by MrTwister
I was in the OP's game session so I'm also very curious about how people are playing this Haunt.sirpoonga wrote:
When our group played this we thought it would be too easy to constantly do the trait rolls. So we treated it as though it was an attack that required a special type of roll (which is allowed in the rules). We ruled no revolver attack though, only in the same room. This seem to make more sense to give the horcruxes, I mean items, a chance to run away.
This is interesting. While the result of your approach is pretty much the same as what we ended up doing, I wouldn't play them as attacks; you are not exactly "fighting" the soulcruxes; they don't defend with a trait (which is required even by attacks using something other than might), you can't stun them nor steal from them, and you don't receive damage if you fail the roll.
I've been reading the manual a lot since the haunt, and confusingly enough the rulebook talks about haunt actions under two different concepts; Task rolls (as they are briefly mentioned in "Attempt a die roll", page 12) and haunt-specific actions (as they are called by the end of "Make an Attack", page 13). Both concepts seem to be used for the same thing. There is no glossary entry for "task roll" but the entry for haunt-specific action (p.21) uses an "exorcism roll" as example, which is also the same example used in the rulebook for a task roll in page 13.
Task rolls are treated in the same way as "trait rolls" are, with the extra instruction that even if a task can be accomplished by two different rolls (e.g: a sanity roll or a knowledge roll) you can only attempt one of them.
It's not clear however whether you can perform just one haunt-specific action per turn or as many as you want/can. Since task rolls are considered "die rolls", the common assumption is that you can perform any number of them during your turn as long as they are for different tasks. I've seen this discussed in the forums before for other haunts, and people always agree on this.
It would be interesting to discover if any official source suggests otherwise (i.e: That you can perform only one haunt-specific action during your turn), as this would solve this issue and probably would change the way a lot of haunts are played.
This is not really a far-fetched theory, and in fact it would be somehow similar to the way you played the haunt. The official instructions put a lot of emphasis on the fact that you can do both a haunt-specif action and an attack during your turn, as if people would somehow believe they are mutually exclusive. This clarification appears twice in the manual (p.13, p.21) and once in the FAQ (p.8). I can't think of a single reason for the designers to believe that people would be confused about that, unless "haunt-actions" were supposed to work in the same ways as attacks do; this is, that you can perform only one per turn, even if you have multiple targets in range.
The rulebook never says that you can do only one haunt-specific task per turn, but it neither says explicitly that you can do many.
sirpoonga wrote:
Also, since monsers can explore can they pick up cards from revealed rooms?
There's nothing in the rulebook about the way monsters would deal with events/omen/item cards, but the text does contain rules for the traitor, so I'd assume they do not pick cards even if they can explore the house.