An Initial Review of the Scout System from the Gambler's Chest (Patreon)

Preface: So my partner's work colleague's son got sick with some form of flu that took him down with a 40 degree fever, his mother (the work colleague) transmitted it into work. Which took my partner down, I spent a week trying to wear a mask in the house, but unfortunately it hit me last Sunday and I am still sick while writing this (I've not been sick outside of my chronic illness since December 2019). So if there are more errors or slips than normal, that's why. Fortunately I have a small backlog for the YouTube channel (nearly at 1000 viewers!) so that is less likely to be interrupted, but if I don't recover soon there will be some form of interruption somewhere.

Before we start, thank you to everyone who responded to last week's post with your thoughts, feelings and opinions on the Scout System (and also a thanks to Cara from The Last Standee for her opinions during our recording on the GCE). Due to my own mixed feelings and the fact that KDM is a sandbox game where you are supposed to tailor the experience to your own preferences, I had a feeling it would be a range of differing ones. You can read the individual comments here at the bottom of the post on the Scout Gear & Discoveries. I'd say that even the people who have feelings that trend towards negative are still positive on what the Scout Discovery cards bring to world building. But we'll get there, first of all, let's break it down, starting with that original pitch, then moving through the general thesis of what the final version is, then looking at the benefits and limitations before wrapping it all up with some kind of current opinion in the Summary.

The Original Pitch

This was given in Update 8 during the campaign (here) and it is a system where the Scout comes along on a hunt, but is sworn to do nothing but watch and record what happens, then recover the gear and return home with it if the hunt team is wiped out. However, you have the option to take an upgrade that will let the Scout fight on the showdown board as well, gaining an extra unit for the showdown, but risking loss of everything if all of the Survivors are wiped (including the Scout).

The final system we got changed this pitch a bit, so let us take a look at it now.

The Thesis of Scouts

When Scouts are added to the campaign, you add the Extinguished Guidepost to the Timeline in Lantern Year 1. During that event you will gain the Death Pact innovation, the Outskirts settlement event, replace a basic hunt event and force the Scout to roll on the Grim Responsibility table. From now on, when Departing you can bring along the Scout, who will take part in the hunt and showdown as an additional unit.

If all the survivors apart from the scout perish then the scout will have to make the decision between trying to finish the showdown solo, or attempt to recover everything and return to the settlement defeated. In the situation where all survivors and the scout die all the gear is lost.

The Scout provides access to Scout keyword gear, which have a range of benefits and also when you have Pictographs innovated you gain access to Scout Discoveries and the relevant Tablet for the particular monster. The Discovery offers a little insight into the monster's part in the world, while the tablet gives a benefit when fighting that particular monster. Both of these trigger the first time you slay a Level 3 monster when you have the Pictographs innovation in your settlement and they can't trigger more than once per monster.

The Breakdown of Mechanics

Lets walk through each individual mechanic in full, starting with that Extinguished Guidepost event.

The Grim Responsibility roll is 40% suffer -1 accuracy & evasion, 20% gain Anxiety disorder, 20% gain +3 Insanity and 20% gain +1 Strength. Anxiety isn't a huge deal for the Scout because it is a relatively minor disorder (giving stinky to the survivor, something the Dreaded Pack does also while it is worn), the 1-4 result is however super punishing in what feels a quite unfair manner. -1 accuracy and evasion is a crippling pair of stats to have because they are the lead offensive and defensive stats in the game. In essence the scout is dragged down to a state where you'll likely stop using them after that first hunt. There's no positive trade-off for this at all, just 40% off the time you get a survivor who goes out on a hunt, gains a hunt XP and then sucks ass so much that you just use them in settlement with the goal of them dying. I don't really understand the decision to make this table have such an unpleasant roll be twice as likely as each other individual result. It's honestly a bit of a head scratcher.

The Death Pact innovation provides a way of performing the Logistics of Death event (more on that later) plus a special innovation to pull out Pictograph directly. Having a special innovation for Pictograph ensures that you'll get to utilise the Scout Discoveries every time (as its cost is very affordable by the time you're facing level 3 node 1 monsters) and it also unlocks a lot of interesting stuff on the hunt event table.

