Why on Earth is this weakness so brutal?
My mind immediately goes to Bob Jenkins and his signature weakness for comparison:
1.) Bob has the same health/sanity partitioning as Darrell,
2.) Bob's weakness also has the capability to deal you 4 horror, and
3.) the amount of horror you take is inversely proportional to your...."preparedness". Preparedness in quotations because it's up to raw luck if/when you pull this.
I feel like this is a fair comparison to make; if you agree with me on that, then you must also agree that this weakness is way too brutal. Here's how they differ, and Ruined Film is worse in both ways.
1.) Greed's (again, Bob's signature weakness) effect depends on your resource count, and with secondary 0-2 lvl Rogue class access, Bob can get to 10+ resources in a single turn. Even if you build Darrell around evidence (and you...probably should be doing that), getting to 4 evidence in turn 1 is literally impossible. With the current card pool, as big as it is, building 4 evidence takes quite a lot of time on average. Your best bet is honestly just manically getting 4 clues and dumping them on the floor for Research Notes, and that just means that you've undone 4 clues worth of progress exclusively for padding yourself against this weakness on top of the fact that I don't like constraining myself to a Research Notes-exclusive deck for Darrell simply because of this one freaking weakness. But it hurts SO much.
2.) Now, the resource condition is also constraining for Bob in that he's forced to, in some capacity, go for a big money build. It's really not that bad because if you're hovering at less than 10 (which isn't big money), you still only take 2 horror, so Bob is barely constrained at all, but for the purposes of making my point, let's just say he leaned hard into it in order to completely circumvent his weakness. He draws it, laughs it off, and keeps playing with his black fan, his connections, and his expensive caviar. Because he got to keep his resources. Darrell has to pay 4 or all of his evidence to his randomly drawn weakness, take the appropriate horror, and now start over from scratch. Again, evidence is not nearly as easy for Darrell to build as it is for Bob to build resources. And currently, Darrell is unquestionably the best at building evidence. If Bob had actually lost 10 resources, I would argue he'd still be able to recoup the loss better than Darrell.
3.) But why the need to recoup? Well, for theoretical hand-wavey big money Bob, hitting his resource threshold is what allows his cards to trigger. There are other things he can likely splurge on if he needs to, but he'd then have options that allow him to budget out what he can buy and what he can't. Darrell needs evidence because he needs to spend evidence. That's his fundamental ability. So not only is Ruined Film removing evidence when Greed is not (removing the analogous resources), but the use of the one that is getting removed is for it to be spent, whereas the need for big resources in a big money Bob deck pushes him to ultimately be successful and completely unencumbered in the face of Greed.
Honorable Mention: Barring extenuating circumstances like going hungry or a bad reading, Bob starts the scenario with 5 resources. Darrell starts from scratch. He can barely get evidence on the board in the first turn. If Bob did absolutely nothing turn 1 and drew his weakness on upkeep, he'd still only be 1 resource away from taking 2 horror, and that's strictly because you have to draw the card first before getting the resource.
I dunno...it's just aggravating how Darrell puts so much effort into having so much of what makes him fun so that he can lose it. Another comparison along the same vein is Harvey's weakness, which tbf is probably worse than Darrell's quantitatively measuring it in terms of damage/horror taken on average since that one is essentially "the faster you pick up speed and momentum, the harder you hit the brick wall when it inevitably comes", but even then, at least Harvey doesn't have to discard down to it, and Harvey draws cards easier than Darrell gets evidence. I'm not about to look up a comprehensive dossier on signature weaknesses, but I'd say as far as those that deal damage/horror, this is definitely one of the worst. Not exclusively because of the amount of horror you can take, even though that can be very severe, but because of how much it sets you back. Harvey's brick wall hurts, but he just....keeps going. Amnesia sucks way more in Harvey than in someone like, iunno, Finn? because cards are Harvey's bread and butter, and discarding his entire hand sets him back (honestly probably more than losing evidence lol). Darrell's weakness frequently does both; it's like the school bully taking your money, and then beating you up when you don't have "enough", and the inner feeling you get afterwards...just stinks. Sometimes I feel like I'd rather just take my chances with Final Rhapsody so I can just brace for damage/horror and keep trucking forward, or at least be eliminated instead of spending the rest of the scenario playing catch-up.
