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Erock
2014-05-11, 11:05 PM
My group and I have decided to see what Day Z would be like in deep, dark AD&D 2e forests. We're playing in the Forgotten Realms. For those unfamiliar, Day Z is a survival-horror game wgere zombies are present but the bigger worry is hunger. The group will fibd plenty of creatures, as well as huge cave systems, labyrinths and Wildlings. What spells, equipment, etcetera should I ban? What would you throw at them?

veti
2014-05-11, 11:20 PM
Difficult, because as far as I can recall there are no actual rules for hunger in AD&D. That right there looks to me like a hint that you might be using the wrong system.

But if you want to try it: one of the biggest threats in a survival horror game is disease. There's the zombie infection itself, obviously; in the game itself, as I understand it, you also have to worry about such fun things as cholera, dysentry and hepatitis, and presumably there's also food poisoning (because there's not much point having hunger and thirst as factors, if there's no penalty to eating/drinking the wrong thing...).

So I'd ban, or at least severely nerf, anything that gives a PC immunity to disease, or allows it to be cured quickly and painlessly.

Yora
2014-05-12, 02:28 AM
You need to track how much the PCs can carry and how much they get slowed down by their gear. However, calculating things by weight in pounds is so annoyingly fiddly that nobody seems to ever bother with it. I think this system (http://www.paperspencils.com/2012/03/18/making-encumbrance-work/) is much more practical.

Arbane
2014-05-12, 03:15 AM
I've often thought that if the GM doesn't go easy on the players, any dungeon crawl can become survival horror.

Everyone's tired, the cleric is out of heals, the wizard has two spells left, there's one flask of lamp-oil, and there's half a mile of rock and the gods only know what monsters between us and ever seeing daylight again....

Yora
2014-05-12, 03:25 AM
A key element would be that the PCs are hopelessly outnumbered. Killing and clearing out all the enemies is straight out impossible. (Which is why the recent Resident Evils and Dead Space are not survival horror, but just splatter action.) Survivial Horror means minimizing harm to yourself, not maximizing damage to the enemies.
If you are lucky, you might be able to get around most enemies and destroy their source, so they die off or disperse on their own eventually. Or there might be hope to get massive reinforcements, but the heroes by themselves stand not the slightest chance in winning a direct clash with all the enemies.

Aberrant Knight
2014-05-12, 06:50 AM
Most survival games also have a gear degradation rule in play. This helps give players anouther reason why they shouldn't just go fighting everything they can, as they may damage their gear (blunt swords, broken armour e.t.c) and in a survival game its unlikely to be an easy fix.
To really ramp it up gear could get damaged just by using it rather than just on bad rolls. This adds some realism to it but could start to cause headaches with keeping track of it all.

hamlet
2014-05-12, 07:51 AM
OK, first off, there are rules for privation in AD&D, just not where you'd expect to look.

First, check Dark Sun the original boxed set. Rules there for dessert travel, but easily adaptable.

Or you can grab up the Wilderness Survival Guide if you can find a copy for cheap. Completely transferable rules for 2e.

Also also, don't ban anything. There's no reason to. Simply be careful what treasure you hand out and, with the zombies and such, keep the pressure on. That keeps priests from being able to cast things like create food and water and putting pressure on hunters, rangers, and woodsy type folks to find food when they're between settlements. It also helps to balance out spellcasters who can, from time to time, just magic their way out of any old problem.

I've done something like this in the past. It's not about fudging rules or anything like that, it's about using the rules you have and employing the codes of the genre. Keep your players running/moving, don't let up until they get to a relatively safe area and even then impress upon them that it's safe only by dint of not having been consumed yet. There will be raids on the settlements that will almost always result in civilian casualties. The residents will be just as hungry, hard bitten, and oppressed by the situation as the wandering murder hobo PC's. They might not find hospitable behavior at every port of call.