are never going to find all the ways the game is going to accidentally bend over for you.

And really, isn't that part of why AH is so great? happy.gif

Press pass is pretty powerful at any time. I remember one time my friend got the encounter at Harney Jones' Shack that said

Harney's shed is overflowing with odds and ends. "Take some of this junk off my hands," he says. Search the Common Item deck for any one non-Weapon card and take it.

So he's looking through the deck and getting more anoyed that most of the expensive items are weapons and he's thinking of taking a motorcycle but then he comes across press pass and there was no longer and question in his mind what to take.

jgt7771 said:

Ah. Okay, gotcha. I overestimated your "rage". Oops.

Heh, no worries. happy.gif

If the Press Pass keeps pissing me off, I'll probably remove it from the game. Between Press Pass and Arcane Insight, I'm starting to wonder if KiY is one of the more broken expansions. I hope not, 'cause I love it.