Hello! Thanks for the feedback. I could only fit so much into the space of a single piece of paper so some clarifications were sadly lost. We plan on fleshing it out a bit once the game jam ends--I actually want to make a bigger game out of the concept--and will definitely use this feedback to help it grow. As for your questions:
Yes the modifiers apply the moment they're in the Residence. And yeah, they can be punishing but in our playtests it's nothing insurmountable especially with Determination--which does stack.
We haven't had any issues with 1s resetting the Frighter-Counter but that's mostly because it's rare for someone's highest die rolled to be a 1, so we haven't encountered an issue there.
We modeled the game after an old Sega Genesis game called Haunting Staring Polterguy so we kept the goal of that game in mind the whole time: scare away the family. The thing is, you have to scare them all individually most of the time and some people are harder to scare than others. So, sadly, we can't just have the last member of the family just run away with everyone else gone. Granted, we will explore a lot of these mechanics during the full scale development that will happen eventually--we have a big backlog of games to get out but this one might jump much of the line.
Again, thank you for the feedback and we will look to expand the game a bit after the game jam ends.