Update 71: One of Them Hot Takes (Patreon)

Last time a decent sized update landed I planned to write a hot take on it, but there was too much going on to manage to fit that into my schedule at the time. Things are different now, and we have the time. So I'm going to strip away the hype and take a walk through the more interesting parts of this update. There is a lot to unpack, some good, some bad and some of it quite ugly. 

This will be a critical look at the update, with the aim of distilling out pertinent points (to me) from all of the surrounding bumf & hype. There was simultaneously a lot of stuff in this one and also a lack of it. I'll use Adam's own headers for each section I write about.

The update is here.

Wave 3 - Gambler's Chest

"The King showdown needs to move from notes to playtesting." 

Out of all the lines in the update, this is the one that concerns me the most, at this stage there really shouldn't be anything that's still in the conceptual/first pass portion. But there really, really should not be a late game quarry monster like The King stuck there. The thing about quarry monsters is, as you move further up the nodes/timeline, they become more complex. Their design, the numbers involved, the gear, everything is a higher power level and that's easier to 'get wrong'. 

Now, because we currently don't have any monster that first turns up later than Lantern Year 13 (Lion God), it's difficult to see what the balance numbers on The King are going to be. But I can tell you that constructing decent monsters around just the Lion God's level is a massive undertaking. Even once you have the numbers/moves/gear initially sorted you have a big task of checking everything against existing stuff to make sure that you haven't created any game breaking exploits or made other things obsolete. I tend to err on the side of caution in my designs, but the reason I haven't released too many later game monsters is because of this increase in the workload, testing regime and complexity they represent. APG has more resources than I to deploy, but when you see that one monster is basically not even on the table yet (and also it hasn't had its resculpt, you just know it's getting resculpted). That doesn't inspire confidence.

On top of that, we're also seeing that there's a design bottleneck in Adam himself; Smog Singers, Godhand, Collective Cognition, The Scout System and the Philosophy system are all cited as requiring his personal attention before they can be returned to the testing teams for more playtests. That's a massive amount of work going through one person and you can extrapolate a lot from it to see why everything has been so slow - it's all being feature crept an extraordinary amount - to a level where it's almost overwhelming the team. I could draw parallels to the video game industry here, what we're reading about feels more like Bethesda's design process rather than Obsidian Entertainment's.

Crimson Crocodile

Last time it was released, I said how much I liked the design of the model, I still do. It's a wonderful derpy version of Disney's Madam Mim in her crocodile form and that hasn't changed. 

What we have been shown here includes a lot of partial mechanics, but it appears that the Crimson Croc (CC) is going to be a monster that attacks via insanity from vibrations/sound generated by its many, many fingers. We don't know what the Terrified trait does at this stage, but the 21,000 Newton Bite card exists to punish survivors who avoid the effects of Adrenal Adept by being deaf. It's just a 2/3+/1 attack most of the time however. 

Adrenal Adept is a very dangerous looking trait for two reasons.

The card text with it's pseudo Gorm retch 

You're not gaining insanity during the fight from the brain trauma table, so you're going to hit more brain traumas.

A lot depends on what level of the monster gets this trait, if its on the L1 monster as standard then lethality is going to be high because ways of gaining insanity during the showdown are limited when the Brain Trauma table is altered in this fashion (Screaming Horns is one of them). 

The Tender Hit locations mechanic seems to be 'additional benefits if you are attacking a "certain square" on the monster. By the look of it, the bonus is additional strength, but because the deck is reversed in order through the Enchanted Flesh (Disney!) mechanic, it's hard to tell how this will interact with hit location scouting (if at all). 

I think the look of the crocodile armor is pretty great, apart from the Doughnut nipples on the female armor set... Also, somehow it looks worse on the sculpt than the art. That's the kind of thing I'd prefer to see avoided. Or stuck on the male as well.

Looking at this axe (and the resources) we can assume that the CC is a glass creature (which matches the idea of the finger strumming making brain damaging noise - rubbing glass). Honed seems to be the main mechanic surrounding these weapons. From what I am taking - the weapon has strength equal to its honed value, but gradually decreases over time (the edge is ruined). I'd think that the mechanic for ruining the edge and reducing the honed value is each time you hit the monster, but it might be more generous than that.

Savage is a design standard on axes, unless Honed provides some bonus to luck also (it's possible that Honed 5 = +5 luck rather than 5 strength, but I doubt it as that's a bit OP) it's as weak as it is on the bone axe before it. But Guardless is a very interesting mechanic that plays into the strongest way that survivors operate anyway - Guardless stops block and deflect working (plus things like Ripple Pattern/Green Helm. However, it doesn't seem to stop Dodge. So in essence, it's not going to change the way we play currently, only Bruisers (Blood Paint/Gorment Armor) attack and operate shields at the same time, Tanks wouldn't touch a weapon like this and DPS survivors don't want to block. Interesting mechanic for sure, it'll be interesting to see where else it turns up.

Before moving on, I would like to say that I really applaud the addition of the 'high grade resources' that's the kind of thing that should have been in the game from the start. I hope that the existing monsters get some form of similar retro-fit.

On the whole, the Crimson Croc is one of the highlights of this update.

Smog Singers

We're finally going to get to see more of the "Sky Whale"! This creature is the one that I posited is responsible for the awful mess the Plane of Stone Faces is in and is also the physical manifestation of the Ethereal Dreamer. We'll see if that's the case or if the hypothesis doesn't hold up soon as that 'Singing Whale' event (which seems bad news for the survivors) comes into play. The Bard Armor is kind of hilarious looking and I hope that it supports instruments in a way that we can finally use them rather than spend our time ignoring them because of the H A R V E S T E R.

