Feeble Frustrating Femurs – An Exploration of Frail (Patreon)

Note: The power went out yesterday while I was writing the back end of this article and I lost a lot of work due to a recovery failure. I've re-written it, but something like this always seems to lose a bit of the magic on the second attempt.

I gave you guys on the discord the opportunity to vote for what you wanted the next topic to be and you almost overwhelmingly asked for a deep dive into the Frail mechanic. So that's what you're all getting, democracy in action!

When I do one of these deep dives into a mechanic, I try to get into the head space of the designer(s) and try to understand what the mechanic is trying to achieve thematically and mechanically. In the case of Frail, this mechanic is not a new or unique one, in fact it has been a staple trope of video games for many years. Employed by both survival genre games and roleplaying games, Frail is a form of the old 'item durability' mechanic which has been employed for years. While it is considerably less complex in KDM – it is still a prime example of this bizarre and often disliked mechanic, some of the major traits of it are:

• It works at full strength until it breaks, at which point it becomes immediately useless.
• It is either impossible to repair/reinforce the item before it breaks, or repairs make the item 100% condition again (like as new) – neatly bypassing material fatigue.
• The amount of time the item lasts is ridiculously small when compared to the reality.
• The item breaks within a few set hits such as in a beat 'em up.

Video games which employ this mechanic include some entries in the Zelda series; Assassin's Creed, Animal Crossing, Elder Scrolls, Dead Rising and so on. It's also often used where firearms in a mostly melee are concerned – the character will discard the firearm when it is out of ammo due to the designer's desire to keep the player's focus on melee.

A sharp contrast to this mechanic is the Monster Hunter series, which does have some weapons becoming duller with use during a fight (including hammers for some bizarre reason) and you'll have to stop and sharpen them. But even when dulled, these weapons are still useful – so for once Monster Hunter doesn't appear to be the core influence on the game design.

In the world of board and roleplaying games this trope tends to be a lot rarer; variations of it show up in 7th Sea (where all improvised weapons are breakable when impressive hits are scored); it was an optional rule in the very old D&D designs – however, on the whole breakable weapons are very rare in tabletop gaming because of the awkwardness involved in their design and the reduced tracking capability that humans have in comparison to computers.

The main truth here is that breakable weapons is an old, outdated mechanic mostly used these days by designers of games who want to keep players focused on one specific fighting style; such as say fists, but also desire to give a window where players can mix things up for a short while before returning to the norm.

Kingdom Death is the exception to this (of course), and Frail exists because its designer grew up on old Nintendo games and idolises the concept of 'Nintendo Hard' as such we have Critical Existence Failure for a few specific weapons, most of whom turn up in the core game and are mainly concentrated around a few crafting locations.

The intent of Frail is to create a weapon with risk attached to it, but unlike Irreplacable – where the risk is that the weapon will archive when the user dies; Frail has a binary state of being virtually indestructible except when it comes into contact with Super-Dense monster hit locations, where upon it immediately explodes into fine dust. Leaving the wielder with nothing more than fists, teeth and legs unless they happen to have a back up weapon in their gear grid.

In short, while Kingdom Death "promises" you that 'Your survivors may die, but your gear will live on'; it also holds its fingers behind its back while making that promise. And Frail is the first, most obvious, point where this covenant between player and designers is broken.  It's in essence the first time where the game tells you 'don't trust the designers, they lie' in a very overt and clear fashion. It prepares you for the multiple betrayals that the various gotcha's ahead will deliver, and therefore they should not be a surprise – but they still are.

In order for us to now dive into Frail further, let us look first at the rules text for the ability, and then explore how many items in the game have Frail as an ability.

Frail weapons are destroyed if a survivor attempts to wound a Super-dense location with them. Archive the weapon at the end of the attack.

There are a couple of key things here; first up we can see that drawing a Frail location does not automatically destroy the weapon; that only happens if the location has a wounding attempt. This means that a frail weapon that hits the trap, or a frail weapon in the hands of that rare flower, the dagger specialist, can get around this issue. We'll talk more about the Frail/Dagger/Specialist interaction a bit later on, because there is exactly one weapon in the entire game that this matters for – and due to the loss of an ability on that weapon, it's not very good at it in 1.6.

As for the weapon list itself, it's pretty short:

• Bone Sword
• Bone Axe
• Bone Darts
• Zanbato
• sCrap Bone Spear
• Hollow Sword
• Rainbow Katar
• Muramasa
• Plated Shield
• Dragon Slayer
• Plus the Scrap Rebar is technically frail itself

So the vast majority of these weapons come from three crafting locations; the Bone Smith, the Weapon Crafter and the Plumery. With the other exceptions being rare, promo and a Blacksmith weapon. It's actually a pretty small list, but it feels large because of the forced interaction with frail weapons via the Bone Smith and the prevalence of the Zanbato in the pre 1.6 meta. In short, the core game tries to force you into using Frail as much as it can; but the player base understandably moves away from it because of how frustrating a mechanic it can be.

