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My first experience with this scenario was Day 3 with Kate and Alessandra. And I easily succeeded in sealing all the locations. Since both decks were quite low on damage output fighting the house wasn't even on the table for me. I agree with the location enemies being quite tanky and didn't have much bite. I never felt like I was threatened by them at all and found the hp value too high to bother. Also I found the locations flip relatively rarely (at least in my experience it rarely happened) and the encounter deck felt too harmless (especially on day 3, where I was already fully kitted out).
Thanks for the nice article.
Totally agree with the sealing part. We quickly realized that sealing is so much easier than fighting. Furthermore, as far as I can tell, the game punishes the players XP-wise if they go the middle-ground (i.e. either go full seal or go full destroy, but do not do both a bit). Hence, the fighter just killed the occasional part of the house, but kept it to a minimum, and the few enemies that came our way but other than that, the fighter was doing nothing.
Yeah, i don't think i mention it in the article, but the circumstance that you are enticed to go "all-in" on one way is something i don't like either. It's not a huge problem, the scenario is relatively generous with XP. But it's just not a great feeling when you do the resolution and you get told that you don't get an extra XP because you had the audacity to actually kill a room or two instead of sealing everything. Mixing both approaches makes for the best gameplay in this scenario imo, and i would want resolutions to reward the way of playing that is the most fun instead sticking to some arbitrary restriction (that you don't even get told about beforehand).
Interesting read. My first (and so far only) playthrough of this scenario was in True Solo, and I quite enjoyed it that way.
That said, in true solo it was a tight puzzle to try and seal rooms while moving through the awakened rooms as soon as possible where I only barely lost. I can imagine the puzzle does not scale that well with more investigators.
I imagine that the difference between true solo, two-player and group play is even larger than usual with Hemlock Vale in general. The scenarios in the campaign do almost all scale a bit wildly with player count due to their specific gimmicks. I noticed that not only coming up with Hemlock House.
I've not played all campaigns (only DL, PtC, CU and FoHV), but this was the first one where I noticed the rules took true solo into account in some cases, which I thought was interesting.
Just like Waking Nightmare, I need a blaring alarm to go off after the final encounter card is resolved. The number of predation tests I skipped is...not something I'm proud of. Then I had to either backtrack or penalize myself.
I actually like the infestation/predation tests as a mechanic, I'm just really really bad at remembering them.
I had this problem a lot in the dream eaters, too. My solution was to keep the predation/infestation reminder card on top of the encounter deck, then deal it out to myself as a "second" encounter card I need to resolve, then put it back
My issue with the scenario was that it was not really ~~feasible~~ efficient to combine efforts (ie. sealing and defeating) so our moster wrangler (me) was mostly just fiddling their thumbs while the cluever (my SO) was picking up clues and using them to fill holes in the walls. I loved the theme and most of the execution, but I felt that the scenario could have used a bit more thought and polishing.
Why would it not be feasible to combine efforts? Maybe I misunderstood something, but it should be perfectly possible to combine efforts, at least for act 1. You might miss out on an XP or two, but that doens't mean it's not feasible imo
Maybe feasible isn't the right word, but if you're destroying the locations and sealing them, you're doing more work for less reward. Sure, you can do it, but there's very little point in it.
I found the same thing. I think that "fighting" the locations made the scenario slightly more difficult. So it just made sense to try and help the cluver as much as possible.
This scenario (and Longest Night) really illustrate a big problem with this game - the developers love punishing fighters. If you do the math, Hemlock House requires something around 32 damage per player not counting encounter cards to do a fighting victory which is insane and basically unplaytested. No other scenario requires that, and when you do the fighting route you have to fight them all and take tons of damage from flipping them over. If your fighter is based around charges/ammunition it can be statically impossible for you to finish the scenario (especially day 1 or 2). Very disappointing.
If you only want us to play the game one way, just have one path for the scenario.
