Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Otaku

Infrastructure concerns would pop up if "suddenly" large packs of rabid dogs were a daily occurrence, and it is still a scary thing today when a random rabid animal pops up.

Scary to unprepared people who happen to bump into it. Once a rabid critter is spotted, it takes a pretty trivial effort to put it down. Same with an outbreak of rabies. Once any meaningful effort to eliminate them is put in place, it's basically just clean-up work.

To realistically threaten establishments on anything approaching a global scale requires too many zombies, too quickly. If you had that many deaths, the rotting corpses would be a biological disaster even if they were normal, non-walking dead.

[trechriron]

Well aren't we just a bunch of party poopers? :-D

28 days later scared the socks off me. I think rabid insane unfeeling physically enhanced zombies spreading the rage with even a drop of any body fluid could bring about the classic zombie apocalypse. Riots of the things raging through cities would stretch most infrastructures to breaking. The military would have to be involved with a "quarantine by destruction" policy. Do I think it would ultimately lead to the full destruction of mankind? Probably not. But the intervening years between "the culling" and regaining control would likely be unpleasant.

Also, I feel like The Walking Dead's premise is plausible. Zombie settings assume a certain level of incompetence on the government's part combined with the sentimentality and ignorance of a modern comfortable society. If people don't know any better, couldn't you have a decent bunch of zombies running around causing havoc? Also, TWD assumes everyone is infected (or near everyone), so any death results in reanimation. That should add a few more to the mix. Look at how the response to Hurricane Katrina was handled, or the general indifference western governments have to mass genocide in Africa. We stand by on subway platforms and watch people fall off and do nothing about it. Do we not have the perfect combination of hubris and indifference to allow a zombie plague to fester to the point of no return? Sure, we would eventually figure it out, but could we respond in concert before the tipping point?

It may not be highly likely in the minds of some, but I think it's more plausible than the naysayers would like to admit. :-) Also, it's MUCH scarier if you believe it's plausible. It's not important if it actually is, but the game will be so much more enjoyable if everyone buys in. Honestly, a game of make-believe probably needs less to do with what's plausible and more to do with what's entertaining. If you can add some moral dilemma or quandary, all the better, but making it fun is certainly the first order. Frankly, If I'm running a zombie game I don't really care how plausible it is. I want to explore a setting, the actions of the characters and hopefully me and some friends can scare the pants of each other with our shared imagined story of "the struggle of humanity against a backdrop of the rising undead"!

Here are my thoughts for a general outline (setting aside for the moment our disbelief...);

Assumptions: 4 players, 1 GM. Everyone is somewhat new to GURPS. The GM has fingered through both Characters and Campaigns, has copies of Basic for the group, and probably started eye-balling some stuff from Campaigns he wants to introduce in the next few sessions. Session 1 will use only Basic.

GM Prep: Create 4 Basic characters. Start simple and keep the focus tight. It's easier to have common threads to spare you the headache of trying to "group them together". The School Bus stuck in the city is a good conceit. Make a Chaperon, Coach, Sports Player, and the ubiquitous Cheerleader. Decide on a point total, but don't spend all the points. Pick one advantage and one disadvantage for each to focus on, some core skills and a couple pieces of expected belongings. Note unspent points in your notes (leave it off the sheet). Give them each one "weapon" with the basic stats even it's not obvious at first glance (baseball bat, crowbar, heavy purse, pocket knife...). Stat our your zombies. The aforementioned Zombies book will be indispensable and save you lots of time. :-) Also, you will need a dozen NPCs. Just pick names for them. You will be eating them right away.

Week 1: Start right in the action, on the bus, in the traffic jam - BAM the "World War Z" "28 Days Later" zombies are running through the streets killing people and causing havoc. Be prepared with a couple quick building floor plans. Map out the bus. Keep throwing Zombies and panicked selfish people and explosions and car wrecks and falling victims and crashing helicopters until the are literally crying at the table. Every few moments, describe one of the NPCs dying horribly. Try not to kill the PCs in the first session, but don't cheat. You can always replace one character in week 2. Let them scramble, running panicked from certain death to a "sanctuary". It should be temporary, something that could only last a day or two. Let them catch their breath now and figure out what's next. This is a good stopping point. In session, focus on the most basic of combat and skill checks. Roll under, 3d6, get familiar with the character sheet. Make suggestions on how they can react to things based on the advantage or disadvantage you picked during prep.

Week 2: Early in the apocalypse seeking shelter/food/water are generally the first order of business (outside of not getting infected/killed). Usually, the survivors are going to take on a few "recruits" or find another group as the recruits. In the beginning people feel safety in numbers (they will eventually learn this is folly...) so let them group up with other NPCs. Again, a few numbers, gender, profession and name are probably all that is needed. This session should be about "fortifying". You may want to come up with a method of determining "random encounters" so as they scavenge and try to figure out what's going on, there's the ever-present danger of the zombies. Tempt them with the safety of the government "safety camps" or a military base. If they take the bait, that should quickly turn into another "week 1" scenario! In genre = don't trust the incompetent government!! :-) During the game focus on Skill checks and Adventuring stuff. At the end of the session, let them look through basic and perhaps pick one more disadvantage and advantage. Let them pick up a couple more skills they feel applies. Walk them through the process.

