Kill Him Faster Season Two

It's been five days since the launch of Kill Him Faster Season One: Rip and Tear! I'm finding myself very happy with how things have done - it's sold probably more copies than I expected, and there's been a lot of interest in the free update version as well. 

I have some thoughts ...

First, a lesson learned is to manually deploy the launch on DriveThruRPG, rather than using the "launch on" option, which releases products at midnight. I probably would have had a bunch more visibility if the first 9 hours hadn't been while people were asleep.

Second, and more importantly, the model of simultaneously launching a small paid update and a pared-back free update at the same time has been great. I want to grow this over the long term, and the free update model is a cool way to give players new content even if they don't want to pay right now. 

Thirdly, I've really started the process of figuring out what goes into Season Two. I loved the mutator concept - adding difficulty levels (can you guess from where I borrowed the naming convention?) was a cool way to deepen the strategic depth of the game without fundamentally changing it.

All of this brings me to an idea for a mutator for the Season Two expansion. Right now, the rules say that a new random event (enemy reinforcements, intercepted comms giving the players control of enemy movement for a round, a pack of stray dogs eats a nazi, etc.).

I rather suspect that this might add too much cognitive load to the table. I also want to increase the connectivity between systems.The new mutator will change round events from being a constant, every round occurrence to a d12 roll. Should the result fall in a certain range (say 9-12), a round event occurs. On a 12, the athletes themselves get to pick the round event that occurs. As players win games in Kill Him Faster, they increase their team's Hype Meter. Not only does this track how popular the team is becoming, but hitting certain thresholds on the meter unlock team moves like wolfpack and cooperative play.

The other thing that this new mutator will do is one the team's hype meter hits a certain threshold, the range for that allows the players to pick which event occurs will double (e.g. 11-12). My hope is that not only will this mutator decrease amount of stuff you have to keep track of in a game, it will also strengthen the connections between mechanics, making the whole thing more cohesive.

That's all for now - more to come shortly!