zombie RPG d&d style mechanics

[jimbal]

Hey there peoples of the undead persuasion. Me and my friends here in OKC are pretty regular D&D players (like every sunday without fail unless there is a major holiday, although we did play on christmas day once). We are currently running a really fun Pathfinder campaign with no alignment restrictions. This is not what this post is about though.

After this current campaign, I will be DMing for the first time if I can get this game planned out. Right now I am just toying with the idea of running a table top game with a zombie apocalypse setting. I have a million and 1 ideas already but the big thing I havent really worked out is what system to use. I am leaning more and more towards using Pathfinder as a basis and converting it to a modern world as far as skills and weapon use. This would mean dropping all magic from the system and if we play a 1-20 campaign it will need some changes to leveling. For example, more ability score increases instead of one every four levels since there would be no magic items to increase stats.

I realize there are seemingly infinite changes to be made, but I have been talking to my seasoned DM friend who currently makes up a lot of homebrew and is trying to get a book published through paizo. So I will have plenty of help doing this but I thought I would poke around in this new found playground for other table top gamers who may have attempted this or may use another system already, like the obvious choice D20 modern. I like the system and will probably take the weapons use straight from that system. I do not like the character creation and leveling system and thats why I am thinking of converting Pathfinder melee content into the d20 modern game.

Also anyone who games regularly, what systems do you use. What type of characters do you like to play. I have always been a melee user until recently. I play tested a psion in our last campaign and had a blast. The current campaign most of us agreed to draw random class, race, and gender from a hat and I ended up with a male halfling witch. I thought I would hate it but we are using a bit of homebrew which includes detect alignment being altered so no one can immediately tell that I have been Extremely Chaotic Evil since the start. With this home brew in place I have caused so many shenanigans and been able to get away with it. Recently in game I got caught finally and talked my way into a life debt to the character I slighted the most by getting him to kill his own mother under the compulsion of my evil deity. My ass DM shifted my alignment to chaotic neutral because part of my life debt has been that i will be executed immediately if I am caught doing anything illegal. So i have been being all goody two shoes.

This post ended up being way longer than I initially intended so Im gonna stop here. Let me know what you think if you have the time, any tips and feedback are appreciated.

[scarydk]

Hi Jimbal

First of, thumbs up for the reflective post!

I also enjoy toying around with RPG (Ars Magica) on the side and the mere thought of throwing in some living corpses for a xmas feast in the slaughter house does sound like fun.

Reading your post makes me think you're going for a dungeon crawl approach to the genre. Not there's anything wrong with that - you'll probably have a hell of a time staying within your safe zone pointing your swords or guns at the nearest horde, but have you considered going for a more post-apocalytic horror feel of the game and introduce fear in your group?

It's a matter of taste but I always advocate for the thematic approach of despair and disorder, which for me is what this genre does best.

The only horror RPG system I've tried so far is CoC and I think it would do well even for a modern post-apocalytic setting.

Well, these few thoughts were only meant for inspiration. I hope you go through with your idea whatever your approach... and hopefuly your group will play with you again some day after you have turned them against each other and into zombie fodder.

'Oh, The Horror!'

[mqstout]

The system you're looking for is All Flesh Must Be Eaten, by Eden.

[j0hnnn]

Listen to mqstout...
wise guy... suggested an awesome system...

be sure to check it...

[happynapper]

(05-29-2012 10:47 AM)scarydk Wrote:  The only horror RPG system I've tried so far is CoC and I think it would do well even for a modern post-apocalytic setting.

Well, I have played Call of Cthulhu (CoC, right?) and I remember that the zombies in that game were truly terrifying. They seemed unstoppable, so the survivors of our group fled that farmhouse built on top of some unspeakable shrine.

[scarydk]

(05-29-2012 10:09 PM)happynapper Wrote:  Well, I have played Call of Cthulhu (CoC, right?) and I remember that the zombies in that game were truly terrifying. They seemed unstoppable, so the survivors of our group fled that farmhouse built on top of some unspeakable shrine.

Right. Didn't know it actually contained creature stats for zeds. Thanks for the brief in game report. It makes me want to pick it up again. My old copy of the game still dwells deep within in the darkness of my father's garage...

[jimbal]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I will be looking into them for sure.

As far as the feel for the campaign it is gonna start with the infection starting and will quickly become a very post apocalyptic game. One of the things I think is the coolest idea is to set the starting point here in OKC because its were we live. Doing this will be awesome for supplies gathering in the early parts of the game because I am gonna use google maps to determine where they are and they can use ooc knowledge of their home town area to get enough supplies to make a desperate escape from the metro area and get to a less populated area. Being that large portions of OKC are pretty sparse it should be fun to see how they handle it and how fast they get stocked up and out of the city.

As far as storyline goes it will probably evolve into a sort of resident evilish end game as just continually fighting normal zombies will get boring even if the suspense is good. I am probably going to do a little bit of time lapse once they hit level 5 or 6 and jump ahead 6 months or so. This will make the idea of them having to have altercations with other groups of survivors fun since supplies will start being harder and harder to get. It will be fun to see if my friends do the honorable thing and share supplies with other groups or if they become the ass bags who just start taking out other groups.

I will probably draw a bit from the walking dead comics for the survivors against survivors story arc part of the game. Then around 10th level when the group is powerful enough the zombies will start getting more powerful. So starting as just a basic romero style zombie to a more dawn of the dead remake running zombie, and then move on to rage zombies a la 28 days later. Of course boss stuff I can incorporate any number of things to keep it more interesting because as the campaign goes on it will become evident that the dead rising is only the beginning of our heroes problems. To keep the fights interesting in the early stages I will likely do stuff like cornering the group, or giving them a couple of escape options but both being risky, throw a nice sized horde at them to make them waste ammo, ya know just all around misery making fun. Vehicle combat will come into play after that when they start dealing with other groups of survivors and should be fun to see a mad max style group of crazies chasing the group. Then the zombies will become a bigger threat again and its back to survival mode for a while. I havent decided on anything specific for the end game and will probably leave it that way until late in the game so I can see how the group reacts to everything and I can make changes easier if I havent planned out everything exactly...also means I dont have to railroad them and I am pretty good at coming up with stuff on the fly.

The more I talk to anyone who will listen, the more I want this game to start now, but we are probably 9-10 months away from ending our current game. So I am not on a tight time table to get this rolling. Thanks to everyone who made suggestions. I am definitly gonna check out CoC and all flesh must be eaten.

On a side note, have any of you ever played epic level D&D campaigns, since we stick to pathfinder pretty much exclusively now we had to home brew a ton of stuff, but that campaign was insane. We played as epic level evil characters whose planet was invaded by this massive army from another planet and were kidnapped and taken back to their world and forced to fight in their coliseum. After that things just went crazy with all the epic magic in the game. By the end we had ended up tearing a rift in the planes and they were all merging into chaos. Good times.

[mqstout]

http://www.edenstudios.net/images/afmbedemokit.pdf
http://www.edenstudios.net/EDN8050.html

Two "demo kits" for AFMBE with basic rules and an adventure (in the 2nd one, it's more of a campaign outline), including ready-made characters.

[jimbal]

that info will be infinitely helpful, thanks again

[Phantaskippy]

For any remotely realistic setting I prefer to use the EABA system.

I like it because their take best 3 dice system creates a bell curve for your skill rolls, the more skilled you get the less chance of bad results and higher percentage of good results, but with a cap on your roll result no matter what. It really works for Zombie games because the low skill zombies can still get hits in.

Also their health system is phenomenal, I love the injury dice and the lack of hard hp. Just a phenomenal system. Too bad the manual is so confusing at times.