Week 3: Folly. First, if they have built a sanctuary you need to come up with a plausible way to invade and ruin it. Second, if they are part of a group or have taken on recruits someone is going to betray them and/or do something horrible. Blow it all up! Things need to go wrong, and in a big way. If it costs someone their character, so be it. Week 3 is all about the brutality of the apocalypse. They had a week to regroup and sullenly Thank god for surviving, so this week they need to regret it. Kill off NPCs the players have grown fond of. {All this was excellent advice in Apocalypse World. It has some great ideas for running a survival horror game, even if you don't use the system). In session, focus on combat. Use all the rules in basic and introduce one at a time with each player's turn so that by the end everyone is comfortable with Basic combat. At the end of the session, give them their current point totals with a little bump for XP. Let them make some tweaks to the characters using Basic and show them how to balance to a point total.

Week 4 and beyond: Explore. Make a new sanctuary. Scavenge. Start giving hints to smaller adventures switching between human foes and zombie foes. Eventually the human encounters should pose more threats with more frequency than the zombie threats. When a character dies at this point, work with the player to make a new character from scratch. In session, introduce one rule/option you and the group like from the full game. It's a good idea to discuss before you introduce it.

This is my "off the cuff" thoughts on a intro zombie game with GURPS.

[Keiko]

Personally, I think it could happen given the right combination of factors. It might not end civilization but thing could get very hairy for most people very quickly like any other wide spread natural disaster and civil unrest. I think we'd, as a species, would eventually figure it out most likely. But too late for many people. And that's where a game could come in. It doesn't matter if humanity as a whole survive, but these 2 to a 10 or so individuals and how they do so.

Frankly, I think much of the "zombies are stupid" thing comes from a combination of overestimation of the stability of modern society, the capabilities of typical realistic people (not hyper aware ultra skills player character types) and the tendency gamers have to ignore things like panic, fear, stress and other normal human reactions and make everyone rational actors with machine like levels of emotional endurance and calm, like the have ice water flowing in their veins.

Players characters tend to have these things. They're being controlled by people sitting around a table in absolutely no real danger or stress often with plenty of time calmly weight their options, discuss them and exact knowledge of chances of failure and success and sometimes other god like knowledge as well. To be fair, its hard to pretend to be irrational, stressed out, fatigued, etc, when you're well fed in a well lit room surrounded by friends playing a game. Horror is a difficult genre to role play period for similar reasons.

I also think there's a little bit of whistling as you walk past the graveyard involved. Thinking about dying a horrible death is depressing as is thinking about not being to protect the things you cherish and the people you love. It's more pleasant to imagine being able to do so easily or that the situation can never come up.

[Keiko]

In the interest of full disclosure, I estimate my chances of survival in a typical zombie scenario as near zero barring dumb luck such as falling in with charitable and more able people. I'm physically average to below average with no combat or primitive survival skills to speak of beyond bits gleaned from gaming and other geeks hobbies which are probably dangerously incomplete or out and out wrong. I don't own a personal firearm and if I acquired one couldn't realistically make combat headshots regularly assuming I knew to try.

Given the typical "shambler" I could likely outrun them but they don't get tired and I soon would and then there's the problem of getting mobbed. I don't know if I'd be able to even work up the nerve to try to run if the things are really thick on the ground. So I'd most likely die in my crudely barricaded apartment, succumbing to hunger an thirst before joining the ranks of the undead as " Female Zombie Extra #242 for the real protagonists to take out when they're scavenging my building for supplies. This is assuming I don't find someway to kill myself quickly.

[Otaku]

Originally Posted by Otaku

Infrastructure concerns would pop up if "suddenly" large packs of rabid dogs were a daily occurrence, and it is still a scary thing today when a random rabid animal pops up.

Originally Posted by RyanW

Scary to unprepared people who happen to bump into it. Once a rabid critter is spotted, it takes a pretty trivial effort to put it down. Same with an outbreak of rabies. Once any meaningful effort to eliminate them is put in place, it's basically just clean-up work.

To realistically threaten establishments on anything approaching a global scale requires too many zombies, too quickly. If you had that many deaths, the rotting corpses would be a biological disaster even if they were normal, non-walking dead.

A rabid animal is a scary thing to anyone who runs into one on foot and unarmed, unless you're suffering from Overconfidence. "Scary" doesn't mean making a fear check, but unless you're ignorant of what it is you're encountering or have a relevant Advantage or Disadvantage, yeah you're making a Fright Check (my previous commented about disregarding Fright Checks included the aforementioned exceptions).

