An Open Discussion on Difficulty (Patreon)

I recently received a message from patron Brian about the topic of difficulty, scaling, power plateaus and reduced challenge with mastering the game and because this is the kind of thing that a) is too much of a time investment to deal with in messages, that's what the patron is partially for and b) is so interesting I wanted to open it up to general discussion. I've cleared it with Brian and here is what he wrote:

What are your thoughts on (in my opinion) the difficulty scaling problem and what can be done moving forward? 

As much of a (massive) fan I am of the CE changes I don't think they address the base issue of the game which is the lack of monster scaling compared to "optimally" playing KDM which results in less than compelling game play.  

Since the pandemic started I had to copy an existing stars campaign over to digital and continued it solo. I was so sad near the end as I literally skipped 5 hunt years because I had enough extremely overpowered survivors and ended up demolishing the tyrant in a few turns.  This issue worries me to no end - I am enamored with KDM as a whole but don't see how to fix the problem which I think many games have-monsters have no system to grow in difficulty and a few lucky years can put you on an express lane to monotonyville. 

I think the problem is exacerbated in the gap years of being too strong for lvl1 monsters but not being ready for lvl2s.   I invited a hardcore strategy and RPG friend to start playing with me and due to insane luck (getting twilight ly1.. Lots of crazy good rolls) he quickly lost interest as we wiped the floor with monsters without any threat. I even brought the campaign to show two others and it was so event-less they immediately lost all faith in the game. 

It seems to me that the better one gets at the game (and there are way too many calculated decisions to succeed) the worse it becomes.  I have heard of rushing level 2 enemies but from what I gather that requires a massive dedication to optimal decision making as a TPK early in KD can be hard to recover from. But that alone doesn't "fix" the balance issue I have come to encounter.  One root suggestion I had was to have permanent Stat increases or default traits added to monsters at certain checkpoints or LYs. 

I also believe a core problem is the overt "power" of stats and how they can dovetail the game fast. Obviously luck is up there but it's maddening to me how speed can be a detriment and strength is thrown everywhere yet can quickly become redundant with other game play factors. Death mask turned my campaign into a joke for obvious reasons.  

So, Brian brings up some very interesting points, and ones that I am sure some people will boggle at. The very idea that the game can be 'too easy' and 'event free' may seem absolutely alien, especially to newer players. However, like many thematic games (as this genre is sometimes called, other times it's called Ameritrash) go; a large part of success in this style involves dampening or mitigating risks as much as possible because the price paid for failure tends to be very high.

If you screw up in KD:Monster; the penalty can be as severe as death before even reaching the showdown, loss of limbs, retirement or even as severe as destruction of gear. This means that one is encouraged, very strongly, to adopt the most powerful plays possible. Because you cannot stop Murder or rolling a 1 and dying (without a lifetime reroll). You have to leverage every other aspect of the game as hard as possible so the uncontrollable deaths do not dogpile onto ones that you could have mitigated. 

So, gradually, either through trial and error, analysis/tactics/strategy or learning from others (either through videos, community discussions or places like this patreon), you will trend towards a certain set of actions and choices. Which has created our metagame or meta. This meta is very powerful, it's streamlined away a lot of the more wacky and silly options, not because one wants to powergame, but because the price for not doing so is unacceptable. Because you put SO much time into playing this game, because even a single lantern year is usually half to an entire session. You are boxed into either accepting that failure is coming, or taking the powerhouse route in order to be more likely to enjoy the later content.

This is a very complicated situation to navigate, there are dozens and dozens of points that cause this situation to exist, and I'm going to try and highlight some of them as they in essence boil down to a few different categories:

1. Unbalanced Gear

All gear is not created equal, now I vehemently disagree with Mark Rosewater that "bad cards should exist", but I do think that situational ones should. Something that's bad in most places but powerful in certain ones is very important. However Kingdom Death has a lot of strictly worse situations. White Lion/Gorment/Silk are all strictly worse than Rawhide/Leather for example, so you are strongly discouraged from deviating your path and tend to homogenize armor progression. The same applies to weapons, while the White Lion weapons are (almost) all excellent options with different applications, there is little reason to step up to the Weapon Crafter gear because they fail to improve.

On top of that, items (over weapons/armor) have infinite scaling, when they are good, they're always good. The Lucky Charm only gets stronger as the campaign progresses, as do things like the Wisdom Potion/CEC - and these pieces of gear turn up very early on.

2. Lack of weapon variety/progression

Almost all weapon categories in this game fail to have a good progression line from start to finish. Sword is one of the few with solid choices in the early, mid and late game, but some - famously whips, are so lacking in any options that they are almost impossible to explore. Silk and Hunter's Whips for example are analogous to each other, and the Rawhide/Ring Whip have massive problems to overcome. So progression there is stunted to Silk/Hunter's -> Oxidized Ring Whip and that's a very dissatisfying experience for anyone.

Now not every campaign should have every single weapon type with a full progression, that should be determined by the various monsters selected. But because several of the mid game tier of monsters (Phoenix, Dragon King, Dung Beetle Knight) all lack depth and/or breadth of options - if you want Katars, hunt the DBK, if you want a bow hunt the Phoenix, if you want a Scythe hunt the Dragon King. All of the above trio of monsters tend to be hunted for their non-weapon options and it is only the Sunstalker that offers any good weapon choices for a Node 3 monster. (We'll not even touch the Lion God and how poor the options are there).

