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PS, I hate the Watcher model at this point.

The build.kingdomdeath.com site really needs to go up. It should have been up before anything was delivered.

its just damn near impossible to figure out where some of these pieces go without instruction.

 cincydooley wrote:
PS, I hate the Watcher model at this point.

The build.kingdomdeath.com site really needs to go up. It should have been up before anything was delivered.

its just damn near impossible to figure out where some of these pieces go without instruction.

I agree. I haven't even bothered with them yet, but we are getting close in the campaign to need the models.

 spiralingcadaver wrote:

Triple9 wrote:
This game is exceptionally unforgiving if you make a mistake (or just have a string of bad luck), but also requires you to capitalize on every lucky roll the game gives you. I'm finding it extremely difficult to keep from taking the periodic mulligan.

We've instituted a house rule after a string of bad luck involved 9 of our survivors dying to random events over 2 or 3 years.

You can now spend all survival (min 2) to prevent death to random event.

It means that new survivors and returning ones stretched to their limit still die, but it does prevent that survivor with 5 survival from coming back from a good fight and then stubbing his toe to death on a 1 or whatever.

So far, it's felt like a good compromise where things are lethal, but, like in combat, you have a chance to "dodge" it.

I like this idea very much!

There have been some things that just leave me going what the F...

I feel even after preparing and selecting things to mitigate problems, none of it matters as its all random dice rolls and you will lose everything.

EDIT: Also to add to the discussion of the random mulligan, this game is to damn long. Im not saying I dislike it, but for the average joe, who only has a game night once a week for a moderate amount of time (4-5 hours) It feels very important to me and my group that we exercise that kind of leeway to assure we even get a chance to finish this.

Yeah, Ive been seeing that a lot lately saying that the Random Events will lose you the game faster than any monster you come up against and that there's not much to be done to prevent or mitigate them and that worries me.

I'm definitely not as sure about the game now as I was at Gencon.

Yeah, in re-reading through the rulebook, those d10 tables seem really nasty, for no obvious reason. A lot of those results reduce population and BAM!, that's it. Unless you can defeat a pretty badass fighter.

It seems to me that all of these random tables might be a roll 2d10, pick your favorite. Not re-roll if you dislike the result, but instead roll 2, see both possible results, and then pick the most favorable / least unfavorable.

Sure, 1% of the time, you get the Settlement-destroying "1" result, but most of the time, you should do OK to not have to keep starting over.

Even if the intent is to be Dwarf Fortress hard, I'm not sure that works for a RPG. Most GMs save TPKs for gross stupidity, rather than merely bad luck.

Its kind of frustrating honestly. I like everything ive seen so far and really enjoy playing. Saturday we played for 5 hours, only made it through 1 settlement phase, 2 hunt phases and 2 showdowns. I cant honestly see an end in sight and my mindset is, why even play then.. I will most likely end up playing this game alone an hour here and there once my kids go to bed.

I understand difficult games like, for example, Pandemic where even the best plans can slowly slip down the hill to a loss, but this whole roll once lose 10 3+ hour sessions of progress that kinda kills enthusiasm really quickly in a group.

Mr.Church13 wrote:
I understand difficult games like, for example, Pandemic where even the best plans can slowly slip down the hill to a loss, but this whole roll once lose 10 3+ hour sessions of progress that kinda kills enthusiasm really quickly in a group.

Yeah... I think the game is slightly too punishing in core format, not in a vacuum, but in the context of people needing to get together and play sessions. Even if they're not horribly attached to a settlement, the loss of a ton of progress due to a 1/10 chance is pretty demoralizing.

Exactly, I was 106% on board listening to the grueling nature of the game. I love how its difficult, I feel like I'm contradicting myself for hating the very nature of the thing I like about the game..

Its hard to explain if you haven't experienced it I think.. but I dont see this game seeing much play time just after a few sessions...

I don't mind difficult per se - we ground through multiple consecutive TPKs when SDE originally came out, but the game was charming enough that we were always getting closer to winning, and the setup investment of each one-and-done game was very low.

In KD:M, weighing the cost starting over will factor into how many random "bad things" I'm willing to accept.

As a game, I'm not sure there's supposed to be an end point aside from becoming strong enough to defeat the Phoenix (in the base game) after the requisite time has passed. It's an odd structure for a multi-session game, but at least the calendar has an end point.

I'm 7 lantern years in now and I've just in the past couple hunts finally gotten over getting attached to particular survivors. Once I started focusing on the gear and less on the individual, I found the frustration factor going way down.

I really liken this game to an old school video game that would drive me nuts to the point of throwing the controller, but then after calming down and taking a break, coming back focused and ready to go.

That said, I've refined my mulligan strategy to be, if the roll is going to destroy my enjoyment of the game, then I'll re-roll. For example, if I'm on a level 2 hunt and a random event causes my best fighter to run screaming into the darkness, knowing it will be a TPK, then I'm for sure rerolling. I'd rather keep enjoying the game than let one bad roll cascade to me putting it away and never picking it up again.

Agreed with Triple9, it took a bit to get over losing a favorite, but you can. The problem is for the things that wreck your hunt or even whole settlement, but it's also hard to find a way around those without radically altering the game, which is why I think that eventually a mulligan rule might be in order, but we're still playing with the survival to cancel... I think one or the other could work, and we're doing the small scale one as a gradual prevention instead of occasionally deciding things should be redone, partially because it's more stable/less open to a so-called slippery slope of circumventing bad stuff.

