Yesterday night we played the scenario Astral Alchemy from the Streets of Arkham expansion for the first time and nailed it right away. We did play with a good (average?!) team (Finn Edwards, Ashcan Pete, Tommy Muldoon and Agnes Baker) and we did have good rolls but I didn’t expect it to go so smoothly. That made me wonder about the MoM difficulty rating system a bit… I don’t know, there have been 3-stars that we failed, more or less, spectacularly (like Behind Closed Doors or Murder on the Stargazer Majestic) and 5-stars that were relatively painless. I know that it might all just boil down to luck but I think that sometimes it’s the internal logic, the writers’ assumptions about what you should take away from each clue or encounter, that makes things difficult.
*** Spoiler alert ***
I remember that in MotSM we couldn’t really grab the meaning of the clues. Some were vague, some were ambiguous, some even conflicting. That might be the whole point of the story but I think you do need some thread that, after exploring everything, helps you paint a clear picture. Instead we failed, or rather I remember I failed, the “final question” quite hard.
On the other hand, AA was quite straightforward: list of things to grab. Once you got them you’d know. Deliver. The end. Lots of monsters since the very beginning (that’s where the luck factor kicks in) but you felt like you knew what you were doing. Probably too straightforward?!
I guess my point is either some scenarios are rated too harshly (like AA) or some are rated too lightly (like MotSM). So, don’t trust those 5-point stars!