3. Monster Plateaus & Behavior 

This one is something that one just has to accept as the trappings of the game. Because this is a board game, and it uses small numbers for its increments (Levels 1 - 3) monsters are just going to have large plateaus in power while survivors power up in in a less step-like fashion (and with a wilder variation in the power gained) and this dance is just inevitable because the only way to smooth out monster power progression is with more options or a computer calculating all the tiny % changes needed to make it feel 'smooth'.

The first one is the important one, there should have been a pyramid of monster options, with more early game choices than later game ones (and more meaningful ones, the Screaming Antelope is shallow and Spidicules has too many issues/redundancies with White Lion gear). But throughout the campaign, the forced way you have to grind out certain monsters for key "eyetems" or armor and the pure lack of cross expansion synergies outside of the Hybrid armors just makes for a potentially repetitive and homogeneous experience for the long term player.

4. Lack of New Content

Now this brings us to the single largest issue as I see it, stagnation. While the KD:Monster meta was solved more slowly than it is in your typical card game, it has been mostly solved now for 3+ years and Adam Poots Games has failed to supply meaningful content for quite some time now. In fact we're over 2 years behind where we should be (Wave 3 - Estimated Delivery Spring 2018) and the game is hurting as a consequence of that.  

This is the kind of game that needs a fresh injection a couple of times a year, a new monster expansion, a new campaign. Those things are essential to keeping the game fresh for players because exploration of new content is the carrot that encourages them to take more risks.

So what does this all mean? Well we have a tactically and mechanically brilliant game design that's saddled with a sluggish development cycle, one that is marred in delays and resets. Imagine a world where the Gambler's Chest had already been released and we were instead getting news that a new campaign around the Gambler was going to be hitting the stores? That the King was getting its own, separate expansion - with the addition of an upgraded version of The Hand. That the cannibal survivors were going to be their own thing?  

Instead, we're going to be flooded with new content in 2021, drowning in it. But that leads to the knowledge that Wave 4 is probably years away (2025 anyone?) and we're going to return to a world where feature creep is delaying the things that have been promised. 

Feast or Famine, that's pretty much the creed of KD:M
 

What to do?

So, how do you deal with this? Well for a start, anyone who is fine with delays, especially any further future delays, is a part of the problem. These delays should be getting pushed back, especially by people who care about the health of the game and company, sorry. But saying "I trust Adam to deliver quality content" (or similar) is not a valid reason to be using at this point. For a start, the quality at a game front is not a guarantee, the current design track record has a lot of missteps, and while one should absolutely not judge the future content to be poor based on these missteps (because the design team is apparently watching, listening and paying attention) you equally cannot say that the content will be quality either. We just don't know, we need more data points. But additionally, the quality of the content is not the issue, it's the constant bloat of content that was NOT pitched for in the first place, that's not what the agreement is when you make a kickstarter and anyone who says they backed because they knew the company would bloat things is a) backing for the wrong reason and b) not telling the truth, because they did not really bloat content much at all in the first kickstarter outside of the already announced goals. The level of bloat we're experiencing now, which has created a delay that will be at least 3 whole years in the making is unprecedented. I appreciate that APG are now buckling down and pushing to get wave 3 out of the door, I appreciate that the global pandemic has had massive, unexpected delays. But things were nearly 2 years delayed before any of that happened.  So, what's done is done, but I will be disappointed if Wave 4 experiences any further delays and isn't out within a short period after Wave 3's delivery. I hope people will push back and decline feature creep. We need a stronger, more consistent flow of new content, anything else is going to hurt both the community and the company in the long run. So perhaps we should be the ones to try and reign in Adam's excess? Food for thought.

Until then, in game personally I've been keeping things alive by playing other games while also exploring the more offbeat content, some people (Nick Writz I believe) have played campaigns without any Hit Location control for example. And that's a good way to do this, the game becomes fresh again if you set yourself limitations. No Rawhide Armor, no Hit Location Control. Avoiding White Lion/Gorm Weapons. Seeing how far you can get without using Dash/Surge. Trying to survive with a Cannibal settlement and so on (I recommend Collective Toil + Graves for that one). There is plenty of offbeat and weird content still there to try out, and sometimes, like the Dragon King, you'll find there is a great deal to experience if you take the knowledge you've gained from the meta runs and pushed things to a more

Which brings us to the final area, the most important one. Discussion. What do Brian's words make you think about. Have you experienced this, and if so, what do you do to keep things fresh and interesting? Have at thee in the comments and until next time, be good people.

An Aside on the Death Mask

I also think that the Death Mask is an interesting mention, this piece of gear is typically locked behind the Mask Maker location, but sometimes the Mask Seller hands it over to you, and it turns out getting it via that method is utterly degenerate. In the hands of a competent team of players, the downsides of this piece of gear are close to nothing and the upside is absolutely massive, a 50% chance of critical wounds on an attack (with no penalty to normal strength wounding odds) is an absolutely staggering beast of an item with some serious issues. I'm not convinced this piece of gear should have the accessory keyword and I'm very concerned that it can be gained by meeting the Mask Seller. I myself have had this one early in a campaign (There are videos of it in action on this Patreon in the Showcase Showdown series) and I ended up wrapping up that campaign early on because it trivialized the game and would continue to do so until random chance (not a monster) took the survivor wearing it from me. It almost guarantees a win at the showdown stage against any monster that has critical wound locations.

I did not feedback any issues to APG about the Death Mask, but in hindsight, perhaps I should have.