I would have to agree with the surface assessment that there's just a lot of randomness that can completely derail everything. The game is set a very high challenge level for certain, and not all of it is entirely "fair" either where there was nothing you did wrong or could have done to avoid it. As thematic as that may be, it's still frustrating for people and I can certainly see tables being flipped when you get to lantern year 19 and a bad series of hunt events depletes your settlement. That's a lot of time invested by a player group, potentially near a hundred hours, to just go "oops, we botched that die roll...oh well." I suspect a great variety of mulligans and snapshots of settlements to rewind to like loading a saved game will be popular, if not the designer's intent.

On the flip side, as a cooperative experience it is much easier to ratchet down the difficulty to everyone in the group's liking. You don't have to marginalize someone else's play experience like you do with many other games that have a "versus" component to make things more fun. For example, if you're playing SDE with someone who is a terrific Consul and is always wiping the floor with the heroes, making the game more fun for the heroes is likely going to make it less fun for the Consul. That scenario doesn't happen with KD:M because all the players are on the same side and it's you guys versus the game. Just because the game's default difficulty is "Nightmare" doesn't mean you can't move your own slider down notch (or two or more).

Given that there's no such thing as "competitive KD:M" or a tournament circuit, it seems less concerning for people to adjust the rules as they want; we all make house rules for our various games after all. Where we clamor for consistent rules is for those games with strangers to avoid having to hash those rules out all the time. However, I'm not sure KD:M is a game you'd ever be playing with random people in a campaign setting; just the nature of the game implies you've met these people before at some point and worked this out. I think that's a core part of Adam's design vision really, that this is a shared experience by the group and deciding how brutal or not the experience is going to be is part of the bonding as a group to play "our" campaign.

Now, I can see a world where you do one-shot challenges and showdowns with strangers randomly just for fun such as at a convention or just to fill time on various gaming nights, but just doing a showdown removes most of the arbitrary death/difficulty of the other campaign phases. It can still be insanely difficult and there can still be random deaths you can't do anything about, but it's less bothersome to me because that isn't "John died off-stage", we all know that he got eaten by an antelope.

 Krinsath wrote:
Given that there's no such thing as "competitive KD:M" or a tournament circuit,

It's a good thing there isn't some kind of scoring mechansim after each year. Could you just imagine?

Wait, scratch that. The game doesn't need another step and calculation for people to gamify.

Bit annoyed that my track and trace number for my wave one shipment still doesn't register or work. Bleh.

 BrookM wrote:
Bit annoyed that my track and trace number for my wave one shipment still doesn't register or work. Bleh.

Hey there :-)

I had the same issue, but my package arrived without the tracking number ever becoming active.

On topic:

I think I will enjoy this game playing it solo, a game as hard as this will become frustrating for people with less time (to put into one single game) or patience and it will ruin evenings lol.

You could come up with some house rules (↑↑↓↓←→←→BA) to bypass some of the frustratingly bad luck your group encounters :-P

I still haven't received anything, or had any shipping notifications for either wave 1 or wave 2.

I'm starting to get a little concerned.

You're not the only one. UK Backer and I've had nothing as yet.

I don't think this was posted yet EU customs may be finished quicker than expected

Very small chance that EU bound rewards will be shipped before our estimated window of October 15 - October 30th. As soon as I get the word, I will let you guys know. !!!

My group is loving the game, and we are enjoying the luls of people dying. We are trying to figure out how we can get another game day in to actual see this through.

Our 2nd Settlement phase event we drew Plague... well of course we have no blood letting or amonia. So we all die.. Thanks...

Trying to find the balance of innovations and settlement buildings vs buying gear and weapons .

So quick rules question, Do the monsters turn to face the person attacking them? Or would they just sit there and let 2-3 attackers stand behind them and attack from the blind spot and never turn around?? I assume if the Hit location says on a miss or reflex basic attack then they turn around?

Chopxsticks wrote:

So quick rules question, Do the monsters turn to face the person attacking them? Or would they just sit there and let 2-3 attackers stand behind them and attack from the blind spot and never turn around?? I assume if the Hit location says on a miss or reflex basic attack then they turn around?

Not unless there is a reaction that would cause them to move/attack.

 DaveC wrote:
I don't think this was posted yet EU customs may be finished quicker than expected

Very small chance that EU bound rewards will be shipped before our estimated window of October 15 - October 30th. As soon as I get the word, I will let you guys know. !!!

Good news I suppose, at this stage it'll be a race between wave one and wave two then.

Does anyone recall which Single Model add ons were supposed to have gameplay content?

Are the Messengers or any of the other Promos?

I believe the messengers (4?) and the crossovers (2?) all do, and I think some of the freebies (like the 4 armored monopose characters) may have had scenario rules, too?

I think the list of extra 1 shot/promo scenarios is

adam & anna
aya
Allison the twilight knight
messenger of courage
messenger of humanity
messenger of first story (pretty sure even though it's not in my notes)
messenger of the spiral path
paul the survivor
snow the savior
candy &cola
kara black

Yup, pretty sure those are the minis with their own mini storyline campaign/scenario. Glad they will get gameplay time as the Adam and messenger minis are ridiculously awesome... too awesome not to use!

My pack arrived today, will look into it later.

Wave one or wave two?

Question: Where were the rules for those minis included? The promos etc. listed above? Were they in the big game box? The Survivor level bonuses & promo figs I received came in a separate bag/box but didn't include rules?

The promo stuff will go up for download later this year.