Designer's Diary: Early Game Weapons - Part 3 (Patreon)

In the final parts of the early game weapon series we will finish off the overall look by discussing how weapons are costed in this game, how to 'gate' mid and late game weapons (and gear in general) behind your early game monster and then I will give you an outline for each weapon type in the game that will allow you to design balanced weapons and ones that fit into the world of KDM as it exists (these two things are not the same, because as I'm sure you are very aware, not all weapons are balanced and equal - Zanbato, I'm looking at you).

Part 1 is there and Part 2 is there.

Costing and Special Requirements

Not all resources in Kingdom Death are equal. Your typical survivor holds just one or two weapons, five pieces of armor and a few support items. Hides and Organs are the predominant resources for Armor and Support gear respectively, while Bones are the main source of weapons.

This general guideline can vary, especially later on where metal can take up the place of bone, but as a rule you should always have at least one bone in your weapon, this bone makes up for the 'rod' of the weapon. It is the structure that gives it hardness. If you pick up any location in the game and take a look at the resource cost; unless it is a late game weapon that is using Iron, one will find that there is always at least one bone somewhere in there, sometimes monster specific, sometimes generic.

The rest of the resources tend to be a bit more nebulous and depend on the monster plus flavour. It is worth researching a little on what primative bone weapons look like to get an idea on how you want to have your items crafted. I will get a bit more specific when we look at the individual weapons, but in essense, you are generally able to be flexible with the rest of your resource cost, it can be bones, hide or organs in any combination.

You should always bare in mind that hide is a very expensive resource to add into a weapon, 1x hide = 1x rawhide piece and that is a huge hit in defensive power. Same with monster specific hide resources, these delay/compete with the development of that monsters' specific armor set.

The other main area to consider is monster specific vs. generic. Monster specific resources (currently) always use the exact name of the resource for their construction. This makes the weapon harder to construct because you have a lower chance of getting what you need (depending on the monster's resource deck). As a consequence, weapons that use monster specific parts are generally more powerful than those which use more generic stuff. If your weapon is stronger than normal, costing is where you can make it fair.

To highlight this, let us look at three very similar weapons and see why I consider two of them problematic and the last one balanced. They are the Zanbato, the Rib Blade and the Riot Mace:

So these three weapons are all very similar in design, the Zanbato and Rib Blade are essentially analogs, the Rib Blade trades 1 strength, devastating and a reduction overall affinity power in exchange for a superior affinity, earlier access and no frail. Without Calcification in the picture I consider them to be effectively the same weapon (6 and 5 have the same break points for a lot of monsters).

The Riot Mace shares the space as well because it is another Deadly weapon, however it deviates from the previous two by being faster, more accurate, a superior weapon type (yeah Club is stronger than Grand because of how it scales to the late game, you can use a Riot Mace forever) and a strong critical wound ability that can cripple some monsters.

However, despite the obvious increase in power I consider the Riot Mace to be the most balanced of the three and the Rib Blade to be the most overpowered. This is due to the cost of accessing them. Each weapon costs the following:

• Rib Blade: 1x Meaty Rib, 1x Hide
• Zanbato: Weapon Crafter unlocked* (1x endeavor, 3x bone, 1x hide), 1x Great Cat Bone, 2x Hide
• Riot Mace: 1x Pure Bulb, 1x Stout Kidney, 1x Jiggling Lard, 1x Dense Bone 

*Now there are additional benefits to unlocking the Weapon Crafter, but let us not kid ourselves, you open the Weapon Crafter to get the Zanbato, the rest of the stuff there is nowhere near as important.

It is this change in costs which makes all the difference, the Riot Mace costs 4 different unique monster specific resources to construct, one of which is a Deathblow specific Strange Resource that causes blind when collected. Also you have to do this with the additional complication of Gorm Climate (which either takes time to deal with, or has to be chanced while you save).

In short, the Riot Mace is very powerful, more so than either of the other two, but it is also the most balanced because of how difficult it is to acquire. It is a prestige/exotic weapon, a journey to get and it deserves its power even if you can technically craft it in Lantern Year 2 (I've done that, it was a blast).

In contrast the Rib Blade represents far too much power concentrated into one item that costs 1 monster specific resource and a hide. This is because when designing the team thought that slow was a negative ability and designed accordingly, but the community demonstrated completely that slow is at worst slightly positive and when used correctly it is a highly positive ability.

