Weapon of Choice: Assessing Gear Cards - Part 1 (Patreon)

A short(ish) one today which hopefully will give some of you newer players the tools to quickly decide if a weapon is worth your time and pursuit. At the moment there is a LOT of misinformation being spread around by self proclaimed 'experts' and people who do not follow the 'play to win' philosophy. 

Now it is absolutely fine to explore and play the game as you wish, but it is not fine to pooh-pooh people who have put the time in to try and find the most efficient, optimal routes.  In particular there is a whole 'cult of speed' group of people who pointlessly rail against the idea that too many dice rolled in attack is harmful and counterproductive. They will throw out anecdotal stories, fudged statistics and outright lies to try and defend their position.  The truth of the high speed situation is this - high speed builds are possible, but they are complex, delicate and have to be used in a controlled fashion. They are for high level play because they require so much supporting and control - they should not be thrown about for new players to fall into.

All of that written, I'm not here to tell you exactly how to play, if you are watching our Let's Play you'll see that we're picking weapon types that I would not call optimal, in part because I want to let nijiq and Grey have fun and in part because I know how to mitigate the downsides.  Instead - I am going to give you the tools required to be able to assess any gear card and decide if it is suited for you. We'll start with anatomy:

Our sample subject is from the Gorm Expansion, chosen because not all of you are familiar with it.  This is the Gaxe.

We've labelled all the parts and I'll work through them now

1. Name - Pretty straightforward, some names are cool, like the Gaxe, some are lame like the Muramasa. 

2. Keywords - This part contains a lot of hidden mechanics, there are many events which can link to these items. Some of the ones that have the biggest impact include: heavy, bone, stinky and fragile. In addition you know if your weapon is melee or ranged by this part and if it is even a weapon or not. Some things you attack with are not weapons.

3. Art - This lets you judge if the weapon has any cool factor, as you can see the Gaxe is very cool. In contrast the Zanbato is clearly not cool.

4. Attack Profile - You've got to have one of these if you want to be able to attack.

5. Speed - The default number of dice you roll when attacking.

6. Accuracy - The default number you need to roll to score a hit

7. Strength - The amount of strength the weapon has to add to the wounding roll.

8. Affinity Ability - abilities in a box like this have an affinity based requirement, without it this box doesn't work.  In this case it requires one red affinity anywhere on your grid to activate.  In some cases there will be a puzzle piece, which means that the affinity in question has to be joined onto this gear.

9. Ability - abilities like this do not require affinities, they may have other requirements to activate.

10. Special Rules - These include savage, devastating, deadly and slow.  All keywords can be read about in the glossary (RTFG - aka Read the Fucking Glossary, seriously it has so many of the games rules in there).

11. Affinities - Those cool half squares you join up to get full affinities and activate extra abilities. The Gaxe has a rare pair of them with it's left and up facing reds.

To assess a weapon you will have to consider all of these things, it's attack profile, it's keywords, abilities, affinities and coolness and you will also have to consider it's mastery. Some masteries are much better than others and some weapons are good despite having weak masteries.  For a look at masteries I recommend you just flick through my two articles on the weapon masteries; here and here.  

Let's get started by diving into the most important part of the weapon, it's attack profile.  This is a series of three interlocking elements that come together.  In essence the attack profile tells you how many times you might hit and how hard those hits will be.  Your weapon has speed, accuracy and strength. 

Accuracy and Strength are very simple to assess, the lower the target number for the accuracy result in general the better the weapon is - because this means that you have a higher chance of your activation this turn being meaningful. More on this when I discuss speed in combination with accuracy.

Strength is even simpler to assess, you just want as high a number as possible here. There is no such thing as too much strength (unless you have a destroyed back).

Speed on the other hand is a more difficult beast to assess.  In general terms the higher the speed, the more wild and uncontrolled a weapon is, more speed potentially means more hits.  This can mean more wounds, and under the circumstances that you have a lot of strength, or a high critical chance (see Deadly in the Keyword section) that can kill a monster quickly.  But the downside is that it can also mean a lot of reactions thrown at your survivor and the trap.  Now people fixate on the trap, but it is the reactions that will kill most survivors and that is why speed is a risk.

There is an interesting philosophy that can be followed and I think it is best typified with the Lion Knight Claws

In this condfiguration these two claws create a weapon can be used in two modes. One is a (4/5+4/Deadly) weapon that exemplifies high speed with decent accuracy but weak strength and the other is a (4/8+/8/Deadly) weapon that shows the 'berserker' style of attacking, with low accuracy but very high strength.

(Note: You can actually get these claws to gain another speed if you want)

I'm not going to go into all of the details of understanding the speed/accuracy interactions here. Instead I'm going to give you a few guidelines and shortcuts.

• 1 and 2 speed have few drawbacks
• 3 speed can be managed in a pinch as well
• 4+ speed is risky and should be considered 'advanced play'
• If the weapon has low accuracy you can put more speed on, but expect very high variance in the results.

So to summarise weapon profiles:

• Speed is best between 1 and 3 - 2 is the recommended amount
• High speed builds are high risk and shorten lifespans
• You want high strength, there is no amount which is too much
• Outside of high speed builds you want as much accuracy as possible.
• With high speed builds you want a lot of strength and Deadly. Remember the Lion Knight Claws!

Next time we look at keywords, affinities and special abilities!