Designer's Diary: Early Game Weapon Design Guidelines (Patreon)

Here we take all the discussion from the previous parts and boil it down to a set of guidelines for you to use when designing your own early game weapons.

Discussion links are as follows:

• Part 1 
• Part 2 
• Part 3 

Before I lay out each of the weapon guidelines, here is a discussion of the system entries so you can understand everything. 

Fist & Tooth and Scythe have been excluded from this list, you should not be creating early game weapons for those two categories. The Cult Speaker Knife is already very powerful and it is locked behind a Tier 2 Innovation, Likewise the Scythe is locked behind the L2+ Dragon King. There are good reasons for this and as such I do not ever recommend that you make early game versions of them. I have also excluded the Twilight Sword because it is a specific weapon and the Katana because its mastery is locked behind the L3 Sunstalker and its design principles means it is problematic when released early in a campaign. So in short, these guidelines recommend you avoid making the following weapons available early on:

• Fist & Tooth
• Scythe
• Twilight Sword
• Katana

You can make Scimitars, but there is not much information about their design right now, they're kind of like the melee version of Thrown. You can creep the power on them also because they do not have a proficiency at the moment.

Here is the only example we have, so use it to balance around:

This all may change in the future when we see what APG LLC does with the Gambler's Chest and Campaigns of Death. We may see early game Scythes/Katanas and variations of the Twilight Sword!

Key to Entries

The following is the system I am using to help guide you in creating balanced, authentic feeling original creations. I will outline the typical nature, range and threshold of each aspect of the weapon and then provide some examples of balanced base designs. 

In the case of numbers I will give you a single word description (low, medium, high) so you get a feel for how the weapon should be and then also attach a specific number or number range to that in brackets.

Speed: Low (1), Medium (2), High (3+)

Speed is a very small range in Kingdom Death, especially when dealing with the early game weapons. In simple terms, the lower the speed, the higher the weapon's strength and vice versa for high speed, low strength.

Going past 3 speed is not something that typically will happen with early game weapons unless they have a very unusual design (Vespertine Foil) and if you want to achieve 4+ speed, it is best done via the Paired.

Slow gives you the ability to cap a weapon's speed, especially on Bows, and in combination with 2+ speed it can create an exciting weapon that encourages Frenzy plays.

Accuracy: Low (7+), Medium (6+), High (5+)

No weapons sit at a 9+ accuracy at the moment and precious few are an 8+ or 4+, you can make 8+ accuracy weapons for sure, but I would be careful with 4+ and 9+. You should bare in mind that all survivors have access to a +1 buff on their accuracy via the Blind Spot rules. Also Synchronized Strike provides easy access to another +1 accuracy (and +1 strength) on an easy to unlock Tier 1 Innovation (Drums). Most of the time your weapons will be 6+ to 7+ for the early game.

Strength: Low (1), Medium (2-3), High (4+)

Most desirable weapons have 3 strength or better. Players are very cautious about 1 strength because it has a poor match up vs. 8 Toughness, so you should be looking to reward low strength with other benefits. While we have examples of 5+ strength weapons out there, I recommend that you lock those behind innovations/strange resources or put heavy negative issues into the weapon such as Unwieldy and stat reductions on things like Movement, Luck or Evasion.

Keywords: weapon, proficiency type, melee/ranged, keyword

I am not going to provide the section for keywords, because it is very much a flavour thing. We discussed keywords in Part 2, some of them have mechanical implications, but most early game weapons will be nothing or bone unless your monster is special like Spidicules.

Clubs, Axes, Spears and Grand Weapons are more often Heavy than other types.

Affinities: X/Y/Z 

Amount: #

I will order the affinities in how common they are for a weapon type. If the text is in bold then it is very common for that weapon type. I will also provide a number range which lets you know how many affinities in total these weapons typically have.  For orientations, see the earlier parts, which list what orientations for each colour are best. The short version is:

• Blue: Left and/or Right
• Red: Left or Left and Right
• Green: Right or Left and Right

Other affinity orientations are less valuable, but can contribute to overall power.

Abilities: [Abilities Here] (Numbers if Relevant)

Any common abilities for these weapons will be put here. I will be pulling these abilities from across the board. If they are in bold, then they are an essential part of the design, otherwise they will run from left to right in decreasing occurrence. The nearer to the start of the list, the more closely tied it is to the weapon's core design.

