Kill Him Faster (Part 2)

Make e-sports, not war

The first part of the critic can be found here.

5. Disassemble Engine

Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.

Lhuzie

Resolution mechanics are as simple as they are straightforward; they don’t need to do much. Just determine if something succeeds or fails, or if a nazi drains your athlete/team resources.

The engine that takes all the fuel to keep things going is Momentum/Hype. Kill Hitler, get Momentum. Get Momentum, get Hype. Raise Hype, get better at killing Hitlers. You get more Momentum.

It is a simple engine for a simple purpose. Not much, but it is honest nazi killing.

Brad

While I agree wholeheartedly with my co-author above, I do think a rather interesting piston in the engine is the fact that you cannot hold onto any player for more than a couple seasons, the fact that the game by its essential nature uses these characters up creates an interesting loop encouraging you to try out different options.

6. Essentials For Session One

So, you got this game; you are going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, you have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the feeling for what makes this game stand out from similar art.

Lhuzie

For better and for worse, it is kinda impossible to do this to Kill Him Faster.

The good thing is that there is no need. You can read it at the table, make randomized characters and go through a first run during the first hour of play, even reading all the rules.

Brad

There is a wonderful digital randomizer to help out as well, give it a shot!

7. Playing The Game Wrong

Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your table, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (or have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line on page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?

Lhuzie

Despite the rules being a relatively system, they are not always presented in the most clear way; take special attention and do not skip on multiple re-reads.

The movement of nazis in and out of the Distant Zone can cause confusion. In most circumstances, nazis stay in the Distant Zone as a reserve/reinforcement pool; game masters draw some nazis and throw them towards different player characters. 99% of the time this will not cause issues — if something is in the Distant Zone, it is still not in active combat and should be considered part of the next wave. The tricky interaction occurs when players spend actions to move all their nazis back to the Distant Zone; nazis can always move one zone, and this includes out of the Distant Zone and into the farthest Zone around a player character. Since this movement happens after all players have acted, between the movement of multiple players and the piles of nazi bodies, it becomes difficult to distinguish between Distant Zone nazis that will be part of the next wave/nazis pushed back that may rejoin the fight still this round. An effective solution was the introduction of an “Activation” step: after Reinforcements have been grabbed from the Distant Zone and before they are assigned to the carnage, they are now marked as Activated. Only Activated nazis get to move/attack; a nazi remains Activated even if moving into the Distant Zone and stops being activated upon death.

Nazis exist in a binary state of Complacent or Alert, which is supposed to change their flow between zones and how dangerous the later parts of the run are — however, all too easy is forgotten by player or game masters. Since this creates fun and interesting developments and keeps runs from becoming stale, you will get the best out of Kill Him Faster if you play around with Alarms and the reaction of reactionary enemy forces.

Speaking of Complacent/Alert, they are Alerted by any non-Silenced attack — including from enemies. While this is easier to track from the side of player characters, it gets a bit tricky when it comes for nazi noise and is often overlooked. The most common scenario where is matters is when a Zone is Noisy; otherwise, it is better for the cognitive load to assume every nazi attack will Alert the other nazis in a zone.

Wolfpack requires one to overlap the Zones of different players in a non-intuitive way. However, it is much easier to manage and track than one my assume, and Wolfpack is a tactic that is only available to the most popular teams — and if you have even an option to use Wolfpack, you will be a player with absolute system mastery. However, if you are playing with inexperienced players in a high-rank team, take special attention to this option.

Rival teams scoring is handled though symmetrical, mirrored Highlights. They can easily break the flow of play, where a faster/asymmetrical/post-run way to handle the rival teams racing you for Hitler’s head would maybe flow better. This also is against the ludonarrative framework — teams are supposed to take a run after each other, a benefit from time travelling. Pay attention to issues of pacing that may result from Highlights and try different approaches.

There is a weird feel in having Momentum — the drive of the game — be earned mostly independent of what most the game is about. You get 1 Momentum if you win a pre-run opposed check, 1 Momentum for the post-run debriefing and… 1 for killing Hitler. Considering how game/time consuming the active run is, only one third of Momentum coming from it feels to weaken the sense of purpose and design support that the rest of the game channels you towards. The fact Kill:Game ratio is not used for anything feels criminal.

Brad

Kill Him Faster really requires at least two reads to fully digest. Don't miss that you can only play each athlete for a limited number of seasons, and that number is randomly determined. Also, don’t lose track of trade and championship days!

8. What to Steal

Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.

Lhuzie

Kill Him Faster offers an interesting lesson, due to the unusual case study it ends up being: it may be the first game we critic that ends at polar extremes: it both fails and succeeds at committing to the bit and achieving the goals it sets for itself.

Hitler-speedrunning and nazi-mowing is stellar, some of the most fun and cathartic fascist killing I have played through in the artform; by those standards, a lesson of focus and pursuing what your deal is.

At the same time, the game show/wrestling/reality TV elements are absolutely underwhelming. Mechanically uninteresting compared to the speedrunning elements, a narrative/gameplay dissonance that hurts the experience of playing the game and the collaborative storytelling (for example: teams are supposed to take turns doing runs and killing Hitler, but then the run of the rival team is solved interspaced with your own run; this both contradicts the setup of the game show fiction but also leads to awkward pull away of focus), underuse of the outputs generated from the speedrunning part of the game. And of course, what really sinks this side of Kill Him Faster is the utter lack of characters and their drama. The athletes you create are not interesting enough: if they were real, they would not be scandalous Olympians, hypnotic wrestlers or drama-chewing reality tv stars. They would be some guy, and really only become more rounded people 2/3 seasons in.

As such, one can actually pretty neatly separate the two goals of the game; side by side you can see what makes one side shine so bright and the other fail to lift off. From a design perspective, it can also teach a lot about how to approach your own designs: should I try to spin more plates besides what I already get working on? Is this a distraction? Is it worth to draw attention away from what I already have got to work exactly as I want in order to improve other aspects of the game?

Thankfully, it seems its creators have learned from their own work: Kill Him Faster: Season One further focus the game in the aspect where the game truly shines — the speedrunning, — adding new maps, weapons, improved wave generation rules, enemies and run mutators. They know what their game is about, what it can do, and have taken one lesson:

They can keep making it get better and better.

Brad

Kill Hitler, Get Paid, Repeat. Kill Him Faster has a lot of draw for fans, but what can we learn from it? The value of a tight design is always praised around here, which is why we are going to learn the opposite today, don’t be afraid to bulk up! Kill Him Faster could use some work in it’s upper muscles, some strength in making stand out athletes. But, these crazy kids really are like the heroes of all the best sports stories, one short montage away from success!

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