How do you make Zombies fun?

[Spiritcaller]

So I'm working on my first campaign right now, and we're moving REALLY slowly but we are making progress. The problem is that, once my group and I can finally get together, I don't really have enough map design/obstacle planning experience to make it as good as I'd hope it to be.

For example, our last session was taken up almost entirely by a single encounter of zombies. The party came upon a graveyard in the woods and ended up fighting a dozen zombies (three groups of four, separated enough that they wouldn't automatically get pulled into a fight). Between bad rolls, low level attacks, and Zombies being relatively pretty tanky it took over an hour. Finally it ended when our Wizard used a fire spell to burn them and the surrounding forest down so we could leave, lol. It wasn't even that tense of a fight, because only one person lost any HP and it was a barbarian with resistance to pretty much everything when he's raging. Besides that, their XP yield is so low that it already feels like a massive grind, and we're not even level 3 yet.

I'm just wondering how to use Zombies in a context that makes them more interesting, because high Constitution and low damage isn't fun, but also most of the enemies in this campaign are going to be some form of zombie.

[GorogIrongut]

It all depends on how you run your campaigns... You could:
1. Run a nitty gritty campaign where normally everything's easy... but in Zombietown you can't find ammo, food, water, etc. The party has to keep track of everything. Restocking is hard AND risky. Make healing difficult. Consider using exhaustion levels. While annoying in other campaigns, this heightens the apprehension that should go with a zombie campaign.
2. I always was a fan of not counting one specific bite as converting to zombiism. So what I would normally do, is I'd start a counter... The player's constitution bonus x20. So a player who has 16 Con gets 60 points. Every time a player gets hit by a zombie, they take d6 'zombification points' which get subtracted from that total. Don't tell your players what they count for... but have them keep track of the points.
3. Don't make the same zombies. Some zombies should be fast. Some should be slow. Some should fly. Make each one different so that the players can't formulate one given strategy to beat the zombies.
4. Linked with number 3, give the zombies a hivemind. So the party can take down a handful of zombies without any worries or concern, but because the zombies have a hivemind, hordes of them converge on the point of the dead zombies. The players have to get quick at taking them down. And then they have to learn to quickly move out to prevent being bogged down by unbeatable numbers.
5. Play with the actual cause of the zombie virus. I freaked my players out, when they defeated a zombie and it collapsed to the ground. It's empty meat bag spewing beetles out on to the floor, seeking out the nearest heat source to... infest. Even if I didn't have them tabulate zombie points for that episode, they immediately switched from melee attacks to ranged attacks to keep from being infested. If you play with the cause of zombification you can come up with interesting ways to freak people out.
6. Consider having it be a ruse. I once ran a perfect zombie campaign, only for them to realize that it was all an illusion. But only one of them figured it out. So the illusion went on to freak everyone out as I described what was happening to the player. It got to the point where they were attacking the player and the player had to make a leap of faith to show them irrefutable proof that the whole zombie mini apocalypse was a figment of their imaginations. Once they could logically break free from it, the illusion disappeared and they realized that they were facing a revenant who'd been casting an illusion... and they'd wasted almost all of their magic/abilities taking out the not really there, figments of their imagination zombies. It really messed with their heads and they were yelping through most of it waiting for the next show to drop.

There are a lot more things you can do, but those are probably my favourites. Just set a dark, creepy tone and have fun with it.

[UrielAwakened]

The Monsters Know is a great blog on monster tactics. Any time I don't know quite how to player a monster in combat I check there first.

4e also introduced a number of low-level zombie variants that are great fun. Rotwings are zombies that can fly, Gravehounds are zombie dogs or wolves, a Corruption Corpse hurls chunks of necrotic flesh, a Chillborn is a zombie that came from a colder region and has gotten frostbite, and a Hulking Zombie is a massive brute capable of tearing down buildings. Adds some much-needed variety and easily homebrewed in 5e.

[TheUser]

The Fly spell

[Emay Ecks]

Some things I've done to make zombie fights more fun:

-Give the zombies some flavor/personality. This might mean having them have weapons, be dressed in cultist robes, wear ruined armor, or be a race besides human. You don't even have to adjust stats to match (I did, but it's not necessary). Players spend some time thinking "hmmm... I wonder what was here before, why are all these knights now zombies?" and it just gives the setting a more lived-in feel.

