Arc Philosophy & Knowledge: Part 1 Arc Survivors an Initial Overview (Patreon)

As I'm not facing the Gambler until I am able to paint it (because he's a once a campaign core monster, I want that first game to be against him in all his glory) it'll be a while before we get to either the Gambler or the King here. Instead it is time to properly dive into the waters of the Arc survivors and fully explore the system. This week we won't be going into any major spoilers (I am going to discuss the second milestone for Collective Cognition), instead we'll fully pull apart this new levelling system and look at all the benefits, weaknesses and trade-offs the system offers compared to its predecessor system of  “ageing”.

What Came Before

The initial survivor levelling system that first arrived in base KDM is built around five axis where your survivor can improve and grow; Understanding, Courage, Weapon Proficiency, Fighting Arts and of course hunt XP.

Understanding and Courage are two tracks that increase through various different triggers, one doesn't have too much control over when and where these will increase, but there are some places in the settlement where you can increase the chances of it happening. The benefits of these two tracks are similar; at 3 points they give a static ability based upon which phase the ability was unlocked along with a dice roll and when the track is full they offer an additional roll on a story event which will grant another different ability.

The second benefit of the Understanding & Courage tracks is that certain events will have a threshold where a high enough statistic will either mitigate something bad or give some additional boon. These are difficult to quantify, but the basic rule is more boxes coloured in is better.

Weapon Proficiency is the most important track in the base game as it unlocks some very powerful abilities for survivors who use the given weapon, first of all is the specialisation which is gained at 3 points. When mastery is achieved not only does the survivor who gained it get access to a second very powerful ability but the settlement gains access to the specialisation for all survivors.

Ticks in Weapon Proficiency are primarily gained by attacking and wounding the monster; but some innovations can offer alternative routes. The big block on this is how survivors are initially locked away from gaining mastery until they reach the first Age milestone at 2 hunt XP. A developed settlement however will have other ways to ensure that 0 hunt XP survivors can start off with a proficiency, these include including innovations like Petal Spiral for sword or simply inheriting ranks via a parent when you have Family.

Next we have (Secret) Fighting Arts; for the most part Fighting Arts are gained in a random fashion by being drawn from the deck; however there are some innovations that can gain specific fighting arts and also Secret Fighting Arts can often have reliable and repeatable methods of access. This is very powerful, because if you can be sure of gaining a specific fighting art you can plan builds to utilise it. This is why (secret) fighting arts like Huntsman, Propulsion Drive, Synchronized Strike and the Acanthus Doctor come up in discussion a lot; there's a reliable fashion to get access to them and reliability means a lot in a game with a great deal of outputted randomness. It's also why Romantic is such a strong Principle; it lets you improve your selection each time you gain a new fighting art from the deck, card selection is another way to help filter through randomness.

Last of all we have the Age track; this track gives statistic increases and similar in a fixed pattern of hunt XP gains; this track is also the timer for when the survivor ages into retirement and stops being able to go hunting (most of the time). The truth here is that the benefits of this track are not very high once you've unlocked Weapon Mastery; in fact you'll find there is a valid strategy of parking ageless survivors at a low-ish hunt XP level so they can work on their important weapon proficiencies without fear of the dreaded Murder settlement event undoing all that hard work. It's not a great sign when your experience point system has a main strategy where players to try and avoid interacting with it because it is less important than one of the other tracks in the game.

All of this highlights the key issues with survivors in the game; while players have decent control over what gear and weapons they'll use, they have very little control over the survivor development. One can't predict or control what a survivor will excel in (outside of “tutorable” fighting arts) and that means their contribution to the survivor/gear grid engine is largely ignored when planning construction of hunt parties outside of a select few reliable options that can be gathered from repeatable sources such as whatever fighting art is strapped onto the Sculpture innovation.

This is the system and limitations that the Arc Survivor system is seeking to improve upon. So let us now take a look at how that operates.

Arc Survivors

Arc survivors in theory start off the same as normal survivors; but they have certain limitations that they take in exchange for access to a new advancement system with alternatives to fighting arts. When a survivor reaches their second hunt XP they will adopt a philosophy as their new levelling system. This philosophy will give them access a unique set of level up milestones; each rank of which will have randomly generated upgrades; but these are all themed around the philosophy and will give the survivor some focus and direction and they can also be upgraded with higher collective cognition levels.

