Designer's Diary: Early Game Weapons Part 2 (Patreon)

This continues from part 1 here. 

Statlines make for only a small portion of the picture when one is analysing or creating a weapon. The rest of the character and power is spread around the keywords, abilities, affinities and crafting cost/innovation requirements and we'll move through that here. I'm hopeful we'll get it done in two parts, but there is so much to unpack that I cannot guarantee this won't go into a third section where we wrap things up and give you some baseline designs to tweak.

Now, before we get into the meat of it, I wanted to take a few moments to look at the new weapons we're seeing for the Frogdog, these were best showcased in the TWIST Frogdog demo and that's where I screencapped them from. The reason I want to look at these is because they represent the only evidence we have of how the internal APG Design team has evolved and learnt from how the community has been playing their game.

First up we have the Long Club

This piece of gear lands in the practical name category, aka the name describes exactly what it is and it's a great example of how simple names evoke primitive and non-complex creations. The Bone Club, Bone Axe and Cat Gut Bow all land in this.

The statline is very close to a normal baseline for a Node 1 monster, it has one more accuracy than normal, but it is paying for that via its keywords because it is two handed. More on this later. The stinky keyword has interactions with the Frogdog in particular and it is a way of evoking the theme of the monster. The only keyword it is holding is Reach 2, which makes it a reach club and reach is a very strong ability, but not one that can turn a weapon into something overpowered.

While the up and down green affinities look power crept for the portion of the game, we don't know the crafting cost on this piece of gear and we do know that the Membrane Armor already has a huge pile of green affinities as is. So it looks like active Monster Grease issues are less of a consideration for APG here.

This is a welcome addition to the game because outside of the Bone Club and the rare Riot Mace, early clubs are sorely lacking. However, it does make both the Whistling Mace and Skullcap Hammer look even worse in comparison. Mid game weapons in KDM are a mess...

The other one is the Anna Poots named Vertebrayonet!

This is a solid improvement over past early game daggers with some interesting Luck design to boot. The stats are unusual when compared to other weapon types, moving slightly towards underpowered, but they match the Acid-Tooth Dagger, so that cements our Node 1 dagger design stats.

Where this weapon makes up for that is the addition of the perfect blue affinity along with a very unique weapon ability. You can easily combine this weapon with the Lucky Charm and Rawhide Armor to create a non-powercreep "deadly" alternative to the Lion Beast Katar.

Finally we have the name, this is in the clever pun/play on words category of name which is shared by the Gaxe (Gorm-Axe), Skullcap Hammer and Skleaver (Sky-Cleaver). This time it is the combination of the words Vertebra and Bayonet. 

Now we've looked at those and seen what other early game daggers and clubs might look like in the future (and also seen that Reach is "allowable" on clubs and "Deadly" continues to be a thing on Daggers) it's time to move onto the rest of the article.

Keywords

Keywords are something that can often be overlooked because they don't do anything directly themselves, instead they interact with other things. The rules on the keywords come from those interactions,  not the keywords themselves. I'm going to highlight some of the most significant ones as there are so very many, too many to cover in full here - we'll do a designer's diary on keywords in full later on.

Keywords are generally split into a few different types. You have category keywords (weapon, item, armor) which split the item types into their mechanical categories - we're going to always be using weapon here. Next you have descriptive keywords that define what the weapon does (melee, ranged, two handed), this is how the weapon is wielded by the user. Third is the weapon proficiency (we discussed that last time), Fourth comes material/properties keywords, which tell you what the weapon consists of and finally we have the other keyword which is always put on the end and it tells you that it has some kind of strange property to it that means it cannot be used by saviors.

There is a general order these keywords are placed in:

category, descriptive, weapon proficiency, materials/properties, (other)

However, this order sometimes gets violated and it is not clear if this is just a slip up on the editing side (such as the demo Vertabrayonet above having dagger after bone, instead of dagger, bone like the bone dagger).

These keywords are never capitalized and are always in italics.

Finally, before we move forward I feel I must again emphasize that these rules are more like guidelines, we are looking at how the internal design team create their weapons so we can make things that match and feel the official ones in power and theme. If you want to go crazy, you can, but I am not going to cover that here and I absolutely do not recommend it for your first few designs. Get fundamentals right before you go heavily altering some portions of the game, same with anything. Fundamentals first!

Now let us get onto the most significant keywords.

Two handed

Two handed weapons are worse than one handed because of their problems with dismembered arms and inability to interact with things like Blood Paint. They tend to be on the slower end of speed and have average to decent accuracy/strength. Almost all reach weapons are two handed and all early game reach weapons are two handed. So I would recommend that you use two handed for the following weapon types and consider very hard if the design fits for any other weapons.

grand, spear, axe, club

As discussed previously, early game scythes are best considered a no-no because of how difficult it is to balance them due to the extreme power of both the proficiency and the mastery. However, they would be two handed.