Bone Eaters

If people want a take on the Bone Eaters, I'd be willing to go back and write about the stuff from the previous update on them. That's where most of the information was located. 

I do find it interesting that there's a Bone Eater version of everyone apart from Lucy...

Wave 3 - Campaigns of Death 

I'll be honest, I really. REALLY hope that Adam doesn't add anything more to any wave again, and does not release any more new vignettes/echoes/white boxes because as he wrote himself:

"Development-wise there is a tremendous amount of testing data on most campaigns, I need to review it again and start to make updates. Then some of the story events need tweaking and a better KD lore pass. Thats the kinda thing that generally only Anna or myself can tackle. "

I'd rather that he focuses on that over creating more content that's going to need a full process from the start, even a variant monster could represent months of time by itself. So fingers crossed that's the kind of thing which turns up as a vignette post wave 4 rather than part of this already unbelievably bloated thing.

The Intimacy Couple - Amanda and Steve

Love the sculpts, love this pair of characters and I'm happy they're getting their campaign specific re-sculpts.  I wish they'd release the 3d Photoresin prints in plastic also, so we can have a complete set of them for each campaign (in plastic).

I have to wonder why there is such a dagger focus on the Stars version of Amanda & Steve, perhaps that is hinting at more campaign specific gear?

Wave 3 - Pinups of Death/Inserts/Card Pack

Happy to see that all of this may get released before 2021, and I'm really, really happy that it's being delegated to the team. Disappointed that there's no mention of the previously discussed electronic release ahead of a proper print of the card pack, because it would be better for it to land in the hands of the community before going to the presses because the community as a whole has demonstrated themselves to be very, very good at assessing, using and breaking the stuff that APG put out.

Showdown Board

The design is exactly the one I proposed and sketched out on our Discord, so there's no way I'd have a problem with it. In particular I like how the centerpiece has been inset so it can have three dimensions without sitting above anything else. This is something that was a problem with the unofficial version, it is just too high and curved to be practical. 

This board is going to look good and feel good to play with. It's also great that Charlie the Spider Crab is still sculpted on there and the future proofing design for terrain is likewise great.

Not super sold on the LED kits however, that's something I'd avoid using most of the time and it's also a nonsense when you get around to painting and it causes problems overseas when parts wear out. So I hope it's left out or becomes an optional extra in the store later on. 

King's Coins

So, there was very nearly a long piece on this patreon about the King's Coins and the absolute mess they represented. But with an almost unprecedented level of celerity Adam withdrew the coins and started sorting out refunds. So I held back because I appreciated that he'd attempted to do something, gotten the details/specifics wrong and created something that upset the community.

The level of upset was honestly a tad extreme, but the sentiment behind it was not. The King's Coins originally represented the appearance of 'premium in-game currency' for a board game. A move towards translating 'micro-transactions' into a new medium, because of how tired and wary the informed portion of the public are of what the video game industry is doing; combined with the way that KDM has artificial scarcity built into it (due to the nature of their production runs and small size in addition to some deliberate choices), FOMO, Scalpers and many, many more issues; so things got very heated. I'm not going to condone everything that was written by people, but I applaud the action and resistance as a whole. The KDM community needs to be more vocal and politely keep the pressure up against unacceptable practices. Well done to Adam for fixing this one so quickly.

The new version, yes. That's what it should have been from the start, a fun physical object you can purchase and PHYSICALLY send back in to get a model that doesn't have any game content. A model that's being 'print on demand' (something that should be standard for KDM's resin store anyway). And they're also being used as ways of rewarding people in contests or offered to people who've shared painted miniatures etc. 

This is a way of doing it that I approve of, and I will likely support this new version of the King's Coins with a purchase of two (one to keep, one to send back in for the model if I like the look of it) - depending on the price.

 Kingdom Death: Showdown Tracker 

Yes yes, a thousand times yes. While this early prototype is very rough and lack a great deal, it represents the first time I've actually liked an electronic rendition of the game. The Tabletop simulator versions are almost all entirely negative experiences for me because the community keeps moving towards scripting (and terrible scripting at that). I've lost count now of the number of times I've had to rollback or rebuild a campaign because the scripting has hit some fatal exceptions, in fact it's gotten so bad that when I start streaming KDM I will probably stick with a fully non-scripted version, even if I have to custom tweak it myself to get it to the level I want. 

However, if this item continues to develop, there may be an alternative method here, so I absolutely support what we have seen even though it's super early in its design. Anything that gets me away from TTS versions that plague my existence would be a delight. 

Weekly Updates

I think we all know how important it is that Adam communicates with the community, this is a great piece of news, but I write that with full knowledge that this is not the first time we've had that promised. So, as they say, the proof is in the eating. Hopefully it is a way of re-earning the good faith he's burnt through so far. 

Because, and we should not lose sight of this. These were the originally pitched wave dates:

Wave 3 is at a minimum 3 years delayed now, and given what we've seen happen to it, Wave 4 is probably not going to see the light of day before 2025. As someone who used to say 'expect Wave 4 in 2121' I am astounded that I have managed to under estimate that.  And it's not because of anything outside of control, there is no external reason why Wave 3 shouldn't be in the hands of its investors at this point - yes, that's right, they call you backers, but you're not, you're investors, investors who've had no physical return for a long time now. 

If you're angry about not receiving stuff yet, well that's fine because we shouldn't be OK with this, not ever. This kickstarter is now filled with things we didn't ask/back for and they are holding up everything else. 

The Soda Pop Miniatures level of delays, the feature creep and the poor communication all need to change, but at this point it seems highly unlikely that the lesson will be learned. Being this way is simply not a good image for the formerly biggest board game kickstarter to have and a terrible example to set for others out there.