The largest thrust of this system are the Knowledges; which are in essence a new version of fighting arts that upgrade and evolve through achievement of certain triggers. A Philosophy will have a single common knowledge as its core tenant, plus a survivor can typically have two more. These two additional knowledges do not have to be from the survivor's core philosophy; they can be gained in other manners. Allowing for interactions and synergies between Philosophies.

One of the way these extra knowledges are gained is via the Forum settlement location; this settlement location will reveal a set number of knowledges at the start of each settlement phase from the Knowledge Deck. They can be purchased by survivors through spending their “Lumi” (From the latin word Lumen; meaning eye, torch, lamp, light or life); a currency that they can gain through various means. The more powerful the knowledge, the more Lumi it costs when purchased from the “market” (The Forum settlement location).

Philosophies and Knowledges are also not all created equal; at the start of the game survivors will have very weak “starting knowledges” and no Philosophies at all; but through hunting of monsters Collective Cognition points are gained. These points unlock milestones which will provide a range of different benefits including access to higher tier (more powerful) philosophies along with some other benefits. We'll take a closer look at Collective Cognition a bit further on.

The combination of philosophy specific advancements and knowledge selection via the forum means that Arc Survivors can be more tuned and focused to achieve certain goals. Their philosophy asks them to do something specific while also rewarding them for doing that certain thing. The Core philosophy is themed around surviving; while the Tier 1 Philosophies are themed around; The Temporary nature of life and things; the link between Light and Life, the prominence of faces in the setting and the concept that the world of Kingdom Death is some kind of purgatory.

This means that a survivor who is focused around Impermanism (temporariness) is going to be wielding Frail weapons; while a Faceism survivor will instead develop links to terrain and the source of the stone faces everywhere. The stone-like creatures known as “The Sculptors”, which will give them extra durability and feed into a more tank like playstyle.

Philosophies not only come in tiers of increasing power; but they can also be unlocked by settlement events, principles and other options. Which means this is a system that can be endlessly modular and offer a huge amount of replayability both individually and through different combinations of various tiers and gear options. It's a massive system in scope and you can see from it why the Gambler's Chest was so delayed, overhauling the levelling up system of your game with this amount of texture and complexity is no small task. I still wish it had been a part of a separate kickstarter, but at this point that does not matter anymore, it's out in the wild and it is very good.

Collective Cognition

Collective Cognition is the settlement's own levelling up system; as new monsters (either of type or level) different to ones previously slain by the settlement are defeated, the collective cognition track  will increase, here's a picture of that section of the settlement sheets for reference:

This system is very clever in how it employs the carrot and stick levers on players at the same time, the carrot is more collective cognition points for fighting higher level monsters and the stick isn't a direct form of punishment as such, it is instead a denial of gaining Collective Cognition (CC) points for that particular lantern year. Not gaining points will stunt CC progression and also has an impact on other things like the new Intimacy table.

Collective Cognition points allow for each of these milestones to be unlocked and the rewards here include some really great upgrades; not just more Philosophies and Knowledges, but this is also the place where Weapon Proficiency progression is locked behind and at the second level you'll get access to the most important Armor Set in the entire game. Here's a blended version of the back with the set bonus at the bottom.

I cannot overstate how significant Clothed & Satiated is for fixing and expanding the game's armor system. Not only does it allow for incomplete armor sets to provide some protection in the early game, thereby reducing the pressure for completing armor sets and helping smooth out unfortunate starts. This gives compensation for settlements who have not managed to complete a set and don't want to repeat a level 1 monster.

The other really important place where Clothed & Satiated helps the game's ecosystem is in “Mixed Sets”; in the past if you constructed a set of mixed pieces from different monsters (not Hybrid Sets) then you would lose out on the set bonus and because a significant portion of many armor sets armor points are placed on the set bonus, this kept players away from experimenting with a pick & mix play style. That's not the case any more and now players are more free to combine armor pieces with interesting abilities together while not sacrificing the protection an armor set card. It's a huge deal in opening up play space and a large argument for a) always playing with Arc Survivors and b) asking for a late game version this card to come into the game by providing +2 to all locations. This card is probably the most important thing in the entire Gambler's Chest Expansion with how it opens up play space. Suddenly things like those partial Beta Armor set pieces (Banshee and Cenobite for example) become more viable.