Exact circumstances would determine the penalty; I grew up on a farm, knowing where the key to gun cabinet was (though I was a terrible shot) plus having other relatives to shoot such critters for me. I don't know how many actual rabid critters we encountered, but about once per year we'd run into something (usually a skunk) that was viewed as "potentially rabid".

One of the things that makes it scary is if you have pets, especially indoor/outdoor ones that could conceivably get infected and pass it onto you before you realized exactly what was happening. Now I specifically called out packs of roaming animals that popped up regularly. Yeah if you can walk around with the proper firearm (and know how to use it), it still won't kill you, but do you want that guy delivering your pizza? Your mail? It can be coped with, but it won't be easy.

Now for the zombie parallel; even if it is the kind of zombie where the person doesn't get all the "undead" goodies (and is in fact still alive) and is just wandering around in an altered state, perhaps prone to fits of violence, it is still likely a terrifying thing to encounter for those that aren't cops, soldiers, etc. Throw in that "unexpected" factor and the risk of becoming infected yourself, and its really going to affect how humanity has to live.

Now go for the "undead" approach; Firght. Checks. Aplenty. Not just from the undead, but from being occasionally shot at because someone got paranoid and thought you might be one of them!

So yes, living post zombie apocalypse, or even post outbreak, sounds like a suitable adventure. Even in a world that has coped with it well, just being on the "Zombie Control" unit (akin to animal control) should be a decent adventure.

[Anthony]

The problem with a zombie apocalypse isn't that you can't come up with some model of zombie that would wipe out humanity. The problem is a model of zombie that is simultaneously powerful enough to destroy civilization and yet weak enough that a group of reasonable power PCs has any chance.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Anthony

The problem with a zombie apocalypse isn't that you can't come up with some model of zombie that would wipe out humanity. The problem is a model of zombie that is simultaneously powerful enough to destroy civilization and yet weak enough that a group of reasonable power PCs has any chance.

All of which assumes that plausibility is an issue. I've participated in several campaigns where the GM said up front, "Right, we know it's implausible that only the PCs would be here, but without that, there's no story. Please accept that and let's get on with the game!" I game exclusively with people like that, so if the OP has such a group, there's really no problem on this front.

Barring meta-game fiat, having the PCs be immune for whatever reason is an option – maybe they were the only test subjects of the ill-advised vaccine who survived. All they need to have in common is "wakes up naked in the lab where it all started." Then they just have to worry about starving, freezing, etc., and can treat the zombies as combat hazards, not biohazards. If that seems implausible still, make sure the scientists feared disaster and stocked the lab well before the zombies tore their faces off.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Kromm

All of which assumes that plausibility is an issue.

Of course, but that seemed to be the direct the story was going. Ignoring plausibility, my main concern with zombie survival is that vanilla zombies are actually a really boring threat, IME you really need to continually mix up the challenges in a game. It helps if you introduce things like evolving zombies, new types of zombies, boss zombies, etc.

[Keiko]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Of course, but that seemed to be the direct the story was going. Ignoring plausibility, my main concern with zombie survival is that vanilla zombies are actually a really boring threat, IME you really need to continually mix up the challenges in a game. It helps if you introduce things like evolving zombies, new types of zombies, boss zombies, etc.

I agree but there's an odd thing I've run into over years of playing and discussing zombie apocalypse style games. Many fans of the genre are opposed to the idea of changing much from the generic "shambler" undead. For some it seems to be a love of genre purity and a desire to see majority of the conflict be "Man vs Man" and "Man vs himself", others enjoy the power fantasy of being able to dominate a pretty easy to outwit opponent and feel clever and heroic without much effort.

Its true that that the shambler's primary advantage is human frailty mental, emotional and physical. Traits that rpg characters tend to lack to varying degrees so they can get dull in a role playing game. But apparently that's a feature not a bug for a good number of players.

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by Anthony

The problem with a zombie apocalypse isn't that you can't come up with some model of zombie that would wipe out humanity. The problem is a model of zombie that is simultaneously powerful enough to destroy civilization and yet weak enough that a group of reasonable power PCs has any chance.

Zombies could degrade in capabilities as more time passes without them eating brains. During the initial stages of the outbreak, when fresh brains are plentiful, the zombies are fast, strong, and cunning. As the population of survivors/potential victims drops below a 1:1 ratio with the zombies, the zombies start slowing down, getting weaker, and becoming stupider.

Humans who manage to survive to the remnant population stage can take comfort in the fact that starving zombies can easily be outwitted, out-shot, and out run. But they have to be aware that there are other survivors out there, and if any of those survivors die, one or more local zombies will briefly become more potent and dangerous.

Zombies work however you want them to work. It doesn't take a huge amount of thought to justify most of the standard tropes.