Asset. Body

Item. Clothing.

Cost: 1.

Neutral
Health: 1. Sanity: 1.

Reduce the difficulty of skill tests you perform during 'parley' actions by 2.

There's nothing quite like the feel of silk against your skin.
Jeff Lee Johnson
Where Doom Awaits #272.
Fine Clothes

FAQs

(from the official FAQ or responses to the official rules question form)
  • Any skill tests you perform nested within a parley action have their difficulty reduced by 2, too.
Last updated

Reviews

I can't offer a purely statistical justification for this card. It's hard to make a case for it in a generic deck. And yet... it will win you scenarios. It is the Robert Horry of cards -- mediocre numbers, magical late-game performance. I am almost positive that there will be a time in your campaign, if you start with this card, when you will fall in love with it. Recruiting Randolph Carter, coaxing Peter Clover out of the club, mollifying the suspicious Josef Meiger -- these are the tests that having you digging around for five minutes in the chaos bag because you're so terrified about what you might pull out. Maybe there are monsters bearing down on you. Maybe the chaos clock is about to strike 12. Maybe your interlocutor is programmed to jump you if you fail the check. You just know you can't fail. And if you have your Fine Clothes on, you probably won't. It seems like an absurdly situational card, because the tests it deals with (for the most part) are located on unique enemies or locations or other scenario cards -- the sorts of things you don't think much about when designing a general, all-purpose deck. Nevertheless, Parley actions are actually reasonably common, as previous reviewers have pointed out, and when they show up, you often HAVE to pass them to proceed. It's not like cluevering or dealing with monsters, where you often have a range of options. Partly for this reason, Parley actions tend to be some of the most consequential in the game. And their corresponding skill checks -- nasty indeed! All the more so because you tend to make them late in scenarios, when the ugly tokens (I'm looking at you, skull!) have gotten even uglier. Who cares if Fine Clothes does nothing but soak a bit of damage for three scenarios in a row? In the fourth, it's going to be the difference between ekeing out a win that you replay in your head for days, or pulling the -3 and staring at in your palm for days.

I think including Fine Clothes as a one of in any solo deck is usually a good call. In fact at any player count if you can draw/search your deck well enough, Fine Clothes becomes an amazing card. Essential for toolbox decks imo because yeah, Parleys are common enough. I find myself taking this more and Leather Coat less these days. — StyxTBeuford · 12985
I don't think there's a more perfect card for Adaptable in the game :) — bee123 · 31
I always put it in my solo decks that avoid fighting. A successful parley often sends the enemy straight to the victory display — Skrattmas · 9

Okay, the Parley bit is interesting ... but - just how many Parley actions are there in the game so far? Not many, so let's ignore that...

1 cost for 1 health and 1 horror. And it's an Item, so Scavenging might work well with it. Also, it's the first body slot card to offer some level of horror protection, which is interesting too.

On balance, it's probably not as good as Leather Coat, but it's not disappointing for the cost, and I find horror is often more of a problem than health. It's also much cheaper than Bulletproof Vest in terms of XP.

I could imagine using this with a Rex Murphy Scavenging build, or perhaps Jim Culver Scavenging with the right ally cards.

One down-side - this has the creepiest card art in the game. Is that a mannequin? Scary.

AndyB · 944
Is really good for Carnevale of Horrors so far — jd9000 · 73
In the first two Dunwich scenarios the parley checks are kind-of important, so I tent to put Fine Clothes into deck with the intent to replace it later. — Magnificate · 1209
*Minor spoiler ahead:* In certrain scenario's where you encounter nasty treacheries that make you discard assets in play, this little neutral card i great as asset discard fodder. You're gonna cry when that treachery comes up after you just put your lightning gun as only asset into play — Heyenzzz · 7081
As of the release of Path to Carcossa, 8 of the 15 existing scenarios have a parley action on at least one card, and most of those require skill checks and have big payoffs. — Sechen · 53
Perfect for Eternal Slumber — ifergus · 1
Preston needs this, if only for the theming. — grenadillaGoat · 21
NIGHT OF THE ZEALOT *spoiler Alert* - does it work for those parley tests with the top cultists in Midnight Masks, please? — brennalex · 7
@brennalex *spoiler alert* Most of them don't actually involve tests, but a couple of the 'Return To' cultists are effected. Jeremiah's has a test, and Alma makes you draw encounter cards which may cause you to make skill tests nested within her Parley action. — Death by Chocolate · 1447

Oof. What a card. Cripplingly over-specialized, and subpar soak and skill icons to boot. It is unlikely that you would seriously consider this card in a blind run of any campaign, and even on a re-run, you have so many more all-purpose options to deal with the enemies with parley actions.