Logistics of Death is either something that's triggered automatically when all survivors are slain or when the Scout activates it during the hunt or at the start of their act in the showdown when all other survivors are slain. In the case that everyone died while in pursuit of a  Quarry; you have to roll on the “Lost to Darkness” table, which always archives all gear & resources, but 50% of the time has one survivor live, while also putting the seriously brutal Lamplighter Settlement Event card into your settlement deck. The Dreaded Pack is considered gear for this purpose, which means that you're completely without a Scout now. (There is a way of gaining a pack, but I won't spoil it here.) That's in essence a game over for most settlements, and even if you do push on because you have some back up gear, if the Lamplighter turns up, you can potentially suffer a game over regardless.

If the Scout triggers Logistics of Death on a Quarry hunt then they will have to roll on “The Long Journey Home” table. A table with a wide range of results, I'll summarise them here:

• Scout suffers destroyed back, -1 evasion and archive all consumable gear (10%)
• Scout suffers -2 accuracy (20%)
• Scout gains a random disorder and permanently fills in their brain injury box (20%)
• Scout suffers 1d10 brain event damage and if they now have 0 insanity they gain a random disorder (20%)
• Scout suffers 1d5 brain event damage (20%)
• If population is 10+ Scout gains +1 strength permanently (limit once per lifetime)

In addition, if you have Memento Mori, you can recover one irreplaceable gear (otherwise all Irreplaceable gear would be lost as per its ability rules). To be honest, I wish this was just a part of the Memento Mori innovation anyway, it's a niche innovation with limited uses at the moment.

With a Nemesis showdown there is a 30% chance of losing everything (plus an additional 2D10 random pieces of gear from the settlement storage), 30% of the time you get the gear grids of two survivors of your choice plus the Scout and 40% of the time you get everything back. In addition, if the Scout survived (through triggering the Dreaded Pack) the 3 to 6 results are effectively turned into a new version of the 7 to 10 result. That helps but it does mean that one in five nemesis showdown total party kills are going to result in a gear wipe.

The scout discovery table replaces one of your Basic Hunt cards, which has 12 cards, that means a decrease in the number of basic hunt rolls per hunt, however given that it is only 8.33% of the deck, you'll not see it often in the shorter hunts against lower levels. That rarity of occurrence helps a lot because there are only 10 different Scout hunt events – I'll not spoil them here, but for the most part they are interesting bits of lore building with not too many automatic “roll well or die” moments. For players who run KDM a lot, these events are going to eventually become rote; however, that's something which happens even with the 100 Basic Hunt Event Table. I would have liked to have seen more variation here, but given the lowered chance of drawing a Scout Event in the first place, it'll be a while before they stop feeling fresh.

As for what the Scout is like as an overall unit, it's hard to put an exact quantification on it because while the Scout has only 4 gear slots vs. the normal 9 slots and suffers -2 movement it still gets access to its full attributes, weapon proficiency, understanding, courage, hunt XP, philosophy, survival, survival actions, activation, move and that aforementioned scout gear. It also provides an endeavour when returning and benefits/suffers from anything that impacts returning or departing survivors. It's certainly not half a unit in value, but it's not a full unit either.

One additional observation, Scouts also do not interact very well with Audience/Embolden (they are in essence the same card with different names), because you can't depart with the gear that the previously deceased survivor had due to how the Outskirts rules work (it stops the gear going to the settlement storage until the showdown is finished, so you can't pick it). Audience is used in the Watcher showdown fights (don't ask why the Gold Smoke Knight doesn't have Audience, no clue and I've always felt it's a bit odd how the Watcher fight feels as if the whole settlement is involved whereas the GSK one seems almost like it is not being taken seriously by the settlement).

