Atut

Condition.

Cost: –.

Neutralne

Campaign mode only. Permanent. Limit 1 per deck. Purchase only at deck creation.

When you purchase this card, gain 10 experience.

For the remainder of the campaign, you cannot earn experience.

Billy Norrby
The Drowned City Investigator Expansion #95.
Ascetic

FAQs

No faqs yet for this card.

Reviews

I absolutely adore this card because it mitigates a core problem of this game that has existed since Dunwich: investigator death.

In the past, if you failed certain scenarios, were an unlucky Charon's Obol bearer, were Doomed, or just suffered enough trauma to kill or drive your investigator insane, you would have to restart mid to late campaign with a deck that is severely under-leveled for the scenarios you would be playing into. I’m sure at many tables, players opted instead to just be flexible with the rules in these tense moments (“oh did we remember to hunt with that enemy last round?” looks at damage on investigator card “yeah I’m sure we did”).

With Ascetic, it’s still not good, but it’s significantly less painful to have to start over with a fresh investigator late in a campaign. This is exactly the power level this card ought to be at because we still want death to feel bad, but not so bad that the campaign feels derailed or that players have to fight off the urge to cheat.

joshcurtis · 42
Honnestly, I think I have almost always considered the death of an investigator as the end of the campaign so that I didn't have to continue with a 0 XP deck. — AlexP · 261

I'm a newer player. A friend and I are playing through every campaign in a row. So far we have gotten to Dream Eaters, which needed us to make secondary characters. We both included this card in our decks for those characters (our "interns").

I found this card to be seriously mediocre on first reading, but after thinking about it more there were some situations where taking it makes sense. I will agree with the other review that the "correct" use of this card is to make swapping out to another investigator mid-campaign less painful, but I think that isn't the only use. I would not use it for every character or every campaign, but there are a few situations I think it is worth using even from mission one.

What does this do? In essence, it significantly front-loads your character's power curve. Your character goes into the campaign significantly more powerful than they otherwise would, at the expense of not having as much experience available at the end of the campaign. If you take this and In the Thick of It you can start the game with 13xp, not even counting any other shenanigans involving characters that start the game with xp, or other ways to upgrade cards without paying experience (for example, my character for Dream Eaters uses this and Down the Rabbit Hole to start the game with some unspent experience, then gets more value for it over time).

That seems like a bad deal initially. Campaigns are usually easiest in the beginning and get harder over time. Why would I want to make the already easy part even easier at the expense of making the hard parts even harder? Since this card significantly distorts the difficulty curve of a campaign, let's think about campaigns with weird difficulty curves.

Some campaigns start very difficult, then ease off for most of the rest, so being stronger at the beginning is actually helpful (Forgotten Age springs to mind). Some campaigns are very short, or otherwise don't give much experience, so you aren't really losing that much with this card (the intro campaign, or one half of Dream Eaters). Lastly, some decks just don't need all that much experience. They're fully functional at ~15 experience and don't get significantly better beyond that. In any of those cases this card is mostly upside.

Another hidden upside to this card is the simple fact that you no longer have to care about gaining experience. For us, that has definitely changed how we play the game, and can be surprisingly freeing. Victory locations are meaningless to you so there is no need to try and investigate them unless it contributes to completing the mission. Same with victory enemies. Don't even try to fight them, just evade them or otherwise go around. Heck, Unsolved Case, which taunts me every time I play my main character of Joe Diamond, is a completely dead card in a deck using Ascetic.

I have found this lack of care about experience to actually make the game easier, which is a potentially hidden upside.

Anyway, I hope that made some sense to you and may have encouraged you to take this card in a situation you otherwise wouldn't. I'm sure there are many things I haven't thought about, so please feel free to point them out in the comments. Have a great day and thank you for reading all this!

Jim_Bob · 17
Couldn't have said it better. — AlderSign · 345

Green Man Medallion can reduce the cost to zero. So u might see ascetic Jenny sitting in the corner, doing nothing but moving resources to her medallion, and finally resigning herself (Don't do this in the multiplayer game).

exin · 40
Also see: Down the Rabbit Hole, Arcane Research, Pelt Shipment, The Raven Quill, Adaptable, Déjà Vu, and Refine to circumvent the drawbacks of this card. — AlderSign · 345
So Investigators who start with XP like [Kymani Jones](/card/09008), and [Father Mateo](/card/04004), and [Roland Banks](/card/90024) and [In the Thick of It](/card/08125) means I can start with 18 XP? — EnderDragon · 1
Yes indeed! — AlderSign · 345
Does DtRHs increased costs trigger, when you create your deck? If not ascetic might be good for mystics due to thei massive discounts on spell upgrades — Tharzax · 1
I don't get the question... You choose the order in which you purchase / include cards in your deck, so you can just add DtRH as your last card during deck creation. — AlderSign · 345
That was, what I asked for, so thanks. — Tharzax · 1

One more thing this card is especially useful for is when you have a team of investigators who have different needs for experience.

If you're a survivor who finishes their core build by 13xp and just gets luxuries afterwards, maybe you should take this card and In the Thick of It. This will help your rogue teammate out - the power boost in early scenarios of the campaign will help you get more xp each scenario and your other teammates will get stronger faster.

Frost · 273