...That being said, I am what you might call, a maniac who makes it his business to include EVERY card that exists in this game at least once in one deck or another, even the bad ones. And to my surprise, I have found a niche for Fine Clothes, in a Joe Diamond deck no less:

Astute players may realise where I'm coming from in volunterring Joe to include this sub-par card; it turns out that Fine Clothes synergises with exactly two cards in the game right now (as of The Search for Kadath): Persuasion and Interrogate. That's right, injecting parley actions into your deck provides insurance against the dead-draw nature of Fine Clothes in the wrong scenario, providing it with the opportunity to always be useful. Granted Persuasion and Interrogate aren't exactly great cards either, but their badness comes from a hard test to pass, rather than a mediocre effect. In that regard, Fine Clothes elevates them to a decent level of power, and Joe Diamond fits the bill for this combo, due to having both the ability to take both and cards, and a hefty 4 in both attributes, which combined with the reduction of difficulty that Fine Clothes provides, all but ensures the success of the parley tests.

That's not to say this is a good combo by any means. It is however a thought experiment in how to maximise the potential of Fine Clothes, and I don't think it gets better than that for our tuxedo wearing mannequin... save for one last possible combo; Adaptable. With Adaptable, and proper knowledge of the scenarios that you'll be facing, you can elect to include Fine Clothes on the missions where it's actually useful, and swap them out when they won't be. This absolves them of their downside of ultra-specialisation, and a -2 difficulty on tests that may be a major part of a mission can turn a scenario one difficulty down for all intents and purposes. As to which ones you should consider swapping in Fine Clothes for, that would be spoilers, so I leave it to you to imagine when dressing in your Sunday's best would be appropiate.

Lucaxiom · 4360
I feel like Fine Clothes is a bit better than you say. Most Parley tests are relatively high in difficulty, and having Fine Clothes can really speed up those tests. Certainly more useful in some campaigns than others though :). Moreover, if you are replaying a campaign and know that Parley tests are coming up, this card can compensate for certain low stats (especially Willpower). And it's especially useful for Rogues, who can swap them in/out of decks really easily with Adaptable to tech for certain scenarios. :) — iceysnowman · 164
I've really liked Fine Clothes. It's a solid filler for the coat slot if you have nothing else to take and you want more utility in your deck. The fact that it soaks horror is also not irrelevant for low sanity bois like Skids, Tony, or Roland. Tommy can keep it out and it'll never die to Rookie Mistake, always ready to reimburse its expense. Mandy can take one ofs for more narrow cards, especially at higher deck sizes (and her stats are good for Parleys anyway). And yeah, any Rogue with Adaptable can squeeze in a copy or two before certain scenarios. I think it serves a great purpose as a coat that anyone can take. It's specialized, but powerful and still versatile in its soak. It's also cheaper than Backpack and Trench Coat. — StyxTBeuford · 12985
While the soak is nice, there's many better cards. You also don't need to fill all slots — Django · 5070
You’re right, you dont need to fill slots. But as an all purpose cheap soak it’s pretty great, and the effect is still powerful and common enough that Ive never been upset for taking Fine Clothes. — StyxTBeuford · 12985
This card is way better than you give it credit for. In the sense that it's a silver bullet. It's outright fantastic in a few scenarios and for said scenarios a Rogue might Adabtable them in. — Tsuruki23 · 2524

