Generations | A Deep Dive into the Character System (Patreon)

Characters are one of several new systems given a full release in the Gambler's Chest; we have had a few character cards turn up in the promotional content, however the bulk of the content, the reveal of how the rules operate, the required innovation card and the specific way you unlock it are all contained in the Gamblers Chest Expansion (GCE). As a part of exploring all the aspects of the massive undertaking that is the GCE, I've wanted to get to Characters because I find them very interesting in adding variation to both arc and traditional style survivor campaigns. So, here and in the next couple of articles I'm going to break down the system and comb through each individual character card (including revisiting all of the currently released ones that came in white boxes). I do hope you all find this analysis interesting because this Characters system is an element of the GCE I've had an incredible time exploring.

Let's get to it.

Gaining Access

Outside of White Box promotional 'sampling rules' which we're not going to get into here due to it being a simple system that is effectively a bandaid waiting for the treatment that is the Gambler's Chest Expansion (GCE), Characters are not automatically available when starting to use the GCE Content.

Instead access to this system is locked behind a rogue-lite/legacy style achievement, players must complete a People of the Dream Keeper campaign and defeat the Final Nemesis. It is then unlocked during the epilogue (GCE Rulebook p87). However, for those players who do not want to wait that long to access it, you have a blessing from Team Death to add the system in immediately because this unlock can also be considered a “Community Goal” which was achieved as soon as the first group beat the Godhand.

That means it is really up to you, if you are playing multiple KDM campaigns per year and you want this goal to be a personal one for you and your group, then that is absolutely an option. On the other hand, if you have less time to game and want to experience this system sooner, Team Death have supported the continued sandbox nature of the game by giving you an officially sanctioned option. I think this was an excellent move, some players do not enjoy playing with house rules and want to experience the game 'as the designers intended', this option frees up those players to decide from two options.

Either way, once unlocked the actual task of adding Characters to you game involves adding the Character Innovation into the tech tree pool and then constructing your Character deck at the start of a campaign. I'll get into some interesting options for how you can construct the character deck a bit further on, but we'll actually start with the Innovation because it's the smaller section of the two.

The Character Innovation

Character is a Tier 2 innovation, meaning that it requires two prerequisite innovations before it becomes a possible draw from the innovation deck. In this case that is our starting language innovation and Inner Lanter. This ties it to one of the stronger early innovations (though at this point Music, Paint and Inner Lantern are all equal choices for a settlement that doesn't hit Symposium at the first press of the settlement monster's knowledge dispensary).

This is a very clean innovation, that also continues to build the world, making the link between the faces on the ground and the survivors themselves even more explicit. The in world reason that the character innovation can be discovered by settlements is because of the now gone settlements that were shepherded by The "Dream Keeper". It's a piece of history that has somehow managed to be maintained despite the actions of the Watchers who generally erase history and knowledge through their life cycle. The survivors may not remember, but their faces do.

For the mechanics; we get an increase in Survival Limit; something which is very valuable to support the cheap, powerful survival gain gear cards available early on, and the bonus of whenever a survivor is named they gain a random character card. It is worth noting here that we have our first opportunity to leverage an advantage. You're not forced to name a survivor if you don't want to, and in fact there is no reason to do so until they are in a situation where they need to spend survival. This means that when you set up your settlement after the prologue showdown one can leave the vast majority of the survivors nameless until either you need them to gain that +1 survival for being named. That is all because this innovation works when a survivor gains a name, not just for newborn survivors. That's a sweet little space that means Character can retroactively apply to survivors who were around before it was innovated. I like things like this because it reduces the “plebeian” chaff issue; which is where you end up with survivors who are worse than a baseline newborn survivor due to them being “older models on the survivor production chain”.

In short, this is just an excellent innovation that's exactly where you would want it to be and I greatly appreciate how early it can be gained, the survival limit increase and backwards compatible nature of the innovation all fit together really well.

The Character Deck

So that is the innovation, how it is first unlocked and how it becomes available in subsequent campaigns, all very simple and clean. What is left is to look at how the character deck itself is constructed.

