The Armor Conundrum: Keyword Armor Sets! (Patreon)

A few weeks ago I wrote about what quite a few people in the community see as being the Armor Set issue. A dilemma where the design of the game's mechanics naturally pushes you towards building completed sets and provides little to no incentive to using mixed sets. While I have written an extensive series on Mixed sets in the hope of highlighting the benefits of using them at times.

We put things to the poll and the Keyword version won out at 33 to 23. While I'll look at doing the other version, using thresholds, as a part of my 12 in 12 design series - I promised to get together, and test, the keyword versions as soon as possible.

It's been a LOT of work, a lot more than you'd realise when you first consider it. This isn't just 'slap a few keywords onto the body pieces and you're good to go'. 

The initial solution, which you can read about in the top link, was to use the inspiration from the Lantern Cuirass, which gives its +3 armor to all metal locations, and expand this to every armor set. This would allow for armor sets to naturally branch out into something like mixed gear without costing so much on the power front.

So lets look at how this was achieved, with a couple of examples and then I'll talk about the decisions behind the specific keywords chosen.

We'll look at the White Lion Set:

Removing the armor set bonus from these cards, and doing it right, took longer than I care to admit as I had to rebuild every single armor set bonus (apart from the Hybrid ones). I took the opportunity to clean them up and make them all match the way that the later armor set cards are - the earlier ones had just shadows of the relevant gear included, the later ones used full colour images. So that's what I've gone with here.

Outside of the sheer amount of grunt work involved in doing this, it was important to do it because this makes sure that one can use the mini-expansion without having to say 'ignore the bit of the text that says Add X Armor',  

We'll talk about the specifics of how the whole thing fits together, but because of how I "solved" the issue, I didn't need to redo the hybrid armor sets at all.

White Lion Coat Example

The largest 'ah-ha' achievement was the introduction of the covered ability. Before it was there, the text read 'When you depart, add X to all hit locations with Y or Z keyword armor.' This was working, except it was super charging all the body pieces because they were automatically generating the armor bonus for themselves regardless of how many pieces you have.

Covered effectively stops that.

Covered (material keywords): If every hit location on a survivor has a piece of gear with at least one of the listed material keywords, when departing gain the bonus listed. 

This armor is applied before Hybrid Armor set bonuses and does not stack with them.

The last clause had to be added because Hybrid Armor set bonuses technically go on before anything given by gear. So Covered needed to be slotted in just before that rather than after (which is how the rules would do it naturally). It's not completely elegant, but it does manage to: a) solve the body armor issue, b) not overwrite hybrid armor bonuses, c) allow for covered bonuses that are not just armor points.

Abilities/Keywords are fantastic tools when creating custom stuff for KD:M and I will get around to writing about them. Keywords in particular have a whole host of 'unwritten' rules about how you use them and where they are allowed. I spent a long time reverse engineering this list and I want to share it with people when I have the time.

That written let's take a look at the various changes we've made and explain why.

The Guidelines:

As always when creating some custom content, I set myself some rules to stick with, now I call them rules, but as the title makes it clear, they're more guidelines. Like every rule in games, you have to first learn the rules and then afterwards you can learn when to break them. They're not so much rules, they're more guidelines.

In my case the rules were as follows:

• No more than two keywords per armor "set"
• There must be a logical 'lore' flow to the combinations
• Mechanically no obvious broken combos should be allowed
• Full sets must not be more powerful than the original ones

With these, it was a matter of setting the keywords allowed for each piece and then testing out how the new stuff worked, both in the normal sets (to make sure nothing broke or changed too much). This involved a lot of single showdowns, sample crafting runs in a shortened campaign and testing in some long form campaigns using various testing mechanics I have developed to simplify the process and also allow for examination of specific areas.

Things were refined, the covered ability fixed a lot of the early power issues (the meta originally was craft body stuff asap because it makes everything else better) and here are the specific decisions for each gear.

Rawhide (Rawhide, Silk)

Rawhide armor is powerful, very powerful, and one of the largest strengths it has is because of the rawhide headband/rawhide vest + left red affinity combo. As a consequence, I almost considered avoiding adding any additional keywords to rawhide at all. 

However, one of the things which nagged at me is just how under used Silk Armor is compared to everything else, and I wanted to push that expansion a bit more (sell more Spidicules for Poots the way "I" got the Sunstalker sold out). So I decided to investigate Silk Armor as an option via the silk keyword.

One of the things which became immediately apparent is that the affinity combos between rawhide and silk are not great. Silk doesn't give you an easy way to activate the headband or vest and those are the two pieces of the set that you actually want to keep when you mix Rawhide. So you end up having to do a lot of work to get those pieces activated. 

The final build ends up being Rawhide head + body + Silk Legs, Waist and Arms and it's solid without being overpowered. Honestly I really enjoyed how it worked here and it inspired another idea that I'll use down the line for my Nightmares & Dreamscapes custom campaign.

White Lion (Fur, Bone)

White Lion was very simple to work out and test, it has fur as its main component and it has some bone in the rest. So those were the two keywords I went with and they just worked. You can now use the Skull Helm, Screaming Horns, Dragon Helm for a start and you can also mix the White Lion and Screaming Armor stuff fairly interchangeably, which should result in some cool builds.

I did end up creating a variant version of the White Lion Coat, which gives +2 armor to all locations rather than the original +1. Honestly White Lion gear is expensive and its offensive nature gets your armor points shredded, so this is my preferred version, but you can also choose to print out the original armor point version if you want.