I recommend that you avoid making more Rib Blades and Zanbatos, but if you do, cost them in a similar fashion to the Riot Mace.

Innovation Requirements and Strange Resources

Another way to control access to powerful weapons is to lock them behind certain innovations or strange resources. This can ensure that the weapon does not turn up for a number of years because it requires either slaying a higher level monster or spending X endeavors, bones, hide and organs (where X is the tier level of the innovation) as an unlock requirement.

A great example of this is the use of the Heat innovation requirement in metal working, if you want to build a weapon that is powerful for the mid game, but do not want it to turn up too early then you can use Heat as your innovation lock (the brown box on the weapon cost). Heat is typically given out as a plot element around LY5, so you know that until LY5 most settlements won't be able to build your weapon. If you do choose Heat as a method, then put scrap into the recipe (or monster specific resources with metal in it, like the Black Skull).

Other innovations can also be used if they are thematically linked in some manner, you just need to be aware of the tier level. Each step away from Language that you take (Tier 0) the harder the item is to craft. You can also link it to less desirable innovations, so the opportunity cost of building the item is higher. Having an unlock linked to Inner Lantern for example is linking it to a strong innovation at Tier 1, while locking it to Records links it to a weak innovation at Tier 3 (Language -> Inner Lantern -> Storytelling -> Records). 

At absolute best, each tier you add to the innovation level increases the "cost" of the weapon by 1x bone, endeavor, organ and hide while also delaying access for at a minimum the number of years the Innovation's tier is at (usually more). One of the reasons that the Cult Speaker Knife isn't utterly busted (it is still very powerful) is that it is linked to Storytelling and requires the White Speaker event to even be activated. That makes it a Tier 2 innovation weapon with the addition of more costs because it's 2x endeavors to activate the story event.

Another way to do it is to use Patterns, this locks the weapon behind not only Insight, but also a bunch of other methods. We'll look at the Pattern stuff soon when I finish refining the pdf I released recently, I have to add more icons to it. But the Pattern System is a very strong way of adding stuff to the game without having to build new monsters.

Strange Resources are the final method, they are very simple and the best example of them is the Sunstalker (though you can find it in the core monsters, it's just not as well executed there). Here is how the 5 (yes 5!) Strange Resource items in the Sunstalker pan out.

• Sunspot Lantern - Requires 2x Sunstones which is 2x L1 Sunstalker
• Denticle Axe - Requires 1x 1000 year old sunspot, which is 1x L2 Sunstalker
• Skleaver - Requires 2x 1000 year old sunspot, which is 2x L2 Sunstalker 
• Ink Sword -  Requires 1x 3000 year old sunspot, which is 1x L3 Sunstalker 
• Ink Blood Bow - Requires 1x 3000 year old sunspot, which is 1x L3 Sunstalker 

In addition the Ink Sword (and to a lesser extent the Ink Blood Bowl) needs the Sunspot Lantern to work. So the difficulty of getting the Ink Sword active is really high. 

There are a whole bunch of interesting decisions that have to be made with this, these items all require other bits and pieces to construct as well, and getting them made is often a journey.  

You also have interesting decisions with the L2 version, both the Denticle Axe and Skleaver are amongst the finest weapons in their categories. It is a hard choice to pick between them and saving for the Skleaver can feel really tough at times because you could just get a Denticle Axe right after your first L2 Sunstalker... The Sunstalker has a very powerful suit of weapons and armor, but it is also a shining example of "design done right", not perfect but right up there with the Gorm suite.

You can make real journeys out of this concept by having strange resources from multiple different levels of monster being required, or having one earlier item be essential to use the later one (Sunspot Lantern + Ink Sword). Especially when it is two different survivors who have to use the items separately - they feel really good to use.

And that's everything about costing. A bit later today I will release the second half of this, which will contain all the different weapon categories and outlines on how to design them. I want to split these apart not to add more time to this series, but because I want all the stats and numbers and so on to be in its own unique post.

When it goes live, it will be here. I can't control the scheduled time of when Patreon posts are released, just the date, so it might arrive an hour or so later if I don't manually post both items one after another (I might forget, I have a lot on at the moment).