TheRPGSite

After the recent zombie thread (https://www.therpgsite.com/index.php?action=post;quote=1252682;topic=46233.0), I was thinking about why I generally don't use zombies in RPGs. I will sometimes have them as servants for the main opposition, but not as much of a threat in themselves. That's also how I've seen them in most RPGs - but then, I haven't played a zombie RPG like All Flesh Must Be Eaten.

My problem is that the genre of zombie movies largely depends on the protagonists being tactically stupid.

THE GENRE ISSUE

The iconic zombie action scene is heroes faced with a horde of zombies. The horror being that no matter how many zombies they kill, the zombies keep coming, wearing them down and using up their bullets. The zombies are mindless, fearless, and relentless.

If the heroes are killing zombies by hand, that can be terrifying. However, if an engineer builds a zombie trap -- then the fact that zombies keep coming no matter how many die is terrific. Each zombie is no threat as it comes in, and they keep coming in and dying.

A common situation is living people trapped in a building (like a house or mall). The zombies can't get in, but the humans can't get out. The obvious thing to me is to build a murder hole - a tunnel that zombies can come in single file and handle it like a cattle chute in a slaughterhouse. It doesn't have to be perfect to be twenty times better than running outside and fighting zombies in the open.

This sort of tactical/engineering logic would make for a boring movie, but it's the sort of solution that RPG players would come up with.

SOLUTIONS

There are plenty of solutions, I'm think. I've got some ideas of how I might deal with this if I wanted to do zombie horror, but I'll leave it as an open question at first.

Make them infectious but you don't need to get bitten to get infected, it's a mutation of the Virus, now it's airborne.

Instead of making them mindless make them to have the intelligence of a wolf, and to be able to cooperate to hunt in packs.

Instead of having them decompose make them so they regenerate form any injury short of completely burning them, meaning if there's a viable cell it will spawn a new zombie, if you cut it in a 1000 pieces you will end with 1000 zombies if given enough time.

Make them like the Thing from the original movie.

Undead 'zombie master' directing intelligence(s) is one obvious possibility.

If you've not read I Am Legend, I strongly recommend it, the original zombie (well, zombie-vampire) apocalypse. It has the airborne virus and the smart lone protagonist. A lot of the tension comes from the knowledge that he is smart , a great zombie/vampire killer, but if he makes one mistake, if he gets too carried away with his self appointed mission, it's game over.

There are several takes. One is that it doesn't matter if you've been bitten. If you die, you rise a zombie. That's more of an original idea (I think one of the Romero movies was more like that), and also in The Walking Dead.

World War Z also solved some of that by making the zombies incredibly fast. They were able to defeat walls just by piling up on each other and then climbing up. They also reacted badly to another zombie being killed. Kill one and you attract a swarm. So the game becomes stealth, and combat almost certainly guarantees failure. You can even then have guaranteed hits and not even need a roll to see if you kill the zombie. You do. But then it's a question of resources - how many bullets do you have?

The final thing is of course the conflict between humans. I think it's Escape from Tarkov that shows how nasty people can be in a survival situation. The obvious enemy can then be anything, doesn't need to be zombies. It could be aliens. The 'real' conflict is to be resolved among the survivors.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on May 02, 2023, 05:30:14 PM
Make them infectious but you don't need to get bitten to get infected, it's a mutation of the Virus, now it's airborne.

That's a great idea.  How about maybe the infection spreads also by touch?  Lets say the Zombie grabs a persons arm and then then become infected?

One of the most unique takes I saw a GM use was transmission via sexual intercourse.  The virus took 1 year to take hold and change the person.  Procreation was a death sentence but humanity had to do it to survive.

You need to read AFMBE. The game hasn't received new entries in years, but what it does have is amazing. It predates the zombie craze by several years and even afterward is still more creative than the entire zombie craze was, with few exceptions.

Don't really have an opinion on the genre aspect directly, because it isn't my thing.  A lot of the zombie horror genre stuff seems to be change the setting conceits to bring out the horror.  I'll answer from a more limited aspect, bringing the horror of zombies in particular in an otherwise more typical fantasy setting.

The zombie niche is mindless, unrelenting, melee swarm you under.  It's about durability, resources, and trying not to get sucked into melee with them.  So you want the mechanics to reinforce that somehow:

- In D&D terms, zombies could have many more hit points than you would otherwise expect for their size/threat, and grappling should be a thing.

- Alternately, things that don't feel damage can be modeled as not taking very much, through damage resistance or the like (kind of like some games have skeleton taking less damage from piercing).

- Make sure morale is a bigger thing (like early D&D) and then creatures that won't break are a bigger threat.

- Related, they won't break off the chase once they have the "scent".  You can outrun them for a time, and then 3 days later they show up on your trail.  (To me, this actually fits the limited horror theme in an otherwise standard game very well, because it allows other things to happen, then the dread builds up.)

- Numbers, of course, works in any setup or genre.  However, you need to mix that with other things to make it felt.  For example, 4 heroic characters against 8 zombies, maybe, maybe not.  4 heroic characters plus 8 soldiers against 20 zombies, where the soldiers morale may break, completely different concerns.  You don't have to make PCs run to make them care about running.

