The Weapon Proficiency Quandry (Patreon)

I was today going to write a piece on how interesting and unique the "Wandering" Weapon Masteries (Katana, Twilight Sword) are with an exploration around how strongly they succeed at building an interesting individual narrative - while also exploring their extreme failure from a game mechanic viewpoint. That's something we will likely return to in the near future as it's interesting to explore such a flavour success mixed with a mechanical fail. 

While checking through everything however, I came back to the crux of weapon proficiency, specialization and mastery - how this is also simultaneously a success and a failure of design and I wanted to explore why that is the case and consider how things could have been course corrected in the update from 1.31 to 1.5. It's an interesting area of the game to explore because this is the portion of the game that causes the highest level of dissonance across every aspect, the game, the design, the designers, the players and the characters are all torn by this very mechanic. Without it the game would lack a huge area of interesting builds, but with it the metagame is dominated by survival strategies. 

So, lets talk about Weapon Proficiency.

Weapon Proficiency is simultaneously a reward and a form of character growth for survivors. It is a way of building stories & personality for both an individual and a settlement. Becoming experienced enough allows one to start training a weapon, becoming proficient with that weapon first unlocks a special ability for the survivor who has it, and then later on unlocks a second special ability for the weapon master along with an innovation that gives access to the first ability for all survivors in the settlement. Having a master gives the settlement access to some form of 'dojo' for the appropriate weapon type, even if the master dies afterwards.

This reward for a survivor living the equivalent of 10 hunts and scoring a wound on the monster in every single one (no mean feat for some weapon types), is at the heart of one of the largest points of dissonance in the game. Everything the setting, the designers and the game mechanics is trying to tell players constantly some version of the following:

The settlement is what matters, individual survivors will come and go. Their lives and deaths are for the greater good of all.

In short, what is supposed to matter is the health of the settlement and the survivors are just the number in which that is expressed. The game only ends if the settlement "dies" or reaches the conclusion of its story, the loss of every single individual survivor (variants notwithstanding) is not the end of the game.

This would stand strong and true except for weapon proficiency; unlike age milestones - which are correctly framed individual rewards given for success - weapon proficiency has this large, tantalizing fruit sitting at the end of it. Weapon specialization for all, a change in the way that the settlement plays that is kept forever. 

Which means that the previous statement is marred, it now reads something like.

The settlement is what matters, individual survivors will come and go. Their lives and deaths are for the greater good of all. Except for survivors training weapon proficiency, they're like permanent upgrades for the settlement and because that is what matters, they matter as much as the settlement. So they're like, you know, precious and should be protected. So, like, why don't you make a murder bait savior, avoid heavy and noisy keywords and play super safe with them until you unlock the mastery. Then they're like, disposable, they're murder bait themselves except when you wheel them out for special occasions.

Oh and hooray for the Storm constellation. Like, yay?!?

There's a huge push and pull which some players may be able to reconcile, but that's the outlier personality here. For the most part players will feel this acute sense of pressure and need to protect these survivors - now this levelling up mechanic can work, in fact we already have an example of it working in Age. 

With Age players are rewarded with temporary benefits for keeping a survivor alive while also being told that their survivors are not eternal due to the twin pressures of death & retirement. Honestly, I find myself satisfied by Age to a great degree and the only areas of friction are weapon proficiency and murder (because of losing a weapon proficient survivor). In isolation, when untangled from Proficiency, Age is a fantastic and enjoyable system. 

I could drill into this further, but I think we're all familiar with how fun weapon specializations are due to the way they open up the game, enable more varied strategies and having mastery gives you that permanent strategy plus the ability to fight harder monsters thanks to Shield plus Fist & Tooth specialization on everyone. Enjoy this dissonance or not, you can't ignore the fact that the game pulls in two directions at once and creates a lot of anti-fun both from game experiences and through player action. It is not enjoyable to be forced to make murder bait, or sit a high proficiency survivor at home performing Nightmare Training, or grind out a L1 White Lion because it's the safest choice to complete a mastery. These kind of things are simply bad for the game experience, but correct for players to do in order to achieve interesting developments for the settlement.

What could have been?

Which brings us to a potential solution, this one needs work, but if we examine the crux of this issue the problem that we have is tying the mastery to the innovation status is what causes players to hoard and protect survivors in a way that the game clearly does not want to happen. This very issue is why players go ageless and then stop gaining hunt XP past Age 2 or 3. It is at the heart of so many weapon choices and pathways, in short it's a driving problem that we've come to accept, but not one that needs to exist.

In order to fix this in a simple and complete manner;' what we need to do is move the goal posts. The permanent reward for this, the carrot so to speak, is the gaining of specialization for the entire settlement and the temporary reward is the owning of a weapon master. Now I am completely in when it comes to the idea of having temporary weapon masters, but I do think that requiring the equivalent of 8 pips of proficiency PLUS 2 pips of experience (so effectively 10 hunts without shortcuts) is too much for the settlement innovation. It's locking away all the cool and interesting things that can be done behind a fortunate run that goes into the mid/late game.

Instead I'd like to propose this solution, and then talk about the various ways we could slide this solution around in order to make sure that it's balanced. (This is not final wording, just an example for the concept).

When a survivor reaches Weapon Specialization, it is unlocked as an innovation available for the entire settlement. 

Now, this means for a starting survivor, weapon specialization would become available to the settlement by lantern year 5. That might seem a little powerful, and yes it is overall in improvement in power for the settlement, but think about how much it encourages you to be more reckless with your survivors. You can afford to risk that dagger survivor because you know that the replacement will still have access to the cool and fun specialization ability. You can build strategies around it from a fair earlier time. (Also the Twilight Knight/Edged Tonometry triggers earlier in a campaign).

There are two potentially problematic weapon proficiencies that sit inside this situation however, Fist & Tooth and Shield mastery. So you may find that this solution might not be applied to those two specific masteries. They might need an exception that keeps them working in the old fashion and that's because how how they give blanket bonuses to the entire settlement. That's fine, we already have two weapon proficiencies that work differently to the rest (Katana/Twilight Sword) so more exceptions are fine.

There is further tweaking that can be done to make this a bit more interesting without having to make specific exceptions and that is to change this new rule to:

When a survivor with a Weapon Specialization reaches Age 3, it is unlocked as an innovation available for the entire settlement.

This is functionally exactly the same number of hunts overall as it takes to unlock mastery (10), however now we are not completely screwed over by the Phoenix, and perhaps even encouraged to go hunt it in order to take a risk and 'lock in' an early weapon innovation. I think this is interesting and just changes things enough to encourage ageing up and letting survivors lock in permanent changes for the settlement a tiny bit faster.

There are also other ways of sliding this around, you could lock it to Weapon Proficiency level 4 or 5 turning the specialization into an innovation - but ultimately I think one of the simplest and most elegant ways of fixing this situation and giving players rewards for grinding weapons while also making pushing to master a thrill all in itself is to de-couple the mastery from the innovation. This will encourage riskier behaviour and return some of the thrills to the game without having to completely re-write stuff. 

Next time, going to explore the Wandering masteries and write about the subject I intended to write about in the first place.