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Deathrevived
2013-08-25, 12:37 AM
With summer coming to a close my party will be reassembling when we are back at university, and I was hoping to kick things off with a bit of a different couple sessions.

I was thinking of doing something I am sure many of you out there have tried, and probably hated, of doing a zombie survival, with the players playing themselves. If that makes sense.

For flavour, I was thinking of being quite loose with the rules, adapting more for fun than firm structure (we are a group that very much lives by the rule of cool). I figured I would use 3.5 since it is what the majority are familiar with, rolling up NPC commoner classes, since HP should be an issue- you get bit, you're going down.

I was wondering if anyone might have some suggestions, words of caution, etc.

Thanks

Black Jester
2013-08-25, 02:47 AM
If you want to run a Zombie game, go get All Flesh Must Be Eaten. The Unisystem it uses as its core is a pretty good system in its own right and in my experience very accessible.
If you want to play this as a longer, ongoing campaign, you should also consider to get the One of the Living sourcebook.
Both books maintain a lot of helpful information for running a game in the survival horror genre and AFMBE willl offer much more variety for the creation of relatively weak, normal persons as characters than D&D would do, especially if everyone plays the same class. Rgat could get old very fast.

erikun
2013-08-25, 07:52 AM
D&D3e Human Commoners aren't going to work well for modeling an actual person, especially someone coming out of a university. It is quite sparse on knowledge skills (reads: it gets none) and unless your players are particularly good at Handle Animal, Jump, Use Rope, or various Craft/Profession skills, it will probably come off as silly. Expert or Warrior (or the more general generic classes (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/classes/genericClasses.htm) of such) are probably a far better fit.

As for other systems, I'd probably recommend new World of Darkness (just the base characters) or something general like HeroQuest/Fate.

Emmerask
2013-08-25, 07:56 AM
Seconding All flesh must be eaten, it really is good!

The Dark Fiddler
2013-08-25, 12:30 PM
All Flesh Must Be Eaten is purpose built for zombies, so it's probably going to be a good option. As far as I know, it's the only system built for that specific genre.

That said, if you don't have it and money is an issue, my next recommendation would be Fate Core or Fate Accelerated Edition, both of which are pay what you want (i.e. free) on the Evil Hat website. NPC generation is ridiculously easy, and zombies can be a major threat. The only thing is that if you approach it wrong, the "one-bite-equals-death" thing can be really difficult to manage. I see a few ways around that, though:

Only inflict zombiism on a PC when you'd kill them otherwise, so as a consequence of losing a conflict.
Make the physical stress track be less about actual damage and more about fatigue.
Combining the two, make zombies inflict stuff like "Tired" or "Broken Ankle" when they inflict consequences, and only zombiism at the very end.

LibraryOgre
2013-08-25, 12:55 PM
Just as a bit of self-plug, but I actually designed the One Deck Engine (http://rpgcrank.blogspot.com/2013/08/ode-one-deck-engine.html) for a zombie game.

Knaight
2013-08-25, 03:43 PM
All Flesh Must Be Eaten is purpose built for zombies, so it's probably going to be a good option. As far as I know, it's the only system built for that specific genre.


Shotgun Diaries is as well, but I wouldn't recommend it for this particular purpose.

With that said: Look into Nemesis. It's a free horror game built on the ORE engine, and while it isn't specifically for zombies it can handle them really, really easily.

Deathrevived
2013-08-25, 09:42 PM
Thanks for the suggestions, will start reading into them!

tasw
2013-08-25, 10:32 PM
With summer coming to a close my party will be reassembling when we are back at university, and I was hoping to kick things off with a bit of a different couple sessions.

I was thinking of doing something I am sure many of you out there have tried, and probably hated, of doing a zombie survival, with the players playing themselves. If that makes sense.

For flavour, I was thinking of being quite loose with the rules, adapting more for fun than firm structure (we are a group that very much lives by the rule of cool). I figured I would use 3.5 since it is what the majority are familiar with, rolling up NPC commoner classes, since HP should be an issue- you get bit, you're going down.

I was wondering if anyone might have some suggestions, words of caution, etc.

Thanks

I've done it. It works as a mini campaign. 8-10 sessions, include the element of human bad guys etc.

For a generic system to keep it gritty and dark feeling either use World of darkness with the straight mortal rules or true 20.

Mr Beer
2013-08-25, 10:48 PM
If I was going to use a generic system, it would be GURPS. Brutal realism goes well with the zombie genre. 100 point characters are probably more competent than your friends but likely about what they think they are and anyway will be in serious danger from zombies.