-I use a modified Undead Fortitude instead of what is written in the Monster Manual (zombie makes a con save of DC 5+damage taken) which just has them sitting there not dying and just being frustrating. My Undead Fortitude save is made on the zombie's first turn after it is reduced to zero (and the zombie has fallen prone on the ground), and is automatically failed if an attack is successfully made against the zombie before being rolled. This encourages players to "double tap" zombies to prevent them from rising back up, and was incredibly surprising for my players the first time zombies got back up after being downed.

-Mix it up. Throw some other undead in there. Have some skeletons, crawling claws, specters, shadows, and maybe a wight or two. Fighting the same thing several times in a row gets boring regardless of what that thing is.

-Surprise the players. Have the zombies burst up out of the ground directly underneath the players and get a surprise round. Have what appears to be the remains of a previous adventuring party suddenly come to life the moment they are looted and start attacking the party.

[tieren]

Curse of Strahd has a fun variant of zombie where as they take damage bits fall off and the bits keep fighting (a hand crawling toward you, a severed head trying to bite your ankles, etc...). My group enjoyed it for a change of pace.

[smcmike]

Yeah, look up the CoS zombies, they are a nice gross twist for schlocky horror.

The thing about zombies is that fighting them isn't very fun, inherently. If you line up beatable groups of zombies and have your characters chop them down, that's a severely blah encounter.

Of course, have you ever seen an encounter like that on zombie fiction? No, you haven't.

Zombies in fiction are part of the environment, not monsters to be defeated. Most encounters involve traveling through zombie infested territory without being overwhelmed, not trying to stay and kill them all.

Let's say the characters need to get to the Mausoleum in the graveyard. If you give them 12 zombies, they will kill 12 zombies, take a rest, and walk to the mausoleum. If you give them 120 zombies, spread out and at a rate that threatens to overwhelm them but never quite does, they will kill 6 zombies and find some way to run/sneak/push their way to the mausoleum, where they will bar the door and panic.

[Scripten]

Zombies in fiction are part of the environment, not monsters to be defeated. Most encounters involve traveling through zombie infested territory without being overwhelmed, not trying to stay and kill them all.


This. If your characters can reasonably cut through a group of zombies, you're probably not using enough of them to make the encounter interesting. For reference, check out the first campaign log from SilverClawShift. It's 3.5, but the concept transfers very well. I also like to give zombies a form of poisonous bite like giant rats or death dogs.

[Zorku]

One game changer in this particular case: make sure your players know they can run away from a fight, and not only because they don't think they will win. If you're going for a realistic approach, a lot of combat where there's nothing to gain and your enemies cannot easily pursue you, is simply going to be a waste of resources that eats up time and drains momentum.

One the player side of the table, making sure that everyone pays attention and takes their turns quickly can help a lot. This means that if the wizard player has to look up the exact text of hypnotic pattern then too bad, cast firebolt or something right now and maybe hypnotic pattern will be a good choice on your next turn... or maybe you should have prepared some abbreviated spell descriptions for quick reference.

On the DM side of the table, you don't have to use the full simulation of a combat from the first attack to the logical last attack. When the party has killed about 2/3rds of the creatures in a combat you should have a really good idea of how little damage they are likely to take while they mop up the stragglers. You can either just declare that the fight is pretty much decided and the party is able to kill everything without suffering further attrition of resources, you can have a lot of enemies start trying to run away (this works much better if you're being descriptive about things and convey that cowards are terrified, hired thugs have decided this job isn't worth the pay, cultists have realized that this cult business isn't all it's cracked up to be, etc; if you just announce that somebody is running a lot of players will chase them, thinking that they are about to lose loot or something,) or you can even have a bunch of bandits throw down their weapons and surrender.

You can't use most of those options in a pure zombies combat, but you're probably a fight or three away from realizing that any combat with only one kind of creature in it is kind of boring, both in execution and from the player's perspective. When no target is more important than any other target, nobody has much of a choice to make. Skeletons are the same CR as zombies, so you can switch a few for archers, and then the party is interested in dropping those before they chew through the zombies. Or, when you see that the combat is dragging on and the party is getting bored, throw in some doom; "the ground starts to rumble, and 3x as many zombies start to dig their way out of the ground. They will probably be able to surround you in about 2 turns. What do you do" stuff.

