So, I have nothing to do at the moment...here's another random hypothetical. The details aren't important for this one, but I'll fill them in anyway.

The game is not going well. A number of gates are open, the Doom track is filling up, and our man Bob Jenkins needs to do something. He's saddled with Hearing Loss and Local Guide, but he's gotten an Elder Sign and aims to head over to Dunwich, where the easiest OW gate is. His Sneak is stuck at 0, and he doesn't have any weapons or clues, but he's desperate. He takes the train to Dunwich and stops at Wizard Hill, so that if any monsters emerge from the nearby gates, he won't have to tangle with them (unless they're blocking the way to his gate of choice). The Mythos phase sees the activation of Sunny and Clear. There's a gate at the Black Cave, and the monster surge sends a few fast monsters hurtling into the Dunwich vortices, awakening the Dunwich Horror on top of poor Bob. With Sunny and Clear and Hearing Loss giving him a Sneak penalty and no clues or other way to get a chance to roll, he resigns himself to being knocked unconscious, driven insane, or whatever the Dunwich Horror has in store for him. He draws a card...and gets the one that summons a monster on a failure. The entire monster cup is emptied onto Sentinel Hill, and then the Ancient One wakes up.

Alright, this is really, really, really unlikely, but in addition to being a rather interesting way for the AO to wake up, it's also the only way I can think of for the AO to wake up from the monster cup being empty. Any probability experts care to speculate whether this is more or less likely than the monster cup being emptied normally (without the AO waking up from monster overflow in Arkham at terror 10)? Or can you think of another way for the monster cup to empty without willful stupidity on the players' part?

In theory a series of events could conspire to prevent access to the Miskatonic streets or an inconvenient order of draws, allowing the Terrible Experiment to run wild if you manage to keep on top of everything else.

Playing with the Black Goat of the Woods might help your odds in any attempt due to splitting into two pools each correspondingly lower than normal.

I think generally you're looking at methods by which monsters are drawn beyond the normal 'once per event' methods of gate opening/encounters and there aren't many of them.

Well, The Terrible Experiment is almost certainly going to wake up the AO from overflow in Arkham rather than the monster cup emptying. Good point about the Black Goat, though. In fact, I can't say that I'm sure whether emptying the hexagon cup wouldn't wake up the AO. Anyone have an input on that?

Walk said:

It sounds like a fun challenge, but I suspect that the probabilities can't be calculated. Only 11 monsters can normally occupy Arkham and the Outskirts (plus up to another nine on the One Thousand Young card and maybe a few other cards that hold monsters). Theoretically, an unlimited number could occupy Dunwich or the other towns, but if ALL the monsters were somehow in Dunwich or Kingsport, they'd be constantly getting funneled into vortexes.

I guess there could be an unlimited number of monsters up in Innsmouth moving back and forth between the street areas. In other for that to happen, you'd need to have several monster surges in which most of the monsters emerge in EOD or Marsh Refinery. Then, you'd need to rarely get two in a row of the same kind of monster movement (e.g., you couldn't get two black moon symbols in a row). Otherwise, the monsters would end up at Sargent's Bus Service, which funnels them into a vortex.

What are the odds of all that happening? Pretty low. The best chance of it happening would be if there were eight players, since each monster surge would drain the monster cup by eight monsters. If it was an eight player game, and the first six cards were all EOD, then you'd have 40 monsters in Innsmouth. And if all the monsters were doing the Innsmouth two-step (i.e., not moving into vortexes), they could be on the board for a while.

Of course, that's assuming that the players aren't killing monsters and spending the trophies. And it also depends on how many monsters are in the cup at the beginning of the game.

Drawing the Dunwich Horror card is probably the most likely scenario for completely draining the monster cup.

Also, if Bob is on Wizard's Hill, why does the DH appear on top of him?

avec said:

'Cos Bob summoned it . He was having financial issues.

I think you'd have to be extraordinaraly lucky/unlucky to deplete the cup via monster surges in Innsmouth. With aound 100 monster sin the cup from Innsmouth and basic, even an 8 player game would need around ten monster surges before you deplete. Even chucking MH in, the number of gate openings in Innsmouth is only around 30% ish and half of those are Devil's Reef/Y'an so you're looking at what - around 70 Mythos cards? 35 with Fine manipulation.

