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Signposts: How to Identify Powerful Strategies in KDM
🕑 Added 2022-11-11 08:43:05 +0000 UTCBefore I get back into writing about the absolutely M A S S I V E pile of content that comes in the Dragon King expansion, I want to write a little about one of the significant tools in gaming that can help you not just quickly internalise ways of navigating future KDM content but also aid you in succeeding in any game environment where strategies are formed from randomisation. This is the design concept of “Signposts” and here I'm going to take you through where the formal naming of this (relatively) modern concept originated, some examples of it in a few different games and then finally we'll get into how you apply this to Kingdom Death content, current and future.
What are Signposts?
Signposts were first formally given a title in Magic: The Gathering (M:TG), a game which originated a LOT of modern game mechanics and birthed the world of Expandable/Trading/Living/Collectable Card Games. M:TG in case you are not familiar with it has a limited format which can be drafted by a group of people who sit in a circle, open a booster, choose a card from it to go into their deck and then pass the remaining cards to an adjacent player.
This format is one of two staple limited formats alongside Sealed (which I won't go into here) and it's so beloved that some M:TG streamers play no other formats except for limited ones. This is the primary place where Signposts were conceptualised by the designers; each set has a bunch of thematic new or returning mechanics spread across the five colours released in the set and the designers wanted to give players a tool to help them more rapidly understand what archetypes of deck they could build. So they created the concept of Signpost Uncommons, a mid-rarity level card (to ensure that it would turn up reasonably often, but not all the time) that showcased one of the baked in strategic archetypes in the set. Let us take a look at a reasonably modern day one from the new recent Dominaria United (DMU) set, say hello to Balmor, Battlemage Captain.
Balmor is one of two signpost uncommons in DMU and his card firmly tells the drafter that they can take what is known as an Izzet Spells Deck in this format (Izzet is the name for Blue and Red combined). Balmor says to the player “CAW. If you take me, this birb, you can be sure that there are others like me who will give you benefits for playing spells, especially ones that make us bigger. CAW CAW!”
Signpost Uncommons are clear and easy to immediately latch onto, so if you opened a pack with Balmor or his elemental compatriot Najal, as a drafter you should immediately see what UR (Blue and Red) is about in this format, if you follow Balmor's lead then you will know exactly what cards are going to benefit this colour combination – sorceries, instants and creatures who are either aggressive in nature or who also benefit from instants and sorceries.
Race for the Galaxy (RtfG) on the other hand chose a different route for its signpost cards; because RtfG involves a single deck that players draw from it has signpost cards that are harder to locate (in part due to RtfG having few duplicates in its pool of cards) but they tell the player about the major strategies in the game and often the early goal (while building a card drawing engine) is to locate one of these so you can build around it for extra victory points. A grand example of this are the two six cost developments Mining League and Free Trade Association from the original pre-expansion game.
Both of these cards reward you for choosing planets in their matching colour; there are other versions of these cards that also point to green worlds, yellow worlds, or even other tags like Rebel bases, exploration abilities or consumption abilities. Having one of these types of card early on in the game, allows you to focus on choosing to play only the cards that give bonus Victory Points via your preferred 6 cost development. It is far easier to cut through all the “noise” that a huge deck of mostly unique cards has when you have a shopping list in mind; if all blue planets come with extra victory points because of your Free Trade Association; they immediately stand out as having more value than normal AND you even have a shopping list of specific cards that also give bonus Vps.
Before we get onto Kingdom Death itself I want to write about two other card games that use signposts, but instead of giving you signposts to help sift through random noise, they instead give you signposts for how to build a specific deck; the first one of these is the Fantasy Flight Games LCG Arkham Horror:
Arkham Horror's card game is built around a deck of cards that represents your given investigator and the tools they have at their disposal. Which investigator you pick is going to inform your specific play style for the game; if you are a guardian then you will be mostly fighting enemies through weapons, a seeker will be collecting evidence through clues, a mystic will be slinging spells, a rogue will be picking locks and backstabbing and a survivor will be just well surviving despite all the odds. But more than that; each individual survivor will have their own preferences, for example here is Arkham's very best boy, Bark Harrigan.