One of the largest sources of frustration that frail brings outside of the resource loss is the way that it seeks to force survivors down to fist & tooth during a fight. This happens because 9 slots on a gear grid are just too few to run a back up weapon. While you could indeed pack two Zanbatos on a survivor, you're giving up a slot to provide an emergency spare and that feels terrible. Especially when you can instead give up a slot on a survivor for hit location control. Which not only allows Frail weapon users to mostly dodge Super-Dense locations (completely in the case of Grand Weapons and their 1 speed/slow) but it also has numerous other benefits elsewhere.

A change which could have encouraged less of this cautious playstyle would have been to have the Frail weapons archive at the end of the showdown instead of at the end of the attack. It's still simple to track, but the situation where a survivor goes from being useful to ineffective immediately doesn't happen. I do think players would engage more with Frail if that was the case because it remains a gamble, but you're not gambling on becoming (close to) useless should you luck out.

This means that when we look at the Frail offerings in the game they land into one of three categories; ones which are a disposable stepping stone to better weapons (the Bone Smith trio); ones which are immensely powerful and effectively don't have frail unless you want it (Grand weapons, Rainbow Katana, Plated Shield) and just things that players don't bother with.

In addition it's worth also exploring how the monsters in the game have their Super-Dense locations distributed. I checked all of the monsters and the breakdown of each monster's Super-Dense %s (rounded to two decimal places) are as follows:

• 0% - White Lion/Gigalion, King's Man, Hand, Lion Knight
• 4.55% - Screaming Antelope, Phoenix
• 4.76% - Sunstalker
• 5% - Gorm, Spidicules
• 5.56% - Slenderman, Flower Knight, Gold Smoke Knight
• 8% - Watcher
• 8.7% - Lonely Tree, Dragon King
• 10% - Manhunter
• 20% - Butcher
• 25% - Lion God
• 34.78% - Dung Beetle Knight

In many cases these monsters have but a single Super-Dense hit location and the %s vary because of the size of the deck. Also any attack drawn where the location(s) have already been seen earlier in the cycle or where the trap is drawn are going to result in no interaction with the Super-Dense location. Of course this is also just the %s when the monster starts the showdown, except for the Butcher who at the start of each of its turns refreshes its hit location deck with a full restock & reshuffle – the actual % change per attack will change a great deal. The Dung Beetle Knight for example gradually loses Super-Dense locations during the fight as they get archived. It never loses all of them (and it can even regain some), but it is a constantly shifting number.

The big things this does highlight are how easy it is for players to sidestep the Frail rule and also what an absolute new experience blindside the Butcher is. 

Before the Butcher; the core game monsters have 1 super-dense location between them all. So the bone swords & axe look quite good. But the Butcher turns up with not just a fast target constantly shuffling hit location deck; but it also has three super-dense locations in a deck of 15 cards. That means 3 out of 14 non-trap cards are super-dense. 

This is what makes The Butcher such a hard gut check on players learning the game, they are likely to be caught off-guard and lose their bone weapons during this fight if they haven't immediately graduated to the Lion Beast Katar, King's Spear & Catgut Bow. It's a pretty bleak situation and as you can see, it's really concentrated – with the Butcher only being exceeded in super-dense hit locations by the Lion God and the Dung Beetle Knight (often considered the two toughest monsters in the current selection).

So that's why players move away from the Bone Smith weapons so quickly, they're used just as simple temporary upgrades over the Founding Stone and then discarded as soon as players can get White Lion/Gorm/Spidicules weapons – all of which have better attack profiles and also do not delete themselves.

While the Rainbow Katar is basically 'don't use this unless you have a Blood Sheath, or you're hitting a Lion' the other Phoenix weapon is the most frustrating and heartbreaking piece of design in the game.

The original Hollow Sword was a terrible mess; it was designed to basically be broken over the head of a monster and then do little else. It had terrible stats, paired and a very uninspiring weapon type with sword.

The 1.6 version reduced the speed, increased the strength on the weapon, added some scaling and gave it the dagger keyword. However, it also reduced the weapon's speed and that's where the frustration occurs. You see; dagger specialisation is one of the few ways a survivor can, in a self contained fashion, draw a Super-Dense location and still negate it happening. If they fail a wound roll they can discard another drawn Hit Location to try again. That means if you have a good amount of speed you can leave a Super-Dense card till last and aim to get rid of it with a discard for a reroll.