I'll also give a text written portion to describe any non-keyword design philosophies in these weapons.

Just a reminder on Automatic Wounds, use the text from the Acid-Tooth Daggers, not the Counterweighted Axe, if you want to have that mechanic. Don't let your players skip drawing a hit location.

Costs: Bone/Organ/Hide

Typically most early game weapons cost between 1 and 3 resources. See the discussion in Part 3 for more on this. There is currently no system for pricing things on resource costs because there are just too many elements to a weapon to be able to give an accurate number. You get a whole bunch of things for 2 resources a lot of the time and because the numerical range is so small it's kind of meaningless as I'd be writing 1x monster bone, 1x generic over and over. Instead I'm going to just list the crafting resource categories for the weapon type in order of roughly how common they are. Remember that 1x bone of some sort is always present as a minimum in most non-metal weapons.

Example Profiles:

These will be laid out as follows:

Speed/Accuracy/Strength/Obligatory Abilities

They'll just give you a quick idea of the rough framework for that particular weapon.

I won't be adding affinities there, nor will I be adding lots of abilities, you can always get away with an additional text ability or ability word if you can balance it with stats or cost. And locking powerful stuff behind multiple affinity requirements is another option. But players are very clever at getting around this, so watch out.

Finally, before we get into it, remember these are not rules, they're guidelines to help you not creep too far into overpowered or useless when you create stuff (something that custom creators struggle with in any game). They will give you weapons that are close to the official ones in balance without anything too wacky in design. If you want to push a weapon's speed, accuracy, strength, abilities etc, you can do so, but I would recommend leaving that for a later design, get some basic bitch weapons out there first and see if your playtesters are at all interested in them.

Axe

Speed: Low (1) to Medium (2)

Accuracy: Medium (6+)

Strength: Medium (3) to High (4)

Affinities: Red/Blue & Green tied  Amount: 1 - 2

Abilities: Savage, Reach 2, Deadly, Various wounding based effects (Critical, Persistent, Automatic), Perfect hit Gains X strength.

Costs: Bone/Organ & Hide tied

Example Profiles:

• 1/6+/4 
• 2/6+/3
• 2/6+/4

Bow

Speed: Medium (2)

Accuracy: Low (7+)

Strength: Medium (2-3)

Affinities: Blue/Green/Red Amount: 1

Abilities: Range X, Cumbersome, Slow, Choice to Sacrifice Speed for Accuracy (See Cat Gut Bow text).

I recommend setting Range at 3 or 4 for Bows rather than the 6 that the Cat Gut and Vespertine have. But if you want to follow official stuff exactly, 6 is your start point. I also recommend Cumbersome on all bows apart from weak short range skirmishing types (see profiles below).

Costs: Bone/Organ

• Example Profiles: 
• 1/6+/4/Range 4, Slow, Cumbersome 
• 2/7+/3/Range 6, Cumbersome
• 3/8+/2/Range 3

Never forget that Bows can also use Arrows, so their strength can be substituted easily. Especially with the creation of the arrows from the Gigalion.

Club

Speed: Medium (2)

Accuracy: Medium (2)

Strength: Medium (3) to High (4+)

Affinities: Red/Blue/Green in equal weighting  Amount: 1-2

Abilities:  Perfect hits affecting AI, Deadly, Cumbersome, Unwieldy.

Costs: Bone/Organ/Scrap

Example Profiles:

• 2/6+/3
• 2/7+/4
• 2/7+/5/Cumbersome

Grand

Speed: Low (1) (Slow)

Accuracy: Medium (6+)

Strength: High (4+)

Official Strengths for Grand are set at 5-6 early on, but this makes them the main meta choices. I find 4 to be ample incentive.

Affinities: Blue/Red/Green  Amount: 1

Abilities: Slow, Deadly

Slow is essentially obligatory on Grand Weapons, there is only one late game Grand Weapon without Slow at the moment (not including the Replica Flower Sword). You can however get away with locking higher speed behind the Slow so it triggers on Frenzy.

Costs: Bone/Hide

Example Profiles:

• 1/6+/4/Slow
• 2/7+/5/Slow, Unwieldy

This second profile is an example of a weapon that is designed to be used in conjunction with the Frenzy Drink, becoming a 3/7+/6/Unwieldy weapon at that point. One could even creep the speed to 3 if they wanted.

