The Hours Ring Facepalm (Patreon)

Oh boy, oh boy. It's time for breaking news.

For those of you who are not aware, Adam just recently managed to rule in a way that has turned the Hours Ring into the new most broken item in the game. How broken is it? Well before we go into details, lets just say that with his interpretation of how it works, it's basically an automatic win for the campaign once it's crafted, you literally cannot lose.

Here is the twitter conversation for you to read through. 

So what is he implying here?  Contrary to the way the community agreed on how it should be played after I raised this problem almost a year ago (see here). It's turned out that Adam has decided to allow the 'worst case' scenario kick in, it's actually even more overpowered than I was first afraid.

Essentially, the Hours Ring works as follows:

If the survivor carrying it dies, then it's archived and you reset back to the development step of the previous year, this is before departing. Essentially it 'reloads' the campaign to a point well before the fight. The intention is to provide a once off 'undo' of this, which cannot be reset without making the ring again. 

That's a cool mechanic in concept, however in practice what it does is this.

The survivor carrying the ring dies, it's archived, you reset to the previous development step and the Ring is now in your settlement again. Because you've reset fully, there's no clause that stops the ring being remade again. 

Essentially you now have infinite retries on every fight as long as the wearer dies. This can happen when the fight goes so badly that it's a total party kill (TPK) or you can build a survivor who can kill themselves - so you can reset every time the fight goes wrong for you. 

Here's one way:

Needless to say, this trivializes the entire game to a ridiculous extent, once you have an hours ring (which is not hard to make tbh, it's basically the Phoenix's butt hole + 5 organs of any type) then the campaign is almost always a win (short of something like the Stars mechanic that can stop you getting into the final showdown entirely).

That's absolutely bonkers and honestly I don't know what to say about this. I mean, I was concerned when the ring was released about settlements that could keep the ring's components in storage and craft it before a key fight (then re-craft it over and over), but the actual situation is so much more powerful. 

I guess this is one of those situations where we're going to have to use our common sense, we've been given a tool that reads 'turn your settlement into Punxsutawney and your survivors all into Phil Connors. 

It's honestly mind boggling and I hope that Adam revisits this, because if he feels these kind of mechanics that just say 'I win the campaign' are OK to exist in such a simple to build form (at least the CW Axe Blood Insanity build and the Red Ring of Death take time to set up and are relatively hard things caused by expansions.)

Enjoy the newest KD:M Meme:

I wish that was a doctored joke... I just don't know what to say, except, bring back the 1.31 Hours Ring.

Gah...

Edit:

For people who are curious. After discussion on the discord, this is how I would have worded the Hours Ring.

Unique, Selfish 

During the aftermath, if you died or ceased to exist, reset to the beginning of the previous Settlement Phase's depart step and archive the Hour's Ring.

Reasoning:

I would keep the Selfish mechanic from the original 1.31 hours ring because it denies the use of 'other' items in your gear grid and I think that is an interesting trade off in exchange for a full reset on a fight.  

I have removed 'may' from the text, so you can't avoid using it, even if you want to. (That's a huge increase in opportunity cost.)

It resets you to the depart step, so you cannot craft new gear, this reduces bookkeeping a smidge but also, importantly it means you cannot craft a new ring. It also archives itself AFTER you have reset so you cannot loop 'infinitely' with it. However you can pick a new monster at a different level and switch up gear grids.

There is still the problem that the hours ring is a pain in the ass for bookkeeping purposes, but an item like this isn't really that good for a pen and paper game, it's more for a video game, which can reset without error. (Story in the Snow, the Promo event, has this issue also).

If people want, I can put together a photoshop of that version of the Hours Ring for use in game once my PC arrives. Let me know.