The rules of construction are contained fully on p87 of the Gambler's Chest Book and breaks down as follows.

Minimum 24 cards

A ratio of up to 5 ability cards per 1 impairment card

1 legendary card

This gives us a deck that is at a minimum 25 cards.

At time of writing, the sources we have for these cards are as follows:

The Gambler's Chest Expansion (Vast majority of cards)

Basara (Soloist)

Elsbeth (The Lost Echo)

Glow (The Glamorous)

Guinevere (The Challenger)

Lune (The Gaiety)

Morgan (Dream of the Heart)

Survivors of Death (Natural Healer, The Impetuous, The Unfettered, The Versitile)

Lantern Armor Aya (The Red Survivor)

Lolowen (The Hasty)

Please let me know if I've missed any, they're quite spread out at this point and I refuse to check anything on the KDM Wiki because it is located on Fandom which is a terrible website that is best moved away from. So I've had to comb back through my own cards in order to check everything.

I'll go through all of these cards in the coming weeks, breaking down the pros and cons of each, discussing any interesting themes and giving them a final score along with thoughts about which campaign they're best used in. So for the remainder of this article let us dive into this deck construction without specifics.

The key element to always hold in mind here is that we get to add exactly one single legendary character card to our deck, that makes this the 'chase rare' and as such not only do we want to ensure that the other character cards we select are not in conflict with it if on the same hunt party, in support of it if possible and also are as few as possible. This last one is key, because when you want a deck of cards to be as consistent as possible and have the best odds to provide the most powerful card(s) then you need to keep it to the minimum size because that reduces the randomness to the maximum. This is similar to how in Magic: The Gathering players stick at the minimum deck size (40 for limited, 60 for constructed) unless they have specific cards that reward a larger deck size such as Battle of Wits and Yorion, Sky Noodle. Kingdom Death doesn't have any rewards for a larger Character deck, in fact it ends up instead reducing the odds of getting the “best” prize, so our first rule is to stick at 25 cards which will mean the deck is broken down as follows:

1 Legendary

4 impairments

20 abilities

That gives us the following odds per character card drawn:

4% Legendary

16% impairments

80% abilities

An additional advantage here is that we're not forced to use impairment survivors most of the time as long as we are good at population management. If we're doing great at population growth then we even get to go as far as “farming” for legendary and/or specific ability cards, leaving the remaining survivors on the population roster with little more than a name and character card assigned to them. How often things come back to it being more powerful to have a healthy, large population in this game.

If we go past this strict number, you can see how the odds do not change for the ratio of gaining impairments to abilities, but they reduce the odds of drawing the Legendary. For example if we double the number of Impairments and Abilities we get a 49 card deck and the following odds.

1 Legendary (2% or 1 in 49)

8 Impairments (16.3% or 8 in 49)

40 abilities (81.6% or 40 in 49)

(Note the missing 0.1% is due to rounding to the first decimal point, which is why I also supplied the ratios/fractions).

We've basically halved the chances we'll get our legendary by going from 4% to just over 2%. That's not great and unless we're house ruling a second legendary character card into the deck in order to balance back the ratios it should be avoided. (And that's a house rule, so it's not relevant for this analysis outside of being an observational fix for people who do want a thick character deck).

All of this means that the most significant choices that we have to make during this process are the selection of the legendary card and the impairments. They're rarer than the abilities, so we want the legendary to be as strong as possible and the impairments to be as acceptable or situationally beneficial as possible. Just because a character impairment is bad for a survivor doesn't mean it is bad for the settlement as a whole. I do have a fun house rule suggestion to come at the bottom of this article for players who don't get to play as much and crave variety.

This means that I think players should start by selecting the legendary card that they wish to explore, following that up with the selection of the 4 impairment that they desire. Impairments can offer interesting play patterns depending on the card, we'll look at those individually as I dive into them, but on the whole if you do not have a specific goal in mind for a given impairment then it's best to pick the least harmful. Or if you're unsure what to have then you can always shuffle the impairments up and flip 4 of them to look at, then either go ahead with that 4, or perhaps reveal additional impairments from the random pile and decide if you want to swap any of the revealed ones for that new possibility.