Now, you can also just reinterpret stuff. That ability that makes the zombies stand back up is pretty clear about how they just don't die from the last hit, but you could have them fall over all the same and just act like they are dead for a few rounds (and honestly, thinking that the combat was over and walking past the graveyard only to hear groans as most of the zombies stand back up and start lumbering towards the players is WAY more interesting than making them slog through a fight that just won't end.

Now, if you've got some particular goal for the zombies, like to keep the party away from a necromancer, then it makes sense for them to actively keep getting in the way for as long as they can, but if they were just native corruption in a graveyard then mess around with how all of this works.

And you can come up with little quirks or abilities that don't really change the amount of damage per round, but that make the zombies require a little more thought. If you've got ones in rotting leather that mainly try to grapple characters and shove them to the ground, while the naked and more-rotten kind only try to bash characters, that alone gives the party something to focus on. If it suits you, maybe some of them are a little more bloated from rot and pus, and instead of standing back up when they die they erupt in a disgusting nova that showers nearby people in nasty enough stuff that they need to make a con check or else be (poisoned/catch a disease/take about 1 slam attack worth of damage/etc.)

-

Undead are very familiar subject material at this point, so you've got to introduce variety somehow. Most any classic thing you can think of is going to be picked up right away, but you can twist these ideas easily. Yeah, no party is likely to be surprised when the room full of bones assembles itself into skeletons, but they're they're much less likely to realize what you have planned when 10 unarmed skeletons are already in a room and all staring at a glowing rune on the ceiling, bones fly all over the place any time somebody hits them, and then after the last one drops all of those bones pick themselves up and assemble themselves into some large golem creature. Decide what kinds of things fit into your world and then just tweak things like this.

[alchahest]

4th had some neat zombie varieties, my favorite was one that would attempt a grapple with it's melee attack and if successful got to make a full movement, so they could go in, grab a party member and back up into the horde of zombies.

[Aett_Thorn]

Lighting them on fire is always good for a laugh or two...

[Easy_Lee]

You can add the Undead features to basically any existing creature in the game. I made an undead gelatinous cube one time, in spite of how little sense that makes. That was a weird one. But that's one simple trick to spice up an undead campaign.

[Nifft]

I'm just wondering how to use Zombies in a context that makes them more interesting, because high Constitution and low damage isn't fun, but also most of the enemies in this campaign are going to be some form of zombie.

Patient: "Doctor, it hurts when I do this."

Doctor: "Then don't do that."

-- -- --

Here's my suggestion:

First, figure out what sort of scenarios would be fun to play through.

Second, select monsters that support the fun scenario.


Zombies can support fun scenarios, but there's nothing inherently good (or bad) about using a zombie. You've seen how they work: they're tough, but not mobile. They're not much of a threat by themselves.

So, what are they good for? In my experience, they're great obstacles. Use them like difficult terrain: a tactical thing that the PCs will try to avoid.

But difficult terrain all by itself isn't a fun encounter. You're going to want to pair them with a more active & dynamic threat, or with an environmental challenge.

-- -- --

Here's an example of an environmental challenge:

"Okay, you've all successfully snuck past the zombies and into the Inner Demon Fane. Here's the map of the temple that you explored so far, and here's where the various groups of zombies are lurching around. You remove the Ruby Eyes of Orcus from the statue and -- oh no! A trap is triggered! The temple is flooding. There's like half a foot of water so far, and the water level is rising about 4 inches each round. You'd better get out fast! Roll for initiative!"

[Laserlight]

You can add the Undead features to basically any existing creature in the game.

Zombie grizzlies, or a herd of zombie mastodons, or zombie T Rex...

[Easy_Lee]

Zombie grizzlies, or a herd of zombie mastodons, or zombie T Rex...

Exactly. If the dead are rising, why limit it to humans? Could have a fun encounter where the players kill some monster only for it to rise as an undead and attack them again.

[Breashios]

Zombies don't have to be about combat either. They could be set to labor, digging a trench, piling rocks, pulling up flowers from the flower beds in town at night. Some might have a remnant of their former personality. I would never have them talk, but I might have one snap to attention when another dressed in a tattered officer uniform shuffles by pointlessly, then go back to digging.

One might try to be helpful. When the party drops their packs to prepare to fight the zombies, one might go over pick up the pack and try to hand it to the character to whom it belongs (while the others appear stunned they are being attacked by the party). Go wild.