With the release of Hemlock Vale and the influx of good parley cards, this has been transformed from a hopelessly conditional card to enabler of an entire archetype. Obviously, Alessandra Zorzi plays 2 of this card in every deck, but any rogue can use the parley suite to decent success - Trish in particular loves tools like Existential Riddle. Bianca becomes much more forgiving, Drain Essence can remove a small enemy while healing you, and resolving an entire Vamp for free is always fun. Perhaps most importantly, anyone wanting to run the newly-taboo'd Power Word now needs the proper outfit to command their ghoul army. On top of all that, it will still help you with everything it used to - recruiting Lita, rescuing your friends, trivialising The Last King etc. Expect to see much more silk in investigators' arsenals from now on.

beenary · 3
Trivialising The Last King? They TELL YOU to wear nice clothes! — MrGoldbee · 1449
I hesitate to call it "hopelessly conditional." At worst, Fine Clothes serves as 1 cost 1/1 soak. — NightgauntTaxiService · 404
This card influences the design of other cards a lot. If they don't want the Parley test to be near-testless with FC, they have to raise the difficulty to 3. I would say, without FC, the printed difficulty of cards like "Pesuasion", "Interrogate", "Vamp" (0) or the taboo'd "Power Word" would be 1 or 2. — Susumu · 366

"Any skill tests you perform nested within a parley action have their difficulty reduced by 2, too." (from the FAQ)

Banger.

Of course, cards with an inherent Parley. (Stall for Time, Hold Up, False Surrender, etc.) are already fine with the clothes, but can we take it one step further? If we really wanted to get the most out of this card, what could it look like?

Let's see: In my opinion there is a general way to approach this, with the possibility to specialize towards a few directions, with the general way being:

1) Perform a Parley. skill test.

2) Use a player window during the skill test to play a fast event or trigger a free triggered ability.

3) Profit.


Ad 1): There are quite a lot of them scattered across scenarios, but to consistently trigger this step, I would recommend something like Bianca "Die Katz" or Beguile. Alternatively (or if you are Alessandra Zorzi anyway), a vast array of Parley. events will cover you aswell.

Ad 2): I'll start with this: Using this combo saves you 3 XP per copy of Chuck Fergus. And this is already how we relentlessly squeeze our Tactic./Trick. events into these fine player windows, getting a sweet -2 difficulty for each of them. This is already great, since it can get the difficulty down to 0 and almost guarantee we did not waste our precious event, but also additionally play into an oversucceed type of deck.

Just looking at Tactic. events, I claim they offer a lot:

I would love to think Fence works similar here, but there is only one useful event I found: Dirty Deeds.

If you want to play this a bit more simple (i.e. without extra combo pieces like Chuck Fergus), just trigger free abilities on cards like Eon Chart, Garrote Wire, Close the Circle, etc. to make them easier.

To delve deeper into the difficulty-zero playstyle Stealth is a great enabler for nun-Hunter enemies or a follow-up with Exploit Weakness.


Let me know what I missed ;)

AlderSign · 269
What you missed is the faq, which states "A skill test cannot initiate during another skill test. If during the resolution of a skill test another skill test would initiate, instead the second skill test does not initiate until the first skill test has finished resolving. If the first skill test was part of an action, the second skill test does not initiate until that action has finished resolving." — NarkasisBroon · 10
Well that is confusing, since it sounds like it indirectly contradicts with this page's FAQ. Although you could read them together in a way meaning you get the -2 for the nested skill test, but the test is still delayed. — AlderSign · 269
So I had to ask since I wasn't clear myself, but NarkasisBroon is correct. The reason for this FAQ is because Beguile and False Surrender are Parley actions that (may) trigger a test as part of the event, and the FAQ says that these tests also benefit from the -2 difficulty. This is the most obvious with Beguile. If you use it to investigate, you get -2 difficulty at the investigation test, since it's nested in the main Parley action. — Valentin1331 · 68453
Ah, I see now. This was new to me, thank you. — AlderSign · 269
There is also a ruling floating around, listed in the FAQ section for Pocket Telescope, that you cannot initiate an action during another action, so it’s not just that the initiated tests for most of the above examples would be moved to after the parley but that the initiation itself would be illegal. — Eudaimonea · 5