Ranged

Oh boy, this is the most powerful of all the keywords by a long shot, ranged weapons have many, many upsides and few negatives. More on this in the section on the Ranged ability.

Noisy

This one is rarely seen on weapons, as we do not have true hunting horns in the official content. It is an extremely negative keyword because it is one of the few keywords that has an auto-death situation tied to it via the harvester. This means that every single hunt event you roll or draw a card for has a 1% chance of killing your survivor outright and leaving the team short handed. I recommend avoiding this keyword in your designs until we have environments that do not involve the Harvester event.

However, if you want to build a nemesis monster with craftable gear based around music, you can get away with noisy weapons and interactions there because the Harvester doesn't turn up then.

Heavy

Another mostly negative keyword that players try and avoid, it does have applications and if a survivor is already wearing heavy armor they are more likely to risk carrying a heavy weapon. Some interesting design applications of the heavy keyword are in the Tyrant fight.

Bone

Worth mentioning because of its interactions with the Bone Earrings (no not People of the Skull, that's a meme game), bone builds can be a strong offensive style of play worth remembering. You can also create your own versions of this if you construct or build around a new material keyword.

Metal/Finesse

Not present in most early game gear for thematic reasons. It makes sense that you don't get much metal until after scrap smelting is innovated. If you want a metal weapon of some sort, lock it behind the heat or scrap smelting innovation. But then it is not really early game, more on that in costs.

Mineral + bone / Calcifiation

Stuff which can be calcified via the Dung Beetle Knight expansion always has these two keywords; the process is  Mineral + bone  -> calcification ->  bone. But be very, very careful with what early game gear you give calcification to. The reason for this is Return on Investment. Most weapons have a low Return on Investment (ROI) because they have to be replaced with new ones over time. One of the reasons that Clubs (Lantern Armor = Sharp) and Cycloid Scale Armor (Sharp everywhere) are so strong is because they increase the ROI on weapons and that results in more resources that can be deployed elsewhere.  Calcification does the same thing, the ROI on the Zanbato in the DBK world is absolutely insane.

On top of that, you also get quick access to the Trash Crown, which is one of the lowkey strongest HL manipulation items in the game because of its ability to 'scrub' unwanted Hit locations (King's Man is the classic example here). 

So be very cautious with Calcifying things, you add a LOT to the value of the item when you give it that option.

Abillities

Abilities are the meat of what your weapon does outside of stats and I will go through only the ones I recommend for early game. If it's not here, it's because we have not seen it land on early game gear yet and it has balance issues if handed out too quickly (Devastating, I'm looking at you).

Deadly X/Luck - Strong Positive

Very powerful, this one is a premium ability package that you have to weaken the weapon elsewhere to get. The Lion Beast Katar pays with lower accuracy, the Riot Mace pays by being very difficult to craft and the Rib Blade "pays" via Slow. I'll discuss the issues with the Rib Blade elsewhere if I get around to it, but let us just say that the design team thought that Slow was exclusively a negative ability, but the community proved that at worst it is a neutral ability and often it is a positive.

Savage - Weak Positive

This one is easiest to think of as a critical wound triggered version of Devastating. I would exercise extreme caution with coupling this one with Deadly/+Luck, but on its own it is seen mostly on early axes. It is not a very strong ability overall, and you should not factor much into the stats cost of adding it to a weapon. Just make sure that it is thematically a fit and that

Slow - Positive

Present on grand weapons most of the time, this ability is how you hard lock speed on bows (very good thing to do imo, love the Arc Bow design) and soft lock speed on Melee weapons. This was valued as a negative ability by the APG design/testing teams and always came with benefits, but the wider community has shown that designs like the Rib Blade are too pushed and Slow should be considered slightly beneficial or better depending on the stats of the weapon.

Whatever your weapon does, Slow magnifies that. If it is strong and accurate, Slow makes it a reliable beater with little push back from the monster. If it is inaccurate and weak, it's not going to be used. But an inaccurate/strong weapon is interesting if locked as slow.

I'm basically saying, don't make the Rib Blade or Zanbato in your early game loadouts, they're too good.

Slow/Melee with Speed 2+ is an interesting mechanic in itself, very much worth exploring because it encourages players to use items like the Frenzy Potion.

Reach 2 - Positive

This is as far as early game reach goes, and there is only one Reach 3 weapon in the game right now. So I would stick with keeping this as the maximum early game reach value and keep it on the keywords I mentioned above. It is always a benefit for survivors.

Block 1 - Strong Positive

The Knuckle Shield has demonstrated that Block is a ridiculously strong ability early on, I would avoid making any shield that can Block X as an activation as a consequence. However, you could create it that the weapon gains Block X in an unpredictable fashion, such as on critical wounds, misses or Perfect hits.

