Looking for Braaaiiins...er, players

Alright, I think I'd be up for running a zombie RP here. I would like to state up front that this would be a game more focused on the RP element, with very soft game mechanics. As such the players would have to accept a fair deal of responsibility in keeping themselves in line.

At present I have 3 basic story lines we could explore, so if you're interested let me know in which.

1) Start of the apocalypse, the outbreak is just beginning
2) End of the apocalypse, the world is mostly dead with pockets of survivors left
3) Zombies in space! What happens when a zombie outbreak occurs in a fleet of generational starships.

Have a Zombie RP over on DITL. Copy it and I'll send you the character sheets to run it.

I'll do that today. See if we can't get something running.

Deepcrush wrote:Have a Zombie RP over on DITL. Copy it and I'll send you the character sheets to run it.

We did, but really, that one kind of died before it ever got going. I'd be more interested in starting fresh, especially given that we'd be missing players for a couple of the characters.

Thats cool, it was only meant for killing time in the Trek sims... then all the wars started... lol

BTW, I'm totally in for it when you get it going.

I'd like to try something like this again, for sure.

Starting from scratch isn't a bad idea, since it really only just started anyways.

Also, I vote for scenario 1.

True enough, and this time I'll get to play.

I'm in for this, and vote for starting at the beginning as well, makes for more allowances. I like this idea just as much as I liked it on DITL, sounds very fun, and I really like doing this kind of stuff, mostly the telling of the story creatively bound by a certain criteria.

Alright, one more question; how real do we want to go with this? If we go more realistic, your characters hopes of survival lay in running, hiding, and finding the right place to fort up in. The RP will be more gritty, the threat more overwhelming, and have a general feeling of anxiety with brief moments of hope, with simple survival being the only real goal.

Less realistic, and you can make action movie type characters that can cut, shoot, and kick ass through mobs of zombies, in which case I'll have to threaten you with Left 4 Dead style special zombies. It would be a much more action oriented, over the top, goal motivated RP.

Game mechanics will use a simple D100 system. You'll have some stats I'll give you based on what type of character you're playing, and when you do things I deem require it, I'll make a roll for you against the relevant stat and let you know how well you failed or succeeded. Interaction between GM and PCs will be like that of a table top game, GM controls the world, PCs their characters. When the PCs want to do something, they let the GM know what they hope to accomplish and the GM determines how likely things work out the way they want based on a combination of rolls, common sense, and Awesomeness.

I vote more realistic. Of course, you can still kill a lot of zombies realistically.

I would think a bit of a mix would be great. We have serious play on the 40k RPs where when you're dead you're dead. But I also don't want a sissy fest of an RP where nothing happens.

No worries about nothing happening, if things start slowing down I'll be sure to throw some problems at the group. I guess the level of realism really comes down to whether you guys want to solve problems by smashing your way through things (things being defined as "zombie hordes" for the most part) or by trying to sneak, distract, fool, and otherwise creatively work to avoid getting mobbed in numbers.

Skipping back and forth could be interesting. I know that L4D can get rough even on the easier modes when you summon a horde at the wrong time.

Being out in the open and setting off a car alarm or causing some other kind of loud sound.

I personally would like the more realistic style, and if someone dies then they just move to another character that they wanna make. Means you can RP for many people if you happen to get crappy rolls, and you can find your favorite type of person.
Also it would be awesome to have like some sort of group ups possible, like characters find each other and contend with large groups. Also, would this be just written, or also mapped, I think mapped would be really awesome for zombie attacks, like you get a horde of them coming after you and have to use strategy to defeat all of them.
Also, what would we have as our large map, like we did in the last one NYC, which had it continued would have ended up being really awesome. And what kind of zombies are these? New style : fast scary, die with a couple bullets in the right place, or Old style : slow, cubersome, but refuse to die and only do so after unloading a couple clips on them?

I don't mind dying, but I don't want to have to make a new character every time I have a bad roll.

nickswitz wrote:Also it would be awesome to have like some sort of group ups possible, like characters find each other and contend with large groups.

That would be a definite goal. If you guys don't start out as a group, I'm going to try and get you all together. Gives more RP options and you have better survivability as a group.

Also, would this be just written, or also mapped, I think mapped would be really awesome for zombie attacks, like you get a horde of them coming after you and have to use strategy to defeat all of them.

Likely to go either way, just depending

Also, what would we have as our large map, like we did in the last one NYC, which had it continued would have ended up being really awesome.

We could do something like that. Based on the votes so far, I'm thinking of basing this on a college campus, which I could easily get a map for and make notes on.

And what kind of zombies are these? New style : fast scary, die with a couple bullets in the right place, or Old style : slow, cubersome, but refuse to die and only do so after unloading a couple clips on them?

Unless we get a majority vote for one or the other, you can expect both and then some.

I don't mind dying, but I don't want to have to make a new character every time I have a bad roll.

I'm not that ruthless a GM. The only time a single bad roll will kill you is if you're doing something extremely risky, like say jumping from roof top to roof top of two multistory buildings.

Sounds good to me, and I like the idea of a map. Means we can picture what we're doing a lot more easily.

Alright, so far it looks like we're going for more realistic, so no action movie heroes. I'll try to work things out so that you guys can handle individual or small groups of (normal) zombies alright, but even the full group will be swamped under by the numbers of a horde.

We're going to go with a college campus setting, so start considering your characters based on that. If it matters to anyone, it'll be the University of Missouri, usually referred to as Mizzou. I think it'll be a good site for this because 1) it's a rather big and spread out place, 2) it's relatively isolated, and 3) average enrollment is around 30,000 people, which becomes a nice sized horde to have to deal with. Also I went there for a semester and didn't really like the place personally. Once their website stops being a bitch I'll steal a copy of the map.

I'll get the character thread with creation rules up in a bit

Sounds like a win to me.

A heads up, I'll be gone the rest of today and tomorrow. The rp will start Tuesday.

Alright, that gives me some time to put together a character for myself.

I'd be in for this.

So... college campus as the starting point?

Yeah, looks like UMU.

Deepcrush wrote:Whats the rate of improvement on stats? 450 seems to leave some nasty gaps in ability.

No rate, leaving up to the players not to abuse things. If I have to call someone on it I will though.