We can see from Bark's profile (top right corner) that he has mostly average to below average stats (those numbers tend to go from 1 to 5) with the exception of Brawn; which is a 5 and is used for fighting. On top of that we see that Bark can also hold more weapons than normal with his extra paws and as such we are incentivised to play a higher number of weapons than one normally would because we have four paws to hold them instead of the usual two.
Bark's signposts do not end there, the back of each investigator card also include deck building options which tell you which cards you can use in your deck. Bark can use all types of Guardian (blue) and neutral (Grey) cards but he can ALSO include any Level 0 (Experience) weapons from ANY of the classes, this means that Bark has access to a far wider arsenal of weaponry than any other character in the game – so you are told by this card that you want weapons and ways to support those weapons, you're also told by the signposts here that you will need to protect Bark's sanity because he only has 5 sanity total and a measly 3 Will (The head stat) to resist scary things. With that in mind you can now construct a deck where Bark will use his paw-to-paw combat and Barkmanship in order to protect other less combat capable investigators as they go about their business.
Every single Investigator in the game has their own signposted hooks for you to get into; Monterey Jack is a rogue who can only get upgraded seeker cards, so he turns into an evasive criminalistic lore collector, Daisy Walker becomes stronger the more books she has, Calvin Wright gains statistics by being hurt and William Yorrick uses his discard pile as a second 'deck'. Succeeding in Arkham requires you to absorb the signposts that your investigator offers, but it can also at times ask you to learn the signposts that the game's particular campaign is asking for; Carcosa wants you to wear fine clothes at the theatre and party where you play the first two scenarios at; Edge of the Earth wants you to be able to handle large maps with loads of places and The Forgotten Age demands that you take a different approach to enemies by avoiding them instead of fighting them. These are all signpost mechanics that if listened to will give you greater chances of success – ignoring them will impact on your ability to do well.
Marvel Champions; which is a boss battler and therefore in the same genre as KDM, does a similar thing, each of its heroes comes not only with their own specific character card, but they additionally have 15 cards that make up their own personal portion of the deck. You get to choose the remaining 25 cards, but those 15 are always going to be there. This gives each hero in the game their own advantages while also suggesting a playstyle to them; Cyclops for example allows you to play any X-Men allies regardless of which aspect you are using, meaning he leans towards the Leadership aspect over anything else due to how well that colour meshes with allies. In contrast Iron Man/Tony Stark has 15 cards that make him become stronger the more of them you get out, this represents his suit being upgraded and more powerful, so you are incentivised to build a deck that supports this goal (Ironheart works in a similar manner). They both need time to get up and running before they take over the game and defeat the villain, so you are rewarded if you follow that signpost by more victories.
Kingdom Death's Signposts
Now we have a bit of a base we can look at KDM itself and understand what signposts the game intentionally (or accidentally) has built within its fabric, this will mean that when approaching current or new content for the game you should be more able to see what directions the game is asking you to go in.
The main randomised areas of interface where players are given signposts and have opportunity to react to them are in the resources gained, the gear cards available and the innovation deck. But the very first set of signposts are entirely in your control – that's the monsters you are going to introduce to the campaign either as quarries or nemesis monsters. Choosing to have the White Lion be the focus of your early campaign means that you're going to be using Katars, Bows and Spears as a large portion of your early experience where as if you introduce the Gorm and focus around that monster the weapon focus changes to that of axes, daggers, shields and clubs. That can have a huge impact on the feel of the campaign, what Fighting Arts become very useful and when you get to deciding between the Dung Beetle Knight, Phoenix, Sunstalker and Dragon King their impact becomes even more noticable.
Likewise, some monsters have weapon specific weaknesses, while all monsters are vulnerable to ranged weapons (because having range is always an advantage); monsters like Spidicules, the Dung Beetle Knight and the King's Man offer weapon specific weaknesses (Spears, Clubs/Shields/Pickaxes and Daggers/Shields respectively).