[mephnick]

If the Diablo games taught me anything, it's that lame undead make a great wall to protect a caster. Throw 20 of em in a room with a necromancer casting Blights and Cloudkill and watch you players panic trying to get to him. Use the mob rules to speed through the zombies' rounds and add some terrain for fun.

[Easy_Lee]

If the Diablo games taught me anything, it's that lame undead make a great wall to protect a caster. Throw 20 of em in a room with a necromancer casting Blights and Cloudkill and watch you players panic trying to get to him. Use the mob rules to speed through the zombies' rounds and add some terrain for fun.

Or a talkative archer.

[Temperjoke]

Exploding zombies mixed with regular ones. When a player kills an exploding zombie, it explodes in some manner, such as a poison or disease cloud, or maybe in a fireball centered on itself that does necrotic damage instead of fire damage. That'll liven things up! :D

[druid91]

More or less how I used them as a player was a sacrificial wall to protect my necromancer from melee threats. Use the same thing here, Zombies as a barrier to more dangerous undead opponents that would otherwise be greatsword chow.

[JackPhoenix]

This got me thinking: you can get through Undying Fortitude with radiant damage. So, if you get zombie to 1 hp with normal attacks, finish them of with a bit of holy water. It doesn't have to be whole flask, just a drip to do that one last point of damage, so the flask would last for a while.

For a campaign, it could be another strategic resource: supplies are limited and demand great. Do you use your last flask to end this battle faster, or do you keep it in case you'll need it to get through necromancer's unliving shield? Do you use your supply yourself, or do you give it to other survivors who aren't as combat capable and could definitely use the edge, or do you divide it somehow (and how?) between the two groups?

[Spiritcaller]

Oh lord, I didn't realize how active this site was lmao. Thanks for the replies!

The biggest takeaway I got here is that I need more varieties of zombies to work with, and I got a ton of ideas off of you guys, which is great. I'm gonna start making a list of them to have fun with. Sounds like 4E and Curse of Strahd are interesting places to look, and the guy that said anything could be undead is definitely onto something lol. Also, flying zombies sounds like it could be a lot of fun, and flaming zombies really are good for a laugh as it turns out.

The second takeaway is that I always need them to be doing something special, which was something I was striving for but not necessarily accomplishing. I did do the "Incoming waves of zombies; get outta dodge" thing already, and I have been trying to make combat less necessary to emphasize stealth through obstacles, but I haven't really had anything for them to be a big wall for just yet (we're not really levelled up for those kinds of tactics, I don't think, and there isn't anything for it to naturally be in the immediate future; that's coming, though). The dozen zombies they fought last weren't necessarily supposed to be dangerous, I just wanted them there to fill out a bit of lore and cast some doubt on the quest-giver that the party trusted a little too easily... I just needed a smaller conflict, which is awkward because they also had to be a bunch of soldiers.

I'm going to try and avoid making resource management a thing because so far the party has mostly been ignoring it, and I don't think any of us would find it too fun. If I do implement it, it's not gonna be an all-encompassing mechanic, at least.



So if I am gonna be going for variants, should I worry about changing the EXP yield at all, or should i leave it generally the same?

[JackPhoenix]

If the variant is more or less dangerous, you should recalculate the CR, not only for the XP, but to get better idea how will your players fare against it.

[Zorku]

I'm going to try and avoid making resource management a thing because so far the party has mostly been ignoring it, and I don't think any of us would find it too fun. If I do implement it, it's not gonna be an all-encompassing mechanic, at least.
A pinch of forum wisdom there: If you find that your party wants to take long rests between every combat or similar weird behaviors, you might want to ask them if they left with one week or rations or two, and then mention that they're pushing it for how much food they'd need to get back to town, or they're getting low on torches, or the arrows are running low. A lot of people don't really like tracking those things, but if nobody is tracking stuff that doesn't mean they're not going to run out (and running low on resources is the actually meaningful element of limited resources, so suddenly not having that might cause people to try and do dumb stuff like carry around 17 suits of full plate expecting to sell them for 34k gold.)

So don't necessarily cut that stuff out of the story, even if you've cut out the math for it. You shouldn't have too much trouble being fair about this.


