Building a better zombie

[Pagan]

Fright Checks.

Use them.


One should never get used to dead people moving about on their own.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by Dr. Whom

The characters have to eat and drink...
The Tap water isn't going to work forever.
The fridge will stop working when the electric stops.

Once the power goes out (really out, not the sissy "oh I need a flashlight for a few minutes" stuff you get during a storm), gravity becomes the only means to get water. If you're in a high-rise apartment building, that means the water in the pipes above your floor. Get to ground level soon. If you're in, for example, Las Vegas, you'd better head to Lake Mead. Fortunately, with all the like-minded refugees, there will be plenty of food... for the zombies.

Also, lots of panicky people, some of whom may soon decide that they need your stuff more than you do.

I would run a zombie-apocalypse as a disaster survival, with the zombies as just one more threat. That will allow you to keep the stress level high without every session being another hold-the-line battle. Secondary upshot: the players will never be sure if they are actually going to be facing zombies this session. Tertiary upshot: it gives plenty of variety that allows for play styles and characters other than "kill everything that moves."

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Pagan

One should never get used to dead people moving about on their own.

....and yet, if you do it three times a week they will.

[Victor Maxus]

25 point characters. That's right, I run a whole campaign in which my players run 25 point, everyday characters, most of them with no serious combat skill at all. My zombies are the wimpy type, but in numbers against low point characters, it leads to terrifying and challenging adventures. My players just run if they can, fight last, and try to survive by sticking their necks out as little as possible.

Another option some people have suggested. In Night of the Living Dead it was Cooper against Ben. In Dawn of the Dead, it was the police against the people in the apartments or our heroes against the biker group. In Day of the Dead, the military against the scientists, and the Land of the Dead, the poor working class against the rich people in the tower. The point is, in Romero films, all the conflict was human versus human, the zombies were just back drop. So, have them fight other humans trying to take their food or steal their vehicle while zombies are closing in on them. Make the have to worry about looters as much as zombies. A good mix like that will not make zombies more scary and tougher, but it will make it more difficult to survive them if half their options are taken away because of the human element.

[Sydney]

Two words...Atomic Zombies...

[tanniynim]

Originally Posted by Victor Maxus

25 point characters. That's right, I run a whole campaign in which my players run 25 point, everyday characters, most of them with no serious combat skill at all. My zombies are the wimpy type, but in numbers against low point characters, it leads to terrifying and challenging adventures. My players just run if they can, fight last, and try to survive by sticking their necks out as little as possible.

I figure this is a given in Zombie Survival Horror, but maybe not. This is another key. At most, I'd go with 50 points in a game like this.

[Archangel Beth]

Originally Posted by lexington

Another version of this. You can take a route similar to Cell and have the zombies form telepathic "hives". Each multiple of ten zombies in a hive raises IQ and DX (for a slower progression start at a group of 100 or 1000 rather than 10 or alternate which stat rises at each step).

A single mindless shambling zombie isn't so bad (IQ4, DX8). But when a whole town gets turned they're intelligent, coordinated and telepathically linked (IQ7, DX11).

This appears to be roughly what Mira Grant does in her book, Feed. Zombies are also very, very infectious -- and can infect anything over a certain weight. (It's done via the interaction of two human-created viruses, one of which was released by crazies before it was thoroughly tested, "for the good of mankind." Well, yeah, now no one gets cancer or colds anymore, but instead, anyone who dies, for any reason, immediately re-animates as an infectious zombie with an urge to infect others until it reaches a certain number... at which point they just want to eat meat.

The protagonists -- covering a presidential campaign that someone wants sabotaged -- spend a lot of time getting blood-tests to make sure that the virus they harbor, the virus that every living thing on earth harbors, hasn't gone into critical-mass-replication to zombify them. EVERYONE spends a lot of time getting blood tests.)

This isn't a book about a zombie uprising. This is a book about a world where the zombie uprising happened, and humanity survived and adapted, and compensates... And zombies are STILL FREAKY. (They moan to attract other zombies to the area. A quiet zombie is one who senses more zombies around... and they will sneak up on people.)

I got a few chapters into it, and then it was time for my kid's horn lesson, and I was slightly concerned about going out among "crowds" of people, where infection could spread quickly... Not in a "monster under the bed" kind of way, but in a "there is something legitimately concerning about this..." way. It's a good book. Go read http://miragrant.com/newsflesh.php ...

Ahem. There is the problem that highly infectious zombies have a strong chance of Infecting The Player Characters. If the players themselves are not willing to have their characters make a last minute speech before saying, "Shoot me now, while I can still remember my name," you probably want to make zombies less infectious and more murderous.

[PK]

Zombies aren't supposed to be individually scary. "Oh no, a zombie!" shouldn't make a group quake.

What's scary is their sheer numbers. Any good zombie encounter will have the PCs running out of ammo before the world runs out of zombies (or being smart enough to realize that they'll run out of ammo, and saving it for when it's really needed). The prospect of having to go melee and possibly getting surrounded should be scary for anyone.

And I mean that. A 400-point combat monster should hesitate before walking into a situation where he's surrounded by a few dozen zombies. Let's say he has ST 16, DX 16, and the zombies only have ST 10, DX 10. At worst, two zombies can work together to bring him down (combined ST 12). That only gives them (roughly) a 9% chance of succeeding, so he's safe, right?

Hardly. He's surrounded. That means no matter how many zombies he breaks free from (and he will!), more will grapple him. Once any zombie has done so, he's at -1 to Dodge and -2 to Parry and can't retreat, etc. So sheer odds say that there'll almost always be at least two zombies on him at any given time. So that's 8% the first turn, 17% the second, 24% the third, 32% the fourth, and so on. Now he's down and they start to pin. Three zombies can join in, for effective ST 14 -- much better odds. Chances are he wins the Regular Contest... which just means it starts all over again, but with him already on the ground. And when they finally take him down and manage to pin him... game over.

Being surrounded by a weaker foe is a death trap, in real life and in GURPS. I'd recommend having it happen as part of a prologue. Try this: Give your group a set of 200-point pregen PCs -- really tough guys, like soldiers, police, EMTs, etc. -- and have them be the first to encounter the zombies. Put 'em in a setup where they'll eventually get swamped. Watch 'em die horribly.

Now remind them that that was just the prologue, and have 'em make their real PCs... on 75 points.

If that doesn't make 'em scared to death of zombies, nothing will. :)

[Crakkerjakk]

Originally Posted by Rev. Pee Kitty

If that doesn't make 'em scared to death of zombies, nothing will. :)

I heartily endorse this approach. Unless you're doing newer fast zombies/resident evil, zombies aren't supposed to be beefy. They don't hit you once and put a fist through your football helmet. Instead, they grab you, drag you down, and then start limb wrenching/biting/etc. Zombies are grapplers. What makes them scary is the fact that their morale doesn't break, they only have one relatively difficult to hit vulnerable spot (with DR!), and there's generally more of them than you have bullets.

[Jasonft]

Originally Posted by Rev. Pee Kitty

Being surrounded by a weaker foe is a death trap, in real life and in GURPS. I'd recommend having it happen as part of a prologue. Try this: Give your group a set of 200-point pregen PCs -- really tough guys, like soldiers, police, EMTs, etc. -- and have them be the first to encounter the zombies. Put 'em in a setup where they'll eventually get swamped. Watch 'em die horribly.

Now remind them that that was just the prologue, and have 'em make their real PCs... on 75 points.

If that doesn't make 'em scared to death of zombies, nothing will. :)

That is a disturbingly good or evil idea. I am not sure which...