The next significant signpost you'll encounter are the armor sets; while there is a general lack of potency in the early game armor sets, they still often signpost for certain weapon types. White Lion offers synergy with Daggers/Katars, Gorment with Shields and Screaming Armor with Spears. Late game the armor sets have a bit less of a focus; but Cycloid Scale Armor has disharmony with Sharp weapons and Dragon/Phoenix Armor both reward Reach (Dung Beetle Armor is just kind of a pile of stats with no real focus, though it has minor synergy with Early Iron weapons, but that became less important when the Polishing Lantern was released in 1.6).
Even the three core game armor sets themselves all have particular leanings that encourage you to use one playstyle over others. Rawhide signposts hard towards a supporting or ranged build thanks to its head piece and synergy with spamming survival actions (to overcome cumbersome, or allow for activating both the Rawhide headband and Cat Eye Circlet in the same turn). Leather Armor has inbuilt collegiality with both the leather shield and the Zanbato and Lantern Armor just screams “CLUB ME WANT CLUB!” Over and over at you until you relent and give it a Riot Mace rattle.
Even the Hybrid Armors signpost certain weapon/playstyles; with Brawler snugly tucking in alongside Fist & Tooth weapons (Hello Cult Speaker Knife), Warlord rewarding axe play and it's only really Dancer Armor that doesn't heavily lean in any particular direction.
These signposts are all things you should be thinking about at the start of a campaign, what powerful pieces of gear are offered by a given monster, does it have an armor set? What synergies is the monster's gear offering – the Manhunter for example rewards using Tools as weapons; while the Slender-Man comes with the Gloom Hammer, something that has immense fellowship with the Spidicules rings. These are all things that you can learn about while playing or by studying in advance and being cognizant of the broad strokes each expansion offers.
But what about if you're playing for the first time some new content? How do you know what the signposts are or even what direction they are pointing? This is the kind of learned skill that can help stand a player in good stead and have greater success in a first run through with new content and that's what we're going to try and do here by looking at the kind of things you should be paying attention to when assessing a piece of gear the first time you encounter it. We'll look at each type of gear in three broad categories; Weapons, Armor and the ever nebulous catch all of Support.
However; before we get to that we can discuss something that exists across all three of these categories; keywords. Keywords are something that it turns out have a lot of weight in this game's mechanics. Individually most of them do almost nothing at all, but other things can refer to them; we'll leave Melee/Ranged to one side for the moment as that is weapon specific – but the other keywords have a set of sliding values that swings from helpful to irrelevant to harmful and the further across towards harmful you reach, the more you should be exercising caution with them.
In the future, where we have other environs such as the Abyssal Woods or the Inverted Mountain, the exact position on the scale of these keywords may vary. With the base game's basic hunt & settlement events (one of the major drivers of keyword value), we know that noisy, insane and heavy all land in the negative portion of the scale and subtract worth from a gear card. This is because they can cause automatic death for the carrying survivor, additional harm or self archiving of the gear card. KDM's scale often swings very hard towards MASSIVE punishment in this respect as it approaches a very binary case of if you have X get erased.
Other keywords such as flammable, fragile, soluble, consumable, jewelry and stinky are either only negatives when hunting certain specific monsters or prone to self-archiving. White Lions love jewelry, so losing against them will cause archival of one jewelry gear card on defeat, not a huge problem if you have some cheap jewelry to lose, a massive one if all you have is a Cat Eye Circlet. Sunstalkers burn the air around them, so they cause flammable or soluble gear cards to depart from this realm of existence and return to the box. You don't have to use these keywords against the given monster though. Stinky is an interesting case because it's something that greatly impacts the Dung Beetle Knight's AI in a manner that makes it exploitable.
Weapons
Weapons have a few factors that determine their potential value and signposting for hunting a given monster. Ranged is a stronger keyword type than melee, but having both of those keywords is even stronger again. The balance between the two however is erratic; ranged weapons are not automatically more powerful than melee ones, but if all other stats are equal, it's a heck of a tie-breaker, especially when you're talking about Bows (because of Arrows and the potential to gain Deadly).