I think you're intothe realms of deliberately tweaking the game to go long at that point - which falls afoul of the 'investigator stupidity' clause.

On the plus side, you don't need to worry about maintaining an Innsmouth two-step - surely a cat lover at Joe Sergeant's would prevent vortex loss.

Regrding the Terrible Experiment - it's a stretch but the assumption is the investigators are killing them periodically but not quite depleting the card before going insane/unconcious and don't have the opportunity to spend them. Otherwise they'd fail the Rumour.

VinceT said:

That would require the cat god to be in play, for the investigator to have the money to get into town and feed the strays, and for the investigator to consistantly pass the Martial Law check, and for there to be no surges on Devil Reef or Y'ha-Nthlei.

Yes, aside from the Innsmouth scenario, the only other possibility I can think of is that the investigators are collecting mountains of monster trophies and refusing to spend them. It's conceivable in a Tsathoggua game, I guess.

The question was whether the monster cup could be drained without rule tweaking or deliberate stupidity on the part of the investigators. It can happen, I think, but it's very unlikely.

Still, never say never. In my first Shadowrun game, a player rolled 9 dice and got 14 successes. The odds of that happening were 0.000775%, or around 1 in 200,000.

Tibs said:

You could also park Wendy there.

Whoops. Yes, I meant Sentinel Hill.

One wonders at the inclusion of the monster cup restriction. I supppose it's really there as a sort of warning to players; it's not actually supposed to come into play, but without it, people could drain the monster cup and thus mitigate or cancel monster spawns.

avec said:

Indeed. I take it you never read Vince T's account of how he did exactly that in the pursuit of the Highest Scoring Game, and the only "tweaking" I could see was choosing his AO and Investigators for the task instead of random draw. Everything else was luck and strategy. Extremely impressive.

www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp

jgt7771 said:

That's um, huh. Wow. It never occurred to me to hoard monster trophies for their point values.

I'll have to read the paper more carefully, but if Vince T really did drain the cup, he must have come very close to losing the game by having an empty monster cup.

avec said:

Indeed. He had a strategy for that, making sure the Cup always had two monsters, one of them being The Black Man Mask, whom is completely unattainable through conventional combat...the perfect recycler. He used a lot of those "cheap tricks" we all thought were cool, but never wanted to stoop to use in regular gameplay: constant Scrounging of Eltdown Shards, Red Signing away "Endless" (plus Legrasse), etc. It was a hell of a lot of spinning plates to keep all his eyes on. Masterful planning and execution.

avec said:

I'd like to think I had it under control, even if strictly speaking I danced incredibly close to the line. I'd chosen Nyarle partly to enusre there were plenty of Endless monsters and that plus tactical spending on tokens meant I felt I had enough means to keep some in the cup. I'd honestly forgotten about the Black Man being almost immune to being taken as a trophy (I suppose you could hang out in the graveyard hoping to randomly grab him by encounter if you felt lucky). Having Summon Monster on Daisy with Zebulon then let me fine tune how many were coming out the cup in a turn. If I were to do it again, I'd consider Yorrick so that monsters could be put back in the cup at virtually any time by his ability to replace clues with them.

The last few turns took some planning, but it was all about arranging things so a gate opened when there were only 2 monsters in the cup then closing it via Daisy's Tome as well as the one other gate open having an investigator on it in the normal fashion. That meant Fine had to be kept on standby as the only thing that was really going to lose me it via monster depletion was two in a row on Mythos of monster surge or 'X monsters appear in...'.

I deliberately kept some less than stellar mythos cards towards the end, because I was so paranoid about that.

I didn't actually think to Red Sign Endless till about the second or third time, and for the entire game I completely forgot you're allowed an additional open gate when playing with Innsmouth and Dunwich - so thought I was closer to calamity on a few more occasions than I was.

I still think the cheapest trick is Find Gate/White Ship. Other stuff is low, and probably not thematic- but that combination not only seems anti-thematic but also quite clearly against one of the fundamental game mecahnics.