Lola Haye's personal story. A ally card for a sucess, 4 doom tokens for a fail? That's not even enough time to close a gate and get to the boarding house! I mean, I'd be okay if the reward was ridiculously overpowered, but it's not, and there's no decent strategy to complete it! I say the fail condition should be jacked up to eight doom tokens.

Anyone else spot things in this game that you think are really unfair?

Perhaps it's because Lola's character stats add up to 1 more than for usual investigators. I wouldn't sweat it.

Yeah, you have a very short time in order to pass it. But in case you fail, there is nothing terrible happening to her. I mean, -1 SAN on a 6 san character isn't that bad, plus the character is really powerful if you know how to use it. So I guess her PS was done to rebalance a little the character.

It's not impossible to pass, anyway: you can have an ES as starting item (for any of your investigators), or you can be lucky and have also Marie in the party, or you can have one or two monster surges at the beginning of the game. I remember games I won with the doomtrack forced to zero (one against Y'bb, and one against Chaugnar Faugn, IIRC), so, technically, it's not impossible (a la Rita in an Abhoth game), just difficult. I'm hurted much more by Darrell's PS, for instance.

Julia said:

Darrell's Story SUCKS!!! He was my favorite Investigator until they SHACKLED him with a victory-killing Fail Condition!!!

(I house-rule his Fail to six or more Clues. Out of downright bitterness.)

Yeah they really messed up some of the personal stories. I was so excited when they originally announced them cause I saw them as a means to rebalance a lot of the characters and open up new gameplay options with them most notably the weaker characters like Amanda or Mark (which they failed to do). Instead we got some good ones and a handful of unfair/weak ones (like all the characters that need to spend 5 clues to pass).

This is one instance where I think they should have unofficially released it to the user base and have them play test it and give feedback before releasing it officially. So much wasted potential.

jgt: If you want, you can designate Darrell an Innsmouth-only investigator (that is, one you only use when Innsmouth is in play). That way, he can hit the First National Grocery for some Research Materials. Sure, it's still kind of dangerous because you might get a clue from an Other World encounter, but that should take off some of the sting.