[Post-Con Report] Zombies at Dragonflight 2015

[trechriron]

So I ran two sessions of Zombies at Dragonflight this year in sunny Bellevue, WA (A city across the lake from Seattle).

FRI night game had 6 GURPS enthusiasts who handled my hair-brained scheme with aplomb. We had a blast! It was a real treat to play with seasoned GURPS players.

SAT night game had 2 GURPS enthusiasts and two newbies (maybe 16-ish). We plunged right into the action, and they picked up on the basics fast. I kept it simple, describing options and helping through dice rolls. They were very engaged and creative! I was impressed with how well they played.

All in all, I had a LOT of fun. I did however learn much from the experience.

I wanted to run a scenario where the plague just broke out. The characters would be "norms" that found themselves in unfortunate circumstances. I made ten characters. A couple were "more competent" than the others. My goal was to have the players randomly select from the "norms" and then as characters died, those characters could pick from the "more competent" pool and continue playing. I wanted to spotlight the horror aspect of the genre. I thought it would be fun to find baseball bats and golf clubs and cast-iron frying pans and have the first fight be desperate. (Edited to add) I thought the horror of actually losing a couple characters in the beginning would drive the horror home. Then the new characters would give those players an extra "kudos" for having died first.

It kind of worked. :-P

People seemed to have fun at the table. People took their disadvantages in stride and several played them up. I thought it went swimmingly. Later on Sunday I overheard one of the players complaining about my game. "Why would you bring pre-gens that are useless in the scenario you are running?"

Ouch.

So perhaps my idea was not as sound as I thought. People were being good sports about it and having fun HOWEVER, it seems to me that maybe they would have MORE fun if the characters were more "tuned up" for the scenario.

I have some ideas on how to touch-up this convention scenario, but I'm curious of your thoughts/ideas?

[p.s. this player was critical of some of the things happening in the game in general. I think he felt my GMing did not fit his ideas of "how things work" and it irked him. I think he believed I was the adversary trying to kill them. Which is not how I run games but he just met me, so wouldn't know that.]

[p.s.s. - the head shot from a sniper rifle is absolutely horrible, devastating and accurate to my understanding of how people describe such activity in the real world. It reinforced my decision to GM a game that feels realistic yet remains playable.]