That brings us to the second major signpost that tells you if a weapon is going to be strong; ways of wounding while bypassing the monster's toughness. There are two main categories of this: Automatic Wounds and Deadly weapons. Automatic wounds most of the time allow you to always score that wound, but you still have to deal with the negatives of the HL card drawn (Counterweighted Axe is the exception to this); Deadly on the other hand allows you to have a higher chance of critically wounding and gaining not only a bypass on toughness and any normal reactions, it also gives you a chance at wounding a location that will drop extra resources. This is uniform amongst all monsters (with the key exception of some Nemesis monsters) and it's why seeing Deadly on a weapon is a signpost that it is probably strong.
After that another indicator of a powerful weapon lays with its strength, strength is not as powerful as Deadly or Auto-Wounds, but it is key in converting normal hits to successful wounds. You can't completely control what the monster is going to react with, but scoring a wound with an attack is usually sufficient compensation for your attack. It's worth noting that Sharp is just a straight variable strength upgrade and you can consider it to be on average over a showdown between 5 and 6 extra points of strength.
Weapon Proficiencies are also a huge important portion of a weapon's power; Spears and shields in particular (as well as Bows) are indicators that a weapon could well be stronger because of how potent the Specialisations are; reaching the specialisation is a huge boon for the wielding survivor and gaining the mastery is a massive one for the whole settlement. Fist & Tooth is another one of these, but it's very rare in occurrence – pay attention to any weapon with that keyword.
Speed and accuracy are more nebulous and they're also tangentially linked; while 1 to 2 speed is generally considered optimal, higher speed in combination with higher strength and/or lower accuracy does work. It's very much about how many hits you'll score on average and how often you'll convert those hits to wounds.
Super-Dense is a solid signpost that tells you a weapon is intended to be disposable due to how it interacts with Frail. However, sometimes weapons get this downside not due to being dispensable, but due to extreme power. So it's not signpost in itself saying 'This is good or bad.' But it can affect your play style.
The Gorm is a great example of how you go about assessing which weapons are signposts and which are dead ends. We have the following weapons and their statlines:
- Acid-Tooth Dagger (2/7+/2): Paired, Auto-wound, Dagger
- Gaxe (1/6+/4): Can gain +1 Speed & Savage, gives monster -1 evasion on first critical wound, Axe
- Greater Gaxe (2/6+/4): Deadly, Reach 2, Can gain Barbed 4, Axe
- Rib Blade (1/6+/5): Slow, Deadly
- Riot Mace (2/5+/5) Deadly, forces basic action on critical wound. Requires Deathblow resource. Club
- Black Sword (3/5+/10): +1 Survival on Perfect hit, +20 Strength for Sword Master.
The most notable pairing here is the Gaxe and Greater Gaxe. They're both axes; they both have good accuracy and speed. But the Greater Gaxe (GGaxe) is the one which is used more often. The reason for that is because the GGaxe has Deadly; while the Gaxe has two abilities that trigger from Critical Wounds but it doesn't have Deadly itself. This is something that happens to axe design a bit and it always holds back the weapon from being as strong as Deadly alternatives. Getting a bonus for a critical wound happening is not as valuable as just getting an increased chance of critical wounds. Savage just isn't a signpost in the way that Deadly is, Savage can be an additional signpost if it is combined with Deadly though.
You can also see from the Black Sword design that this weapon is signposted to be a mid/late game weapon because of how strong it is and how ridiculous it becomes. The Black Sword is insanely powerful in campaigns with the promotional Vagabond Armor because that gives you access to Sword Mastery without putting in the work outside of just crafting a relatively inexpensive armor set. In another case; the Acid-Tooth Daggers would be wholly unremarkable and easy to ignore if it wasn't for that automatic wound – all of a sudden you're being rewarded for rolling lots of dice and you'll even consider using these paired.
