Dreamlands is a disordered place. Don't trust so easily. — MrGoldbee · 1450 9/16/21

Such a genuine surprise that people would spend (15*the number of investigator) actions to place clues on an 8-shroud location and try to discover said clues. In addition to that, deliberately avoiding unrevealed locations on a blind run for potential victory points. — toastsushi · 74 9/16/21

@toast TDE could well be your first campaign, so you might not know that. Also in the design space of Arkham, it's entirely possible that an agenda flip or resolution would reward you for not exploring. But that's a design problem inherent to blind plays of Arkham, where it sometimes turns into a game of "guess the designer's intention". It can be a bad experience if you guess wrong. — suika · 9406 9/16/21

to be fair, the card Text strongly suggests that staying there is possibly not the right thing to do. — PowLee · 20 9/16/21

Ditto what @PowLee says. Also, in a 2-player game, after spending 30 actions (with no time to deal with enemies), and then finding 10 clues on a 8 shroud location? Sure, technically not impossible, but on your first playthrough without being prepared for this location? Highly likely you misplayed something. — Nenananas · 251 9/16/21

I'm afraid, my friend, that you'll not find much sympathy here. On the other hand, if you don't want the game to be mean to you, this is maybe not the best game for you? — SGPrometheus · 809 9/16/21

The card explicitly says "but you feel you are missing something"... It's an 8 shroud location that requires three actions per clue just to place the clues, that you need to collect a ton of clues from, that even tells you that you are missing something. It's obvious that you aren't intended to attempt this ridiculous task on scenario 1. You can only blame yourself for this one. — Soul_Turtle · 441 9/16/21

One can call it obvious, but that doesn't really make sense considering that Arkham is a game about narratives and using the information in the narrative to navigate scenarios. The scenario plays up that you shouldn't leave the path, it is heavily established early and Arkham is a game where certain choices have long term consequences. You can't say "I didn't expect anyone to listen to what I told them to do" as a game designer, especially because this is literally playing on real world myths and fairy tales and it feels very much like it is tempting you to leave the path, rather than it being legitimate. It violates the normal rules of "Establish, Payoff" pretty heavily, and the capstone of why this 'tehehe' wink and nod moment didn't work is that Arkham is a NARRATIVE game, and it stands to reason that having the narrative say one thing and the mechanics try to tell you to do another isn't going to work out for many players. It is a suuuuuuper common pain point in dream eater playthroughs for a reason. — dezzmont · 212 9/16/21

It is not “obvious”. My blind run of this campaign was in three player. I was Patrice and I had built a deck packed with skill icons. I suggested to my group that I generate the clues and commit what I had to their tests and we aced it. Naturally, we later discovered how damaging this was, but in previous campaigns, you were generally awarded something regardless of the path you chose. You can burn down your house and get Lita and trauma, or you can forgo Lita for the house in next scenario and bonus XP. That’s how an RPG should run. This dream eater scenario definitely breeches some player trust because they rightfully and conditionally assume a “pure” avoidance of the woods will grant them a story path (not unlike doubt/conviction or circle undone allegiances). — LaRoix · 1643 9/16/21

I really think it's pretty obvious. There isn't a scenario 1 in any other campaign in the entire game that presents even an optional challenge anywhere close to "spend 3*5*playercount actions, then investigate an 8 shroud location 5*playercount times". On a card that says "but you feel that you are missing something". Did you not get even the slightest meta sense of "the requirements to do this task seem really overtuned for the first scenario in a campaign, and the card says we're missing something, if we do this we won't even see half of the locations in the scenario, maybe we aren't supposed to be doing this?" I'm not sure how it could be any more obvious, besides being outright impossible. Though to counter the handful of people who actually stayed on the path despite all of this, it probably would have been smarter design to just make it impossible outright. — Soul_Turtle · 441 9/20/21

As for Arkham being a narrative game, staying on the path does tell a narrative: the investigators were too scared to leave the path and didn't experience anything in the whole scenario, hence they gained no experience. Terrible gameplay? Sure. But it certainly does tell a narrative where you made a choice that has long-term consequences. — Soul_Turtle · 441 9/20/21

Well MJ has said that there was an alarming number of people who did not stray from the path. In a blind run, there’s a human tendency to not really absorb all the text coming at you. I don’t think it should have been made impossible; I think the designers put this option in, they should have rewarded the players who don’t stray (like give them scenario advantages in the next two scenarios since they won’t have XP). My problem isn’t that there’s no story different, but that there’s no incentive to take the road less traveled, so to speak. — LaRoix · 1643 9/21/21