If the Hollow Sword had kept its speed up, or kept the paired ability, then the Hollow Sword would have stepped into an entirely new and exciting role. One that made Dagger users potent without having to rely on the Gorm/Sunstalker for all their power and instead given them an interesting, skill testing interaction in the core game.

You see, between the 1.5 and the 1.6 designs is the perfect version of the Hollow Sword. Take the 1.6 version, add 1 speed to it and/or give it paired and we have an incredibly exciting survivor type who seeks to leverage drawing lots of hit locations into quality hits. It's just heartbreaking that the Hollow Sword didn't get there and it's the only time I've ever genuinely wished that APG spoke to me before releasing content – because they very nearly created an exciting and interesting dagger that players would get hyped about and seek out making. It was so close to being great, but instead it's just something you won't bother with unless somehow you have a dagger user with a personal +2 speed. Very niche, such a shame.

So, that just leaves us with the other two new entries, the Scrap Bone Spear and the intended band-aid for Frail - The Scrap Rebar. The Scrap Bone Spear is a very simple failure on the part of the designers to understand why Frail weapons are used by the community – they're either used because they are massively overpowered for the resource cost (1.5 Zanbato, Bone Darts, Dragon Slayer) or because they are really cheap to the point of being disposable (1.5 Zanbato, Bone Darts, Bone Sword). The Scrap Bone Spear fails on both points by having barely better base stats than the equivalent White Lion and Spidicules spears but costing a whole five resources. While this does seem to look like part of the issue is actually that the White Lion King's Spear is underpriced (cause the Amber Poleaxe is four resources) – we had no adjustments to that weapon in 1.6, so I'm left confused as to what the design team feel is the right price for an early game spear. The Scrap Bone Spear is a weak weapon with both of its affinities on the wrong sides (left green and right red affinities are the worst spots for those respective colours). I think I can only assume that whoever gave the final approval on this weapon forgot that the King's Spear existed, because that's the only way it could have gotten through any reasonable playtesting process.

You'd need to swap both affinities and reduce the cost down to 1x bone, 1x scrap (+heat) before I'd even start to consider possibly using this weapon – and even then I'd more often than not pass on it in order to just build something better elsewhere – because once I have the Weapon Crafter open I'm not in the market for 3 strength weapons that situationally can increase their strength based on rolling 10s. Phoenixes are just going to laugh at a weapon like that before they send the survivor wielding it back into childhood – because that's what it is, it's a child's toy, not a weapon that a hunter would bet their life on.

The Scrap Rebar doesn't fair any better, as I wrote in the hot take it's got three areas where it's useless. It's over priced (2x scrap, 1x organ), basically has frail itself (because it archives on the first Super-Dense location rather than having the weapon do it) and it is really specific in how it wants to be placed in the gear grid. If you wanted to build a Scrap Bone Spear and give it a Scrap Rebar then you need to block the red affinity on the spear – helping ensure that the Scrap Bone Spear can't assist in activating a Monster Tooth Necklace and therefore boost its strength to the minimum floor of 5. It's almost like the design team is deliberately trolling the community with this item. In truth, if you'd asked me to make a joke item focused around preventing frail in the worst way possible, I still couldn't have come up with something as poor as this. If we were going to fix the Scrap Rebar we'd have to drop its price to one scrap, give it more arrows and possibly let it sit outside of the gear grid the way that arrows in the Sunstalker Quiver do. Ultimately, there are just very few frail weapons worth investing the resources in – the Scrap Rebar currently reduces your total inventory slots and increases the cost of the weapon you're using it with by three resources. Is there any weapon in the game that's worth two slots? Well, the Perfect Slayer and Black Sword might both qualify but for the most part, no.

So while the Scrap Rebar does continue the interesting trend of modifying weapons by 'slotting' other gear into it. It ultimately fails because of the costs involved and the incorrect targeting that this item gives. It almost feels like it's been built with future campaigns in mind, ones where monsters have 3+ Super-Dense locations each and the best weapons are all frail, but that's not really an engaging sounding play experience, not because weapons breaking is uninteresting – but because weapons breaking in the middle of a showdown is fundamentally problematic for the game's showdown system.

At this point I think it's fair to call Frail a small, failed appendage in the game. The main design mechanics and ethos of KDM's design does not leave room for a mechanic like Frail to be interesting; the game is too binary and heavy in its punishment mechanics. That written however, I do think that the best way to make Frail work would be to have the weapon archive at the end of the showdown rather than at the end of the attack. That at least reduces punishment to the cost of replacing the weapon, rather than stripping the survivor who was unfortunate enough to hit the Super-Dense location of the weapon they've invested time and resources into immediately and leaving them with nothing but their bare hands (and teeth) for the remainder of the fight.

Frail? This mechanic certainly is.