And once you've gotten comfortable with the game, and you've started internalizing the systems, it becomes apparent just how terribly balanced the game is. But eventually, the notion of fighting another half dozen level 1 white lions so you can get back to the interesting stuff is going to sound agonizing. The game is already all about learning what tricks the monsters are capable of and then working around them, and you don't really mind those initial complete settlement wipes where you need to start the campaign over again from scratch because you're still learning the encounters. There's lots of ways that you can fail even in victory and getting "good" at the game largely becomes a question of experiencing something that seems like it should be a win, having your most experienced survivor just promptly die in ways you can't control at that point, saying "Well that's fucking bullshit" and figuring out how to avoid ever being put in a situation where that bullshit event can happen to you again. These experiences are pretty common, and it reinforces the theme, but experiences like this are mixed in with a lot of "gotcha" design.
A few games ago we had a hunt that we just rolled preposterously badly on, and while we still got within 3 hits of winning, it ended with one character devoured alive and slowly masticated to death, another who didn't get to take an action for something like 7 turns as the monster just charged back and forth across them trampling them into the ground repeatedly, and our "savior" character swinging their mace to make a last ditch heroic save, and hitting themselves in the chest sending a bone fragment into their heart and dying instantly. Playing in a world where you're all basically doomed and it's just a question of how much value you can eke out for your settlement before dying miserably is a fun inversion of that, and some of my favorite KD:M experiences have been the times when it all goes horribly, horribly wrong. Fantasy has been built around hero tropes, and honestly they're kind of done to death. I think the bulk of the problem is that Poots clearly designs for a particular experience, and not to make a good game, and the experience he is designing for is that humans are the bottom rung of the food chain of this universe and that their existence, to borrow from Hobbes, is nasty, brutish, and short and that's interesting, and even occasionally compelling. It's not, at all, but it could be a ton better than it is. Which is not to say that it's a bad game. My main takeaway about KD:M is that it is an excellent idea for a game that is held back by having a lunatic who is often pretty bad at design in charge of it. I'm not Schild, but I can answer questions about how it plays if you have any specific ones.
0 kommentar(er)