I'll likely do a video on character deck construction once the Gambler's Chest is on the simulator because construction of Magic: The Gathering (MTG) Cubes is something I really love exploring because it allows me to dabble in game design by crafting a play environment without needing to build every single element from scratch. This something I can't do through board game design due to a lack of funds and team support. As an aside, MTG has been a huge help in keeping my gameplay sharp while exploring Kingdom Death: Monster and Aeon Trespass: Odyssey (expect some more ATO content coming this year, it's getting closer to the time where I will finally write a full, lengthy review on that wonderful game experience and all it has brought to the Boss Battling genre).

The Impact on the Game

Given the way that character cards are handed out; when a character gains their name, this means that at the very start of a fresh survivor's life, they are given a direction, focus and value. Sometimes this direction is rather vague because the character card is of a low power level or providing something generic, at other times it's a strong indicator of where the character should be heading and at other times it may be a false start. The given character has received an impairment that means what they could contribute to a hunt is irrelevant and instead they'll be best served staying in the settlement.

Now it is relatively rare that we get characters that provide just a settlement based benefit, though I do think that is a ripe place for the system to grow (more on that in the section after this) so most of the time we are asked to consider what a particular survivor can bring to a hunt party, either via a form of hunt phase based benefit or something that will aid a specific role during the showdown. One can put most of the character bonuses into a few broad categories; hunt, damage, tanking, support and resource generation. A few fall outside of this, but most of the time that is the five brackets things roughly land in.

That gives us an immediate focus for a given survivor, instead of being something of a tabula rasa (clean/blank slate) that only has the bonuses given by the settlement innovations and possibly their parents we have a chance at getting an immediate focus for a survivor and I think that is a really helpful handle for players. It's also gives the survivors a bit more of a thematic grounding via generational epigenetics, even in our world children are not born with a completely blank slate. There are predispositions that we are only beginning to unravel and attempt to understand, such as how mice have demonstrated that fears or avoidances can pass down to offspring and create irrational fears (Smithsonian Article here, but you can find other sources on this fascinating concept elsewhere). This is even more prominent in the world of Kingdom Death where survivors wear the faces of the long dead and we've seen plenty of examples that more than one survivor can have the same face. Those identical survivors even seem to demonstrate similar core traits and this relationship is explicitly spelt out when you unlock the Character innovation upon the defeat of the Godhand. The settlement carves the faces of their people into the land, and the land passes those faces and a core fragment of their personality to those who come after.

Story via mechanics.

The Future of Characters?

It seems that Team Death are not done with characters because APG has put out more after the release of the GCE and that is in my opinion a good thing. With a large and robust library of character cards, players can hone and focus their survivors collectively towards a particular direction aiding in building a more symbiotic settlement with broad themes and distinct types of survivor.

For myself I would like to see the area of 'I stay in settlement and contribute that way' explored further, while we do have a few survivors who provide non-hunting based benefits. These are not heavily focused on specific tasks, there's no survivors who are excellent at Scrap Gathering, Trepanning or Storytelling for example. And the types of bonuses could vary immensely, here's a few rough ideas for the kind of things I would like to see:

When this survivor rolls on the scrap gathering table, roll an additional dice and choose which result to apply.

Once per lantern year, when a gear card is crafted, may spend an additional resource to add a bonus depending on the type of resource spent.

When innovating, if you do not have Symposium draw 1 additional innovation card.

And so on, there's a lot of space out there to bring in improvements that can add further to the settlement phase. There's also space to have monster specific character cards that are added to the deck, and they can further provide some seasoning to a settlement that reflects the way that monsters impact on survivor genetics and philosophies. To provide an example using currently released cards; perhaps a settlement with The Watcher at its core always gets Morgan's Savior based card in addition to its normal legendary ability? I'd also love to see an updated version of family that lets a given parent pass on their character to their newborn.