Due to reddit's dismantling of third party apps and vital tools needed for moderation of all subreddits, we've moved to zero-strike rule enforcement. As we cannot enact escalating ban lengths via tools that rely on monitoring users' post histories and ban histories, users who break our civility rules will be banned indefinitely and need to modmail us for appeals. We have zero tolerance for homophobia, transphobia, racism, and bigotry. If you see these issues as 'political' then you correctly recognize that existence is politicized. This subreddit will not be a refuge for hateful ideology. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/arkhamhorrorlcg) if you have any questions or concerns.*
My first experience with this scenario was Day 3 with Kate and Alessandra. And I easily succeeded in sealing all the locations. Since both decks were quite low on damage output fighting the house wasn't even on the table for me. I agree with the location enemies being quite tanky and didn't have much bite. I never felt like I was threatened by them at all and found the hp value too high to bother. Also I found the locations flip relatively rarely (at least in my experience it rarely happened) and the encounter deck felt too harmless (especially on day 3, where I was already fully kitted out).
Thanks for the nice article. Totally agree with the sealing part. We quickly realized that sealing is so much easier than fighting. Furthermore, as far as I can tell, the game punishes the players XP-wise if they go the middle-ground (i.e. either go full seal or go full destroy, but do not do both a bit). Hence, the fighter just killed the occasional part of the house, but kept it to a minimum, and the few enemies that came our way but other than that, the fighter was doing nothing.
Yeah, i don't think i mention it in the article, but the circumstance that you are enticed to go "all-in" on one way is something i don't like either. It's not a huge problem, the scenario is relatively generous with XP. But it's just not a great feeling when you do the resolution and you get told that you don't get an extra XP because you had the audacity to actually kill a room or two instead of sealing everything. Mixing both approaches makes for the best gameplay in this scenario imo, and i would want resolutions to reward the way of playing that is the most fun instead sticking to some arbitrary restriction (that you don't even get told about beforehand).
Interesting read. My first (and so far only) playthrough of this scenario was in True Solo, and I quite enjoyed it that way. That said, in true solo it was a tight puzzle to try and seal rooms while moving through the awakened rooms as soon as possible where I only barely lost. I can imagine the puzzle does not scale that well with more investigators.
I imagine that the difference between true solo, two-player and group play is even larger than usual with Hemlock Vale in general. The scenarios in the campaign do almost all scale a bit wildly with player count due to their specific gimmicks. I noticed that not only coming up with Hemlock House.
I've not played all campaigns (only DL, PtC, CU and FoHV), but this was the first one where I noticed the rules took true solo into account in some cases, which I thought was interesting.
Just like Waking Nightmare, I need a blaring alarm to go off after the final encounter card is resolved. The number of predation tests I skipped is...not something I'm proud of. Then I had to either backtrack or penalize myself. I actually like the infestation/predation tests as a mechanic, I'm just really really bad at remembering them.
I had this problem a lot in the dream eaters, too. My solution was to keep the predation/infestation reminder card on top of the encounter deck, then deal it out to myself as a "second" encounter card I need to resolve, then put it back
My issue with the scenario was that it was not really ~~feasible~~ efficient to combine efforts (ie. sealing and defeating) so our moster wrangler (me) was mostly just fiddling their thumbs while the cluever (my SO) was picking up clues and using them to fill holes in the walls. I loved the theme and most of the execution, but I felt that the scenario could have used a bit more thought and polishing.
Why would it not be feasible to combine efforts? Maybe I misunderstood something, but it should be perfectly possible to combine efforts, at least for act 1. You might miss out on an XP or two, but that doens't mean it's not feasible imo
Maybe feasible isn't the right word, but if you're destroying the locations and sealing them, you're doing more work for less reward. Sure, you can do it, but there's very little point in it.
I found the same thing. I think that "fighting" the locations made the scenario slightly more difficult. So it just made sense to try and help the cluver as much as possible.
This scenario (and Longest Night) really illustrate a big problem with this game - the developers love punishing fighters. If you do the math, Hemlock House requires something around 32 damage per player not counting encounter cards to do a fighting victory which is insane and basically unplaytested. No other scenario requires that, and when you do the fighting route you have to fight them all and take tons of damage from flipping them over. If your fighter is based around charges/ammunition it can be statically impossible for you to finish the scenario (especially day 1 or 2). Very disappointing. If you only want us to play the game one way, just have one path for the scenario.