While future weapons sometimes will come with new statlines, keywords and abilities, you can still tell how hard you're being pushed in their direction by those core aspects lean. The Nuclear Scythe for example is a classic in this, it's the only scythe currently in the game, but it can at the cost of additional slots gain Sharp and or Deadly 2 – this is a very strong signpost towards crafting one because you can compensate for its low strength with any strength boosting armor set (Cycloid, Dragon, Phoenix). It also helps that it turns out Scythe proficiency is really strong and unique.
Armor
Armor on the other hand has a bunch of different things that can make it good; we've already discussed armor set bonuses and it's worth not just repeating that a good armor set bonus can make the armor set; but it's also mentioning that armor set bonuses as a mechanic creates a really strong signpost that's dominated the meta decisions of players from the very start. Because armor set bonuses usually provide additional armor points; players have been driven to complete armor sets rather than mix and match their favourite pieces to create unique combinations.
This very action is a huge part of what makes KDM's mechanical world feel restricted and hard to break from; because armor points are so important for offensive and defensive orientated survivors it's really difficult to justify not just building a full armor set for every survivor. Whichever one fits best.
Honestly, when I think about this portion of the game's design in any detail and note that the designers themselves sometimes express frustration at the way the community plays – this is something that they could have addressed, they still can do so. By increasing the baseline armor points of each individual piece appropriately and removing the armor bonus on the sets themselves they could have motivated players into a more makeshift style of armor play. Instead of that they've leant into creating more hybrid armor sets and releasing them. Which works, I guess, but it's not satisfying.
Outside of just raw armor points and the set bonuses the other main signpost for armor is the affinity layout. The more affinities an armor set has, the more enticing it is for variable builds. As mentioned above Leather Armor practically screams at you to get a Leather Shield, Monster Grease and a Zanbato to complete its layout. But that's not the only place where affinities matter.
A good affinity layout with multiple configurations is a strong signpost that an armor set will be powerful, but dependence on multiple puzzle connections to activate abilities is a big drag on that. White Lion Armor suffers from its affinity layout lacking a cohesive identity; while Lantern Armor and Silk Armor both ask for compromises to be made, something that isn't a good direction to move in.
Ultimately what you're looking for with an ideal armor set is lots of armor points, affinities and abilities combined with a strong set bonus, good layout and synergies with some kind of weapon type or playstyle.
Support Items
Support items are such a nebulous group of disparate entities that they will always be the hardest to pin down, but there are some types of item which are huge signposts – the Lucky Charm, Monster Grease and Monster-Tooth Necklace all send players towards Luck, Evasion and Strength respectively. They tell players from the very start that these three traits are immensely important and linked to success. It's very telling that both Luck and Evasion are core parts of the Damage and Tanking playstyles. We were guided towards this concept of specialised builds performing roles through these gear cards and the limitations of the 3x3 gear grid.
The main signposts you want to look for with Support items is unusual passive abilities combined with good affinities. But also the crafting recipes for these items matter a lot and that brings us to the final signpost I'm going to write about due to this article's length getting away from me (and I need to prepare for the podcast recording tomorrow).
Resources
Resources are the in game 'drafting' signpost, you're going to get a certain number of resources from a showdown fight and the odds of receiving a given resource depends on the number of those cards in the deck. Often if a resource deck contains just one of a given resource then the gear that can be crafted from it tends to be more powerful than average; we see this with armor sets that require a specific resource or key items like the Cat Eye Circlet – if you get the resources for them you're directly and crudely signposted to craft these items.
The Cat Eye Circlet in particular has an interesting form of signposting in campaigns with the Gorm. You have two direct options for Hit Location control in campaigns like this, the first being the Cat Eye Circlet and the second being the Wisdom Potion. What works so well here is the Circlet is very difficult to construct as it is dependant on high variance, the only way you can increase the odds of getting it is by going out and killing another White Lion, by slowing down your play as much as possible so you can get as many resources per fight for an increasing percentage chance at hitting the jackpot.
The Wisdom Potion in contrast uses generic organs, two of them, and a certain level of Gorment Alchemy potions. While it is still chance that gets you to this item, you have a lot more common a resource to spend and you have other ways of altering the odds of success further.