Katar 

Speed: Low (1) to Medium (2), High (4) with Paired.

1 Speed Katars are really powerful because of interactions with the Katar Specialization. Be cautious about making 1 Speed high Strength Katars as a consequence.

Accuracy: Low (7+)

Strength: Medium (2-3)

Affinities: Blue/Green  Amount:  0-2 

Abilities: Paired (Obligatory), Deadly, Hitting with all attacks/Scoring X number of hits

Note on Paired: I recommend that you have a [When Paired gain X] bonus on Katars in some fashion. This encourages Paired usage, otherwise players will just use one of the weapons. An example of this is the Hooded Scrap Katars, which deal an automatic wound if you hit 4 or more times.

Costs: Bone/Hide

Example Profiles:

• 2/7+/3/Paired/Deadly
• 2/8+/3/Paired
• 2/7+/4/Paired

Shield 

Speed: Any (1-3)

Accuracy: Low (7+ or worse)

Strength: Low (1)

Be careful making high strength early game shields.

Affinities: Green/Red/Blue  Amount: 0-1

Abilities: Armor Gain, Block 1

Note on Block, be very careful with handing out this ability early on, same with armor gain. You can get Block to work well with a 'On hit' or 'Perfect hit' trigger which will force the survivor to attack in order to get the block. Otherwise they will sit there with it the way that the Knuckle Shield is used.

Costs: Hide/Bone/Organ in that order, typically it is Hide on a bone frame.

Example Profiles:

• 1/8+/1
• 3/7+/1
• 2/8+/2

Spear 

Speed: Medium (2)

Accuracy: Medium (6+)

Strength: Medium (3)

Affinities: Red/Blue/Green in that order  Amount: 1

Abilities: Reach 2 (Obligatory), Savage

Costs: Bone/Hide

Example Profiles: 

• 2/6+/3/Reach 2
• 1/5+/4/Reach 2/Savage

Sword 

Speed: Medium (2) to High (3+)

Accuracy: Medium (6+) or better

If any weapon can have Accuracy pushed, it is swords. They tend to be more accurate than most other weapon types.

Strength: Medium (3)

Affinities: Red  Amount: 0-1

Abilities: Survival Gains on Perfect hits, Deadly, 

Costs: Bone/Scrap

Example Profiles:

• 5/4+/1/Deadly
• 2/6+/3
• 3/7+/3

Thrown 

Speed: Any (1 to 3)

Accuracy: Low (7+)

Strength: Medium (2 to 3)

Affinities: Red  Amount: 0-1

Abilities: Range X (Obligatory), on Perfect hit do X, Debuff monster

Costs: Bone

Example Profiles:

• 1/7+/4/Range X/Slow
• 2/6+/2/Range X
• 3/7+/3/Range X

You can get away with making Thrown Weapons stronger/more effective than most because they do not improve weapon proficiency. They are the Ranged version of the Scimitar.

Whip

Speed: High (3)

Accuracy: Medium (6+)

Strength: Medium (3)

Affinities: Blue/Green  Amount: 1-2

Abilities: Reach 2 to 3, AI Control (specifically mood removal), Provoke.

Reach is not an obligatory piece of design on the official Whips, but I highly recommend it to give Whips a useful design space to live in. Be very careful with Provoke, it breaks the game when used with high strength because that allows it to trigger every turn and keep the monster locked onto one survivor.

Costs: Hide

This is one of the exceptions to the weapon resource rule, Whips tend to use hide for their construction over bone. You might see some bone as the handle or tip though.

Example Profiles:

• 3/7+/1
• 2/6+/3
• 3/6+/4

And there we are, that's the end of everything I can think of right now on Early Game weapons, I know there are things I have missed, so if there are specifics you want to ask about, for example the concept of building 'pre-paired' weapons. Let me know in the comments below. 

Also, if you want to know what weapon types could really benefit from early game option expansions it is:

• Clubs
• Katars
• Whips
• Thrown
• Scimitar
• Daggers

There we go! You can actually use this stuff to design mid and late game weapons also, but if there is interest in additional guides to expand into mid/late game weapon design. Please let me know.