So if I am gonna be going for variants, should I worry about changing the EXP yield at all, or should i leave it generally the same?
The main things that determine CR, and thus EXP yield, are how many hits it takes to drop the creature, and how many times the creature has to hit a PC to drop them. So basically if you haven't given it more hp or added higher damage dealing ability then the EXP is probably the same. If you've bumped any of those up, then it might be 1 tick higher CR. Try to compare it to something else at that CR (or use the table in the DMG,) to see if it's a big enough difference to count for that.

[Psikerlord]

Brain eating or mindless dismembering zombies that keep attacking a downed opponent on zero hp (until dead dead) suddenly make them much, much more dangerous/exciting to fight against.

Then simply add more zombies for a scary horde.

[Spiritcaller]

@Above post

If only people were getting downed, lol. Something to keep in mind though, I'm sure it'll happen eventually.

A pinch of forum wisdom there: If you find that your party wants to take long rests between every combat or similar weird behaviors, you might want to ask them if they left with one week or rations or two, and then mention that they're pushing it for how much food they'd need to get back to town, or they're getting low on torches, or the arrows are running low. A lot of people don't really like tracking those things, but if nobody is tracking stuff that doesn't mean they're not going to run out (and running low on resources is the actually meaningful element of limited resources, so suddenly not having that might cause people to try and do dumb stuff like carry around 17 suits of full plate expecting to sell them for 34k gold.)

So don't necessarily cut that stuff out of the story, even if you've cut out the math for it. You shouldn't have too much trouble being fair about this.
So just use my best judgment on when stuff might run out instead of keeping tabs on everything? That sounds SO MUCH better! Lol.


The main things that determine CR, and thus EXP yield, are how many hits it takes to drop the creature, and how many times the creature has to hit a PC to drop them. So basically if you haven't given it more hp or added higher damage dealing ability then the EXP is probably the same. If you've bumped any of those up, then it might be 1 tick higher CR. Try to compare it to something else at that CR (or use the table in the DMG,) to see if it's a big enough difference to count for that.
Sounds like a plan. So, would that mean that trading some Constitution for Strength would be a fair trade, given that those are basically the two traits we're looking at?

[Alerad]

Here are some more ideas:

A wizard or death domain cleric who sleep-raises the dead. He doesn't retain control over them, except for the newly risen ones, resulting in him being trapped in the same place for several months now. Bonus points if he is actually a good-aligned character and doesn't know how to prevent himself from doing this, or doesn't realize he is the cause for the zombies.

Alternatively, Shadowfell sorcerer:
https://media.wizards.com/2015/downloads/dnd/02_UA_Underdark_Characters.pdf

Or a wizard trying to raise an intelligent undead. He succeeded, so the first zombie had spellcaster levels and Animate Dead prepared. It then turned on the wizard.

Westworld zombie spinoff. Expensive theme park where customers get to kill zombies for fun, and the acolytes raise them back at night. The zombies are controlled to provide just enough excitement and challenge, but not real threat. Until now.

[Malifice]

So I'm working on my first campaign right now, and we're moving REALLY slowly but we are making progress. The problem is that, once my group and I can finally get together, I don't really have enough map design/obstacle planning experience to make it as good as I'd hope it to be.

For example, our last session was taken up almost entirely by a single encounter of zombies. The party came upon a graveyard in the woods and ended up fighting a dozen zombies (three groups of four, separated enough that they wouldn't automatically get pulled into a fight). Between bad rolls, low level attacks, and Zombies being relatively pretty tanky it took over an hour. Finally it ended when our Wizard used a fire spell to burn them and the surrounding forest down so we could leave, lol. It wasn't even that tense of a fight, because only one person lost any HP and it was a barbarian with resistance to pretty much everything when he's raging. Besides that, their XP yield is so low that it already feels like a massive grind, and we're not even level 3 yet.

I'm just wondering how to use Zombies in a context that makes them more interesting, because high Constitution and low damage isn't fun, but also most of the enemies in this campaign are going to be some form of zombie.

Youre high enough level for Fireball (at least 5th) but a few small groups of 4 Zombies took an hour to fight?

That... doesnt sound right.

[Nifft]

Youre high enough level for Fireball (at least 5th) but a few small groups of 4 Zombies took an hour to fight?

That... doesnt sound right.

"Fire spell" is not limited to fireball, there's also burning hands and fire bolt.

[Safety Sword]

Party hats