Skids in Another 48 Hours

Theme: Skids couldn't go back to prison. He needed money and he needed it fast. Being in lockup would only slow him down. So when Detective Alice Luxley offered Skids an opportunity to lessen his sentence in exchange for his cooperation in her investigation, Skids promptly accepted.

Luxley wouldn't normally use such unorthodox tactics in her investigations, but this was an exceptional case. She'd seen things that shouldn't exist. When she read Skids' statement to the arresting officers she realized he'd seen them too. Now she has 48 hours to show results to her superiors and help Skids clear his name or the both of them might find themselves in lockup when this is all done.

Background: So I tried Roland and Luxley and I noticed something pretty quickly. Roland gets plenty of opportunities to trigger Luxley's ability, but he doesn't always need it. So who would always need it? Who can take Luxley, can evade and is kinda poor at combat but decent at picking up clues? Well our old buddy Skids can do all those things. Yeah Skids. The arguably worst investigator in the game.... but listen I always loved the guy. He has some great theme captured in his design. I just feel like they didn't understand what Rogues were going to be when they made him. Though they've had quite some time to look at Skids again and give him tools. Did they give us a reliable build? Is this it? Probably not, but I think I can trigger Luxley quite a bit with this build so she'll feel essential and not just a nice to have.

Description: So the core of the deck is get Luxley on the table and just investigate. When an enemy comes out then evade it and keep investigating. Let Luxley deal her damage to the enemy to ping it down or just run away. I tried to give us several options to action compress killing enemies when we need to kill them. Scenario 1 Scene of the Crime and Luxley means we don't even need to evade to get her ping damage and it gives us clue acceleration. Scenario 2 we evade with Hatchet Man then investigate to dispatch a 2 health enemy. Scenario 3 we Cheap Shot to hit an enemy and evade it. Then we investigate to ping with Luxley to dispatch a 2 health enemy. Scenario 4 we Narrow Escape to investigate then ping with Luxley and follow up with a boosted attack from Skids to do 2 damage or more with a weapon in hand. Use Enchanted Blade's base ability when you don't need to extra damage to save charges (consider turning this into a level 2 Switch Blade). Run when you can, and try and move quickly through the scenarios so you don't run out of steam late game. Skids' ability is all about racing the Scenario. If you exhaust your Investments and are still going that might be trouble. I wouldn't level up into two handed weapons. Skids has extra actions potentially to get more punches in and really wants his Lockpicks early in his progression for hard to investigate areas. Trench Coat should turn into Lola S. when we have the spare xp to buy her and Charisma.

Willpower checks are handle either with our 2x Take The Initiative or a Physical Training on the board. Be judicious about how you spend on Physical Training. Know what Willpower tests you can fail. Also strongly consider going to Physical Training level 2 or High Roller.

The third pillar of the deck is resource acceleration. We wanna try and find Emergency Cache for early game burst econ. Investments go down on the board for late game burst econ. They don't need to reach the full 10. They are emergency buttons for when you need cash. Lone Wolf will get us to the floor econ we need to reliably use Skid's ability often enough to be useful. 1x Lucky Cigarette Case and 1x Pickpocket are our card draw engines. We should be evading often and once we get Lockpicks we should be winning by 2+ often. Getting one, the other or both on the board should be a big boon to the deck since we are getting rewarded for doing our main game plan of evading and investigating to enable Luxley.

In summary it seems like alot of moving pieces but it boils down to get Luxley, Evade and Investigate. Everything else is just trying to add efficiency to that game plan.

Experience Progression: First things first, you need Adaptable and Charon's Obol. You need so much xp as a Rogue it's ridiculous. I'd also consider strongly Adaptable-ing into 1x I'm Outta Here for scenarios that have a Resign action, which is alot of them.

With that out of the way we want to go right into 2x Lockpicks to replace the Flashlights. That's what makes Skids a reliable clue getter for Luxley's ability. Also it turns on Lucky Cigarette Case, which is hit or miss in the level 0 deck. Next we really want 2x Lola Santiago and Charisma. She combos with Luxley well and is a good replacement for Trench Coat. A great addition to the investigation team. Now our investigation game is properly stabilized.

After that I'd considering 2x Hot Streak (either level), and 2x Physical Training lvl 2. You could also go High Roller instead of Physical Training, but it's way less flexible. Skids is so expensive to run he needs all the economic help he can get. The Hot Streaks replace the Emergency Cache to get us a better early game ramp up to our economy.

From there I would be looking for Combat upgrades since we'll be into the late stages of a campaign where things start getting pretty hairy. I'd look to Lupara, Switch Blade level 2 (Which totally shouldn't be on the Taboo List!) .45 level 2 or Derringer level 2. Skids needs a +2 combat boost or an ammo-less +1 since we aren't taking any other blanket strength boosts in this build. Machete is Taboo-ed. We could take it with xp, but I think we have cooler options.