Jupp. Any "A Monster appears!" encounters are nullified.

Hi All,

we just got the Curse of the dark Pharaoh expansion, and it's cool, but yesterday we had a problem. One investigator was in R'lyeh, and he draw the card you must immediately fight Cthulhu. Think about it: it's impossible to beat Cthulhu face-to-face! Cthulhu reduces (iwthout any checks) an investigator's max. sanity or max. stamina by 1 each round. That means that you have maximum 9 rounds to kill him, but he has more that 10 doom tokens. So did we misread the rules, or is it 100% impossible to beat Cthulhu? Or how do you play in these situations?

Imiface said:

You just need 13 hits on the first turn (his regeneration is nasty). With his -6 combat modifier, it's hard, but not impossible, especially if you came packing plenty of Clues, which you hoped to use to seal the gate. Shotgun can also help, so can Fight (or Grapple) Skills, Joe Diamond will just own Cthulhu if he has Clues. Check the FAQ for notes on final combat (which that encounter sorta is), you basically need X times Y successes (X = # of investigators, 1 in this case, Y = doom track length) to kill the GOO. Successes carry over and you can do any amount of damage in a single turn, you're not limited to 1 doom token removed.

Dam said:

Thank you! So do you mean by "Successes carry over and you can do any amount of damage in a single turn, you're not limited to 1 doom token removed" that if the investigator does a fight check with 8dice, and there are 5 successes, than he can remove 5 doom token removed?

Imiface said:

Yes. So if you're fighting Cthulhu on your own, you need a total of 13 successes before you get devoured. Cthulhu will be regaining 1 Doom token per turn (which means 1 more success needed) but it is still quite possible to beat him in that situation, if you're well armed.

This is the single most common rules mistake that AH fans make, by the way. Everyone makes this mistake, because there'a a paragraph in the rulebook which is just a total lie. It says something like "the number of successes reset after you remove a Doom token". They don't. There's no upper limit on how many Doom tokens you can removed in a turn; successes carry over from one turn to the next.

My group tracks AO 'hit points' during the final battle using a D100, and whenever an AO regains a Doom token that's just the equivalent of adding 4 hit points back (or however many it is).

Cool, thanks, everything is clear now.

Until now, we always hurried to seal as much gates as possible, to avoid the Great Old One to awake, because it seemed to be invincible... But from now on, we change our strategy.

Imiface said:

Boo, hiss, NOOOOOO!

I personally count final combat "wins" as draws, preferring to count close/seal wins as true wins. Well, those and that one game in which "Join the Winning Team" was completed .

Dam said:

Do you have Kingsport?

Because no one in their right mind will count an Epic Battle victory as a draw. It's easier to seal gates.

Dam said:

You're insulting the memory of all the investigators who have valiantly died in order to let my group beat up Atlach-Nacha!

I can see why a Final Battle win could be called a draw if you tried to seal a load of gates and failed, but if you gear up for the final battle for the whole game (like my group often does) I don't see why it's any less a victory than any other type. It's not like it's too easy, after all. Even if you treat the main game like an extended shopping trip, you still have to keep gates/monsters under control, and it's not like it's a sure thing that you'll get the stuff you need to beat the AO.

thecorinthian said:

I just can't even imagine playing in a game where people just gear up from the word go. I think I'd be bored to death in about 2 rounds. Curious though, since your aim is to gear for the final combat, why do you need to bother with keeping gates/monsters in check? X amount of open gates wakes the GOO, no hassle of waiting for the doom track, all you'd need to do is get geared up when that happens. Killing monsters only to fuel your shopping, otherwise never leaving stable locations.

Tell the players at the beginning of the game that when the AO awakens, you add 6 doom tokens to the AO, and remove two per seal on the board.

Then tell them they're free to gear up from the start. See how long they last

Dam said:

Really it's just a question of how co-ordinated you are. If everyone agrees to go for a sealing victory from the word 'go', then you've got a good chance - but if your set of investigators isn't very well suited to that, or you get a bad set of Mythos cards, you have to decide whether it's worth sinking loads of the group's clue tokens into seals whcih may not help (and may not even remain on the board).

Preparing for the final battle doesn't just mean shopping for items. The most reliable long-term investigator upgrades are usually Allies, and it's often more efficient to get gate trophies than monster trophies.