I remember on the old forums there were guidelines for points to spend on an investigator (or maybe someone had come up with a comparison). Points being 1 for 1 on each line of stats.

Does anyone know what they are?

How do you factor in focus and items?

I want to create some investigators but make sure they are on the same power level as the existing ones.

Thanks.

If you use Strange Eons to create investigators you won't have to worry about it. It automatically keeps tracks of stats and possessions and the like and tells you if your investigator is balanced or not. Nifty!

http://www.sfu.ca/~cjenning/eons/index.html

that is nifty, but I am an old fashioned pencil and paper type of rpger, where the maths is half the fun, so I need the figures.

I don't remember it all; here is what I remember, but I don't think it is all correct.

Points to Spend = 25
Starting Cursed = -5
1$ = 1
Starting Blessed = 5 or 10
1 Clue = 2

Sorry, but that is all I remember.

tamsyn said:

Here is the short version:

Stamina and Sanity sum to 10 (and should not usually go beyond 3/7 or 7/3).

Start with Focus 1, and all skills run 0 to 3. Spend 7 points to increase these: spend a point on focus to increase it by 1, spend a point on a stat to increase each number in the range by 1. (0/3 to 1/4, etc.)

For possesions, start with 1 Random Skill and spend $25 on extra equipment. Random common items are $3, uniques are $5, spells are $4, skills and allies are $10, clues are $2. Anything you don't spend is starting money. Fixed possessions cost their list price, but certain powerful items cost $1 extra (e.g., Tommy Gun).

You can find a more detailed guide on Board Game Geek, but it contains some errors and has not been updated to take expansions into account.

You'll find that Strange Eons offers a lot more options than either the summary above or the guide on BGG (not to mention that it lets you make over 30 other kinds of game components in addition to investigators). But it shows the cost for most of these options, so you could always use it to verify the cost of some design choice and still design the investigator by hand if you wanted. If you want an idea of how accurate it is, it could already recreate every investigator in Kingsport point-for-point (except for Chen, who is obviously radically different) the day it came out. In other words, it anticipated all of the new tweaks that were introduced with the KH investigators and got the costs right, too. (Either that, or the KH crew used SE to design the investigators.)

Cheers,
Chris

35$ total

3/0 Speed/ Sneak

3/0 Fight/ Will

3/0 Lore/Luck

1 Focus

go up the 17 all added

8$ for extra skill points

3$ commons

5$ uniques

2$ clues

1$ 1$

4$ spells

strange eons is quite explicit about costs so I would use that to ascertain the ratios if you are so against using the wonderful application itself.

Hope I didn't confuse anyone. I should have been a little clearer. When I said to spend 1 point to increase a stat by 1 (0/3 to 1/4), I meant one single stat (e.g. Speed 0 1 2 3 to Speed 1 2 3 4), not a pair of stats (e.g. Speed 0 / Sneak 3 to Speed 1 / Sneak 4).

Cheers,
Chris

wow that is brilliant thanks guys.

Joshua Marquart posted his deductions for the rules that the guys at FFG use at:

http://files.boardgamegeek.com/viewfile.php3?fileid=14843

Hope this helps even a little bit more...

The King in Green said:

Those are the rules I mentioned earlier in the thread. They are generally quite good, but as I said they have not been updated for new expansions and they do contain some errors.

Cheers,
Chris

Thelric said:

Oops, I didn't realize you meant the same thing...

The King in Green said:

No problem. Anyway, you looked up the link for anyone who is interested.