I think there's a lot to explore here and due to the relatively low bookkeeping and mental load that characters represent when compared to Arc Survivors this is a relatively light way to add depth to all parts of the game.

The House Rules

That brings us to a rather unusual segment, but given that we're looking at a deck building mini-game, and one that is set up in advance and impacts on the entire rest of a significant time investment (a Kingdom Death Campaign) there are some interesting house rules that can be implemented here if a play group so desires.

1. Drafting

To start with, here's a way one can construct the deck via its own mini game. Before beginning the campaign, take all of the character cards and split them into three piles; legendary, impairment and ability. Then deal three sets of 1x impairment and 4x ability cards out in front of the players. One of these sets will be selected and becomes the start of the character deck while the remaining cards are returned to their respective decks. This simple process is repeated for a total of 5 times, ending when there are 24 cards in the character deck. Then a legendary card can be drafted, I'd recommend flipping up three legendary cards from that pool and picking one from it.

There are numerous ways one can tweak this further, changing the order in which the legendary card is picked, choosing it first means you can try to tailor support for the legendary card for example. Or you can alter the draft structure by drawing 3 impairments, picking one and discarding the other two and then revealing 3 abilities to pick from, choose one and discard the rest. Repeating the process until you've drafted 5 abilities to go with the impairment. This is then added to the character deck and the discarded cards are shuffled back into their respective decks before repeating the entire process until you have the requisite 24 cards.

You can even go further than that by having all the cards for the impairment and ability pools dealt face down in a grid shape, then flip up the centre card of each and the 4 cards orthogonally adjacent to it also revealed. Then a card is selected and the unrevealed cards orthogonally adjacent to the now empty space are flipped up. This is a form of grid drafting and it can make the entire deck creation process be a collaborative exploration experience. If people want photographs of what this would look like, please let me know in the comments and I'll edit this article to include them.

2. Churn

This second concept takes place after construction and is designed to increase the variety of cards you'll experience during a campaign without having to bloat the deck. In its simplest form the idea is that you'll churn through the character card deck by having a card get removed from the deck when drawn and replaced with a random one from the matching type that are not currently in the game. In this method you'll have a high turnover along with making every single character card drawn a far more unique experience. You've drawn The Hasty? Well it has now left the deck, been replaced with a random unknown ability card and may not return until another ability card is drawn. It'll increase the unique feel for the survivors and it'll also have a huge benefit for the legendary cards, because once you draw a card like The Glamorous once, later drawings of it are typically worth less because it has unique once per campaign unlocks.

Churning will make your Character deck an evolving mystery box that you are not entirely sure of what it contains, and it'll even allow you to speed through the initial set up because you can just deal 1x random legendary, 20x random ability and 4x random impairment cards at campaign set up and not worry about what is exactly in there because it is going to be constantly changing and evolving. I really enjoyed playing this way, because it made the game

3. Smoothing Character Draws

Finally if you want to have more control over the character deck when playing you can increase the number of draws when naming a character in a similar way to how Romantic does with Fighting Arts. However, if you are going to do this, you need to draw a single character card when one is gained and check the type. Then, you should draw from the deck until you hit a second one of the same type (except for legendaries which are of course singular in the character deck). This means if you get an impairment, you'll choose from two impairments and the same applies to abilities. That'll keep the gaining ratio even, because; for example, if you flipped one impairment and two abilities out of three cards you'd rarely choose the impairment and that would affect the character ratio a large amount.

These are just three ideas to help get your creative juices flowing, you may have more.

Final Thoughts

I completely adore the Character system, the way it uses thematics to build the foundation for mechanics is something that greatly appeals to me. It's a fantastic little package and while I still haven't fully figured out how I'd rank the various modules in the GCE I do think this is a competitor for one of the top slots due to how relatively small this system is to implement but how much impact it can have thanks to the world building, mechanical experience and the emergent storytelling that comes out of it. In some ways it almost feels like a miniature version of the Arc Survivor system without as much bookkeeping overhead and I love it for that.