Perfect hit - Neutral 

Perfect hit abilities are a way of making your weapons have powerful abilities some of the time and it is a great place to put things which you think might be too strong. If you want to soft lock a perfect hit ability you can stick it behind Perfect hits on a slow weapon. This means you know that without Frenzy it will trigger 10% of the time (20% with Timeless Eye).

If you put it on a weapon without Slow, check what happens if players speed creep the survivor. If at the far end they can kill a monster in one attack without hitting the trap (which the Counterweighted Axe/Butcher's Blood build can) then you should get back to the drawing board or slap Slow on it.

Cumbersome - Strong Negative

This negative is a way of keeping more powerful pieces of gear in check. I recommend putting it on Bows in particular as the Vespertine Bow has highlighted how problematic a long range weapon without cumbersome can be. The Bone Club is a great example of how Cumbersome can be used on a melee weapon to creep stats. It turns out that the Bone Club is one of the strongest weapons in the game thanks to its ridiculous ROI because the club weapon type can easily be carried all the way to the final boss if it has a decent statline.

Range X - Strong Positive

I recommend not following the Cat Gut Bow design here and dropping down to Range 3-4 for your early game bows. Maybe 5 at a push. Range is an exceptional ability because of how it allows a survivor to stay safe without investing into armor, lower range reduces that benefit while also not compounding the effects of the Strategist Fighting Art (which players CAN tutor in the early game).

Frail - Strong Negative

Frail is a bit of a pain in the ass to design for. It should be an interesting mechanic that allows you to push a weapon's power level further than normal. But because of the relative rarity of Super Dense locations and the community's leverage of Hit Location control, Frail rarely does anything and when it does trigger it just causes frustration.

You can put this one on items, but be careful with the compensation, if it is used in combination with Slow for example it can be almost neutralized.

Affinities

With affinities you are rarely going to creep above 2 affinities total. On the whole the affinities are worth roughly the same, because each different "class" uses them in different ways. The main things to pay attention to are the following break points.

2 Blue 

This is the break point for the Lucky Charm. It is very important to consider how your weapon interacts with the Lucky Charm and Rawhide Armor combo. If it has a left or right blue affinity, or blue up and down then it is going to be very strong if it has Deadly.

4 Blue

This is the break point for the Blue Charm, that can allow for a lot of ease in handling the monster's trap. This will get stacked with Spear Specialization a lot of the time if you give access to it too easily. So I would warn you to exercise extreme caution with Spears and Blue affinities (Scythes also). 

2 Red

The break point for the Monster Tooth Necklace, this one is not as powerful as the 2 Blue one because the MTN is locked behind the Heat innovation. So do not worry so much about creating weapons that have the same affinity layout as the Bone Club. Just note that they will be easy to scale against L2 monsters once the settlement has Heat (good ROI for the players).

4 Red

Break point for the Red Charm. This one is very powerful with low strength weapons that have powerful abilities. If your weapon + Red Charm is stronger than 2x Acid-Tooth Daggers + Active Red Charm then you need to be cautious. That combo there is powerful enough to help dunk the Gold Smoke Knight.

3 Green

Threshold for Monster Grease, this is a massive break point and you should be cautious with it. However, as noted above the Long Club and Membrane Armor call into question what is going to happen in the future.

4 Green

Threshold for the Green Charm, not as important because the Green Charm is a 'failure protection'. If you are going to let players get to 4 Green Affinities easily I don't think that is an issue outside of Monster Grease. The Green Charm doesn't help win showdowns directly, it helps you not lose them.

On the orientation front you should build test layouts with your early game stuff in combination with the following items and armor sets.

• Rawhide Armor
• Screaming Armor
• White Lion Armor (If you are trying to make it viable with a pushed Dagger/Katar)
• Leather Armor
• Gorment Armor
• Lucky Charm
• Leather Shield
• Monster Grease
• Monster Tooth Necklace

These are your "generic" staples (Plus White Lion Armor) that players are going to try and take advantage of.

Also remember that Cycloid Scale Armor can always make your weapon Mid to Late Game in power if it has a compelling reason for a player to do so.

In general terms the following affinities are worth the most to players for the above thresholds.

• Left or Right Blue
• Right Green
• Up and Down blue
• Left and Right Red
• Left Red
• Down Green
• Up Green

Other orientations/orientation pairings are worth a bit less. So you can put them on without as much of a concern.

I'm afraid that we are indeed going to have to go to a third part, but that part will be where we look at crafting costs/requirements and then take all of the sections; check the threshold designs for each weapon type and also put them into some example baseline designs that you can tweak for your own stuff.

So until next time, if you have any specific questions about keywords, abilities or affinity combinations only please put them in the comments here!