My Scout Experience

For myself the introduction of the Scout was a very bumpy landing, it is a forced element in the official People of the Dream Keeper campaign and I was hit with the statistic nerfs, meaning that not only did I have a maimed and useless 1 hunt XP survivor from the prologue fight, but I also now had another survivor who was gaining 1 hunt XP. Add that into having read the scout rules and the Outskirts blue text and I was very aware that I might have a Lantern Year 1 fight where so much ground would be lost that I would have to consider scrapping and restarting, a struggling settlement on the edge of oblivion can make for interesting, engaging storytelling experiences, but it's not a great one for experiencing and reviewing the content in an entire 30 year campaign.

That first showdown was also a great example of how useless the scout can be, due to 3 movement and a lack of protection all I could really do was keep it far away from the Croc as much as I could. Something that continued for the first three lantern years until I gathered enough Hollow Stones to build the cloak. From there the main play pattern for the Scout was to set up near interactable terrain and then hide out, with that only changing at the time I gained useable footwear plus spare weapons.

However, things turned when the rest of the hunt party was stable and the Scout had a solid load out, at this point it very much became a situation where I could pick the Scout style I wanted to use, due to having the Reaperjaw pattern (and my love of Daggers) I settled on what I think is the bog standard cookie cutter build of Cloak, Boots, Dagger & Scout Lantern. Flexing the Scout Lantern out of the Gear grid only when facing the Smog Singers due to their heavy gear punishment event archiving fragile gear, which the Scout Lantern has.

I can certainly see other strategies outside of the cookie cuter build coming to the front though, a Leyline Walker scout could stack evasion, or a Crystal Skin/Marrowism Scout has natural durability, which would open up the gear grid to hold monster control gear. A Marrowism Scout in particular is impressive and a large argument for all settlements with Scout to seriously consider Cannibalism. However, the thing which these all have in common is that they have ways to generate defences without needing gear to achieve that. Thereby freeing space up to slot in other things. It is going to be interesting to see what can be done with those four slots.

For myself though, the Scout really didn't justify its existence until we reached the Scout Discoveries mechanic, this is a really sweet mechanic that gives you a one off event card that results in a random experience from a selection of options. While it is nice to get some additional gear or resources, the big thing here for myself is the richness it gives to the monsters you face. There are some exceptionally cool moments and because you only encounter one per timeline it gives a bit of spice to replays.

It's a similar thing with the Scout Hunt Events (and the Arc Survivor ones); they break apart the random (but homogenous) nature of the existing Basic Hunt Event Table by giving us more things to experience. I do think we really should push Team Death to start creating basic hunt event cards so they can add more things to tailor our sandboxes to what suits us. It's good content.

Final Thoughts

I cannot but feel that there is the nugget of a perfect version of Scouts baked within this module; the world building and thematic expansion that the Scouts bring to the game is truly wonderful and those Scout discoveries and the Scout Hunt Events are the cream of the crop here. However, the feast and famine nature of Scouts cannot be ignored, if you are doing well, scouts are going to add onto that. Players who are experienced at showdowns should be able to take the momentum they can generate through play and leverage it even further with more resources, more endeavours, more survival and so forth. However, players who are not as experienced and suffer showdown losses, especially early game ones, are going to be crushed and demoralized, perhaps to the point where they state they won't be playing with Scouts again.

Having explored everything here, I do firmly wish we had the original Pitch version, where sending the scout onto the showdown board was a conscious choice that had to be chosen by the players. That adds more player agency to the situation and when the party/gear wipe was something the players chose to risk then the blow might be softer because they gambled and lost. That feels more meaningful than the current system, which can punish you with archival of gear even if you do get the scout out of there. The Nemesis result of 3 to 6 when the scout has died in particular will push many settlements into a “I give up” state for all but the most hardened of players.

There's definitely a place for this system in the game's ecosphere, but this system is not something that will work for every player. So at end of the day, while it is a shame this isn't an immediate and inarguable gain for the game in all quarters the way that so many of the other elements of the Gambler's Chest are; it is still a welcome addition even if only for the lore.

For myself, I don't think I'll return to the Scouts outside of trying them out each time new expansion content for the system arrives because the combination of making both game state extremes more extreme along with the very restrictive 4 slot gear grid means that the system just doesn't engage me, which is a shame because I love the richness that this module brings to the game's tapestry