I won't spoil the other milestones in the Collective Cognition system at this point outside of mentioning that there are some fun monster specific knowledges that you can unlock, plus this is where you get Settlement “Knowledge Market” (aka) The Forum and also that weapon progression is locked behind a Collective Cognition milestone (this is mentioned in the rules directly, so it's not a spoiler to highlight here). However, I will write that there are some really fun and exciting things in these milestones and the system is very good at driving players forward to hunt variation in monster types and levels.

Fighting Arts vs. Vaultless

All of this additional stuff means that something has to give somewhere; and the system which is pulled back in impact when you play with Arc survivors is the Fighting Art system. Survivors a limited to a maximum of one Fighting Art and one Secret Fighting Art; but on top of that, when they gain a normal Fighting Art they have to go through the Vaultless Story Event in order to gain it. This story event heavily discourages you from gaining any fighting arts at all and what it ends up doing is suppressing all non-Secret fighting arts out of the experience almost entirely. That's a shame because it means most of an entire deck of cards and the strain fighting arts system is (almost) excised from the game entirely. Strain fighting arts in particular are an unfortunate casualty, and the truth is that when I play the Gambler's Chest Expansion with my partner and friends I will ignore this Vaultless portion of the game's experience whenever a survivor first gains a Fighting Art (later fighting arts will still experience the table as it generates Lumi). Being limited to one fighting art is more than sufficient a throttle as far as I am concerned. I've already experienced more than once what it's like to unlock a strain fighting art and then watch it shuffle off to the Fighting Art deck without being able to be used. It was deflating.

In short, I agree with limiting survivors to 1 fighting art and 1 secret fighting art at a maximum, but I do not think the Vaultless portion of the Arc Survivor experience is engaging for a typical player and I do expect to see it often house ruled for at least Strain Fighting Arts. (Same as I expect to see people house ruling in Clothed & Satiated for non-Arc Survivor settlements).

Knowledges

That leaves us with just Knowledges left to explore. Knowledges can either be tied to a specific Philosophy or they can be gained via the existence of certain monsters and they work in the same fashion as the old Story of Blood strain fighting art. At their heart they work the same as Fighting Arts, but they are not automatically going to be providing a benefit for the survivor who gains them. Most (not all) Knowledges need the survivor to gain a set number of observations, which when achieved automatically upgrades not just their knowledge, but also replaces the lower level version in the settlement's knowledge deck. This achievement style mini-game is a very engaging part of the system and provides fun play patterns where more things than just attacking the monster become relevant to a player. Someone might be incentivised to become the survivor who activates terrain, while another survivor may through injuries become durable to damage (which is REALLY fun with the Gorment Armor set btw).

For those of you who have already started to experience this system I am sure I do not have to stress too much how engaging all of this is. Not only do they mechanically add texture to the showdown, but they also add to the world's setting with insights into it via the survivors new perspectives.

Summary

Once you've played with the Arc Survivor system it is hard to want to go back to the original version, this new level up system is a triumphant improvement over the previous with the only mechanical negatives being the increased cognitive load for players who now have to track observations (something that will lessen with time and experience) and the weight of now having to operate a vastly more complicated system. The other huge negative is how much this system attempts to erase fighting arts from the game – which makes strain unlocks in particular lose a great deal, unfortunate for something which already had an update to limit its impact.

The second drawback to this system isn't something we as players need to worry about because it is, mostly in the design portion of the game, because going ahead each expansion will need to integrate with this in some fashion and eventually new Philosophies will be needed to help keep things fresh for entrenched players.

Hopefully now the system is in place, the additional design load will not be too much stress onto each expansion, but I am concerned about seeing Philosophies pushed into shop white box sales that also require the purchase of miniatures as we have seen happen to other content (we've already seen the first incident of that this week with the Starbound Philosophy).  I want to see packs with just Philosophies in them, not ones bundled alongside miniatures.

Next time we'll take a look at where things begin with our starting Knowledges.