Screaming Armor (Fur, Bone)

Exactly the same as above, I wanted Screaming + White Lion to be the first place where players can really experiment and see what works. It's a little tricky because Screaming Armor is very powerful, but overall I feel that it's not overpowering, you certainly don't end up with anything stronger than just pure Screaming armor.

Gorment (Gormskin, Leather)

Gorment took a long time to work out, it's a tad awkward because it's basically two armor sets rolled into one. The normal 'partial' version with 4 pieces and the "upgraded" version with the Regeneration Suit added in.

After a lot of testing I landed on the keyword I originally chose, leather, but I decided to parse out the set bonus and essentially turn the Regeneration Suit into an accessory 'fixer' that lets you get extra armor onto Gormskin/Leather buiilds. There's some neat stuff with this change while also keeping the way that Gorment works intact.

Silk (Silk, Rawhide, Leather)

I broke my rules here and allowed Silk to hit 3 types. As mentioned above I wanted to push silk a little and make it more desirable because of how the turban is locked away and how awkward the affinities are. Also Rawhide is kind of a terrible keyword to be backwards compatible with if you can't easily activate the headband. You're always going to be replacing the arms/waist/legs if you get the opportunity.

Therefore, Leather was added in as an option. There are a huge amount of interesting synergies you can get from the leather pieces as Silk has a lot in common with it. As a result, if you're willing to spend the steep resource costs for Silk, you can get an impressive armor set out of it.

I also pushed silk a little more with one additional change, the weakest piece of the armor set, the Silk Wraps, gained the bone keyword (it has bone-like materials mixed into it) in order to give it a wider range of options - it can be combined with WL, Screaming and Dragon armor pieces for example.

Leather (Leather, Metal)

The keywords chosen here were a deliberate step to allow Leather to work as a bridging point towards the late game armor sets. Only Cycloid Scale doesn't have the metal keyword (and it's powerful enough to be excluded from the list), so this change lets you mix in Phoenix, Dragon and Lantern stuff to create new builds. It does make tanks stronger overall as the leather set bonus is not that strong, but you're always forced to keep the very underwhelming Cuirass if you want to mix leather + metal and that does a lot to keep things in check.

Phoenix (Metal, Feather)

Phoenix was pretty straightforward, the metal keyword gives it combinations with Dragon and Lantern and Feather was added for future proofing purposes. I didn't want to add something like Leather in because of how the leather bracers work with the Phoenix Plackart (see Warlord armor) and Fur/Bone just didn't work aesthetically.

However, the power of the Phoenix Plackart as a single piece is more than enough to compensate for the rest.

Dragon (Metal, Bone)

Another simple one, Dragon Armor uses metal and bone, and while I could have gotten away with Metal + something else because the Dragon Skull is also metal as well as bone this made the most lore sense. It also clicks really well with options, keeping the armor set strong without making it overpowered.  Losing the set bonus here can be quite an issue, but the Dragon Mantle ability is one of the best in the game. So it works out.

Cycloid Scale (Scale, Rawhide)

Cycloid got a very weak keyword added to it because of how powerful it is. I didn't want it having access to Leather, Silk or Metal stuff so I was left with fur or bone options. I explored all of them and found that it just wasn't worth it, you always ended up pushing towards full cycloid. But the addition of Rawhide gave you access to an alternative support style build for the armor and also useful progression while building towards it. So that was the choice.

Because Cycloid is so strong, no third keyword was added even though Rawhide is kinda blah. However, this may be revisited if you guys find that the Cycloid Scale changes aren't enough.

Rolling (No changes)

Rolling armor doesn't have any locations, as such it already mixes with everything just fine. I didn't have to change anything about this armor set, it just works as is with what I've done.

Lantern (Metal, Fur)

Lantern Armor almost didn't get a second keyword because of how large the armor gains are on it. But we tested the lore friendly 'fur' keyword and it worked. There's some fun stuff you can do, but it's not overpowered because of how awkward the activation costs are on Lantern.

Green Armor (no changes)

The armor point bonus and the armor set as a whole was too strong for this style. So the card and set were left unchanged. 

Vagabond (Leather, Cloth or Leather, Metal)

Of all the hybrids, there was one which just didn't fit in or work. Vagabond. I considered not doing anything with this one because it's a promo set that's pretty powerful. However in the end, for the sake of 2 cards I decided to get it added in. Completeness and all.

The Hard Breastplate offered a chance to mix up the keywords for leather mixed sets though and I took it, however because this is a promo armor set I decided to dial down on the power level and use cloth as my spare keyword. This has interactions with Spurkulese, but also means that the Hard Breastplate works with the Tabard, Cloth Leggings and Cloth (gear).

How to Print:

Using Makeplayingcards.com you can upload these cards and print them out.  The fronts and backs of each card are pretty self explanatory.

• Armor Set Bonuses - Either put Male/Male and Female/Female on both sides of 2 cards or put M/F like the official versions
• Gear Cards - Backs are included for each gear type.
• Vagabond Armor Set Bonus - You'll need to double side this or slip a version of the official back into your printing. I'm not supplying the back as it's just a re-do of the original.
• Hard Breastplate - Crafting Recipe is on the original card. You'll have to get it there, I want to encourage people to pick up the Vagabond Armor sets (Before and Beyond the Wall) rather than provide a complete 'free' version of them. You can use the rare card back supplied or the Leather Worker one.

.pdf version will come in the future with the general release for the public, we'll see if there's anything broken beforehand (and make sure the covered rule is fully foolproof).

Comments here is the place for any feedback on this and outside of typos please keep your feedback to 'backed by play' as that is the kind of feedback I find valuable, theorycraft feedback isn't useful to me. 

Thanks! Enjoy!