Do you think that was the major stumbling block, the academics? Or did they get chance to shine in or other ways?I have started it multiple times and gotten as far as Egypt. It has a reputation for being an amazing adventure and I have found it to be too meat grinderish for my tastes. Of the main CoC adventures, I have played Shadows of Yog Sothoff all the way through, run Horror on the Orient Express all the way through and Masks is the only one we never were able to get through. The thing is, one of the GMs I ran it with is one of the best GMs out there and he couldn't get it to work ... so I'd say it's very challenging.
For me, it suffers from being more appropriate as a pulp adventure as academic characters will just die at certain parts. It definitely has a globe-hopping nature to it. Very Indiana Jones if you were.
We had gone through 16 characters before even leaving NY.I’ve played it through to completion with a relatively large group of college students so we were using the original publication (no Australia chapter). We finished in a term and everyone pretty much went through 2 investigators. So, ultimately about 16 characters. We had a GREAT time.
There is a ton of stuff for academics to do but then you move to combat. I have a couple of different funny stories to tell about the game.Do you think that was the major stumbling block, the academics? Or did they get chance to shine in or other ways?
I’m two thirds through The Enemy Within and the party are very combat capable and it seems like I have the opposite problem. Would a group of combat capable PCs make masks too easy?