As such, in a campaign where you're unable to hit the Cat Eye Circlet but have access to the Wisdom Potion you can take this signpost as an indicator of what type of weapons you should be using. The Circlet digs three deep into the deck per activation; letting you make smart decisions about the three different cards you've seen and line up the weapons accordingly – all that matters is the maximum known options per activation of the Circlet are three.
In contrast the Wisdom potion offers you permanent information of just the top card of the Hit Location deck and nothing further down; so in a campaign where you just have the Wisdom Potion suddenly 1 speed weapons become so much more valuable because you get to choose the order in which they attack and can line up every single successful attack with the most optimal target. This greatly signposts your play style for the campaign by making 1 speed weapons the aces that you can rely on and each additional speed beyond that becomes a potential liability.
So, to wrap up before closing here are some key indicators for any current or future released gear content that can help signpost you towards choosing to include them in your game or your play style:
- Speed being between 1 and 3 and having a good relation ship with both strength or accuracy
- Higher Strength than the other weapons from the same monster
- Increased Critical Wound Chances
- Access to Automatic Wounds
- AI Deck manipulation
- HL Deck Manipulation (Including ways to avoid the trap)
- Higher than normal Armor Points or ways of gaining additional Armor Points
- Movement Gains – especially when you have Dash
- Monster Stat Reduction (especially Accuracy and Movement, which can cancel attacks)
- Block/Deflect in numbers above 1 (When you are at Block 1, it might as well just be a Leather Shield which also gives 5 or 10 extra armor points.
- Accuracy Gains
- Working with unusual keywords (especially weapon synergies)
- Lots/Good affinities in optimal directions (Green right, Red left, Blue left/right)
- Armor kits having modular layouts rather than one rigid one
- Lower than expected resource cost
- Strange or Rare drop % resources required
One would hope that as APG become a more mature and sophisticated set of designers as time has passed and that they have learnt from past errors like the Cat Fang Knife, which requires a mid-high tier resource (L3 White Lion) but resulted in a weapon that is often forgotten about because outside of its affinities it failed so completely that they ended up creating the Gigalion's Hooked Claw Knife to replace it. One would hope we see more Crest Crown type rewards for hunting the higher level monsters and that their specific strange resources become strong signals to 'craft this resource specific gear' the way that the Ink Sword, Denticle Axe, Skleaver and Ink Blood Bow all do.
To wrap up, hopefully with all these examples I've helped explain this concept and give you access to some of the tools that you can apply to your first playthrough of the Gambler's Chest Expansion campaign whenever it finally arrives! Perhaps it'll even help in the next board game you play with randomised elements, Glory to Rome!
People of the Stars and the Halloween releases are next in the writing queue, plus at least one comb through whatever heavy load Adam drops on us in the Black Friday chaos as long as it contains sufficient new material. We've had a lot of reposted material in the Dark Herald posts recently.
Comments
Fen
That doesn't apply to the Vagabond Armor ability which states: "While wearing this you have the benefits of Sword Mastery and Sword Specialization." One of those benefits is the Black Sword unlock. That is how it's been played for since August 2016 and that FAQ has been around for that long. I directly asked APG about this in 2019 and asked them to clarify the situation. They still haven't, nothing changes as far as I'm concerned until we get an official channel (Their Website) confirmation. Aya's miniature from Before the Wall; which is where the Vagabond armor set comes from has her wearing Vagabond Armor with a Black Sword. They intended this interaction and they've provided no evidence that it's changed in the years this content has been out. I hope this will change; but what you're referencing here doesn't cover it. It's too general and old.
eduardo zunino
That's the one I'm talking about, there it says that there are not specialist, until 3 levels In profiency, same could be said of master, they are not considered master until they have all the levels, and vagabond only give the mastery ability to the wearer but he is no master
Fen
If APG want to update the FAQ to cover that then sure.
eduardo zunino
Are you sure vagabond works with black sword? People on lanterns reign discord had always going against it, and I think recently a post from tastemaker a member of APG confirmed that it doesn't work