- Zombie kills zones are a definite out for set scenarios in a survival game.  To make them more interesting, toss them in a mission. The players still want to create the zombie kill zone, and might, but the mission and environment give them other concerns that must be balanced against that. Kill zones with unlimited time and no reason not to do them, not very interesting.  Kill zones improvised on the spot because the zombie area has to be gotten through to do the main mission, have a lot more potential.

Quote from: GhostNinja on May 03, 2023, 09:40:17 AM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on May 02, 2023, 05:30:14 PM
Make them infectious but you don't need to get bitten to get infected, it's a mutation of the Virus, now it's airborne.

That's a great idea.  How about maybe the infection spreads also by touch?  Lets say the Zombie grabs a persons arm and then then become infected?

That works too.

Quote from: rgalex on May 03, 2023, 09:54:31 AM
One of the most unique takes I saw a GM use was transmission via sexual intercourse.  The virus took 1 year to take hold and change the person.  Procreation was a death sentence but humanity had to do it to survive.

So, two people fuck, get infected and become zombies one year latter... Leaving a 3 month old infant orphan. How come the infant didn't get the virus?

But never mind the baby not getting it. For humanity to survive you need 1.5 births per death, in that scenario you have 1 birth for every 2 deaths. Yeah, there's no hope.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on May 03, 2023, 11:43:48 AM

Quote from: rgalex on May 03, 2023, 09:54:31 AM
One of the most unique takes I saw a GM use was transmission via sexual intercourse.  The virus took 1 year to take hold and change the person.  Procreation was a death sentence but humanity had to do it to survive.

So, two people fuck, get infected and become zombies one year latter... Leaving a 3 month old infant orphan. How come the infant didn't get the virus?

But never mind the baby not getting it. For humanity to survive you need 1.5 births per death, in that scenario you have 1 birth for every 2 deaths. Yeah, there's no hope.

I think I'm missing something in the premise. If the virus is 100% lethal in 1 year, then if someone hasn't had sex in a year, then you know they're not infected. It makes it pretty easy to tell who is infected and who isn't.

This is why highly lethal diseases generally don't spread effectively, at least with human transmission.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on May 03, 2023, 11:40:31 AM
That's a great idea.  How about maybe the infection spreads also by touch?  Lets say the Zombie grabs a persons arm and then then become infected?

That works too.
[/quote]

You could also combine it so the infection is both airborne and touch.  Makes the situation even more deadly.

What if zombies aren't supposed to be threatening? What if the purpose of zombies is to be throwaway mooks to use as a speed bump? What if the actual threat is the thing you can't reach because there are too damned many zombies in the way?

With a smile and a nod to Mutant Chronicles.  (there's a Warzone kickstarter even as I write this)

Give them guns that can fire any bullet.  Bullets that cause wounds that can't heal.  Roided out mutant leaders with syringes that turn corpses into more gun weilding zombies.

how about Zombies with leather jackets and switchblades?  ;D

Now that's threating.

What about turning zombies on their head? What if you made a single zombie in the spirit of Jason Voorhees?

Getting hit bypasses all accrued hitpoints and is an opposed roll based on base HD die.

So a fighter might roll a d8 plus Con vs. a d8 rolled by Jason. You might survive one hit, but likely not two. Cannot be killed by normal means. Etc.

Downed zombies rot and putrefy at an alarming rate.  If you don't actually get your hazmat gear and clean them up, things get worse.  They ooze and drip their way into the groundwater.  The mold that would grow on them and spread may be more infectious than the bites.

Oh, don't forget the bugs.  Especially mosquitoes.

I generally agree that the classic zombie needs a little extra spice on it to be a credible threat in an RPG, especially in a fantasy RPG. The basic truth is that a Romero-style zombie wouldn't be much of a threat to a man in full armor, especially if it comes down to just trading blows.

I like the way zombie hordes are handled in Berserk. In that, a "zombie" is just a corpse possessed by a demon, and they're indifferent to all physical damage. The only thing that dispels them is daylight. so from sunset to to sunrise they will just keep coming no matter what you do. And when night falls again they will come right back. That could be adapted into an RPG to put the characters under a timed siege, or force them to fight an all-night running battle.

I do think you can make even the traditional zombie a threat to PCs, but you need a few tools: good mob rules, good grappling rules, and the right environment. Picture it this way: The PCs are traveling along, waist deep in a fetid swamp, when dozens of zombies surge up out of the water. They're inside the PCs' formation already, and they're impervious to pain. They don't punch or claw; they don't even bite. They just pile onto the PCs and try to drag them down by sheer weight of numbers. Maybe the PCs cut a few of them down, but soon there's no room to swing a sword, no room to aim a gun. Either you're strong enough to keep your head above water or you aren't.

Quote from: GhostNinja on May 03, 2023, 02:15:12 PM
how about Zombies with leather jackets and switchblades?  ;D

Now that's threating.

oooh dance fighting West Side Story zombies....brrrrrr....

Quote from: jhkim on May 02, 2023, 05:22:52 PM
There are plenty of solutions, I'm think. I've got some ideas of how I might deal with this if I wanted to do zombie horror, but I'll leave it as an open question at first.

#1. Anyone bitten becomes a zombie after X time. There is no "save". You take at least one hit point of damage, you're infected. Fighting zombies becomes a huge game of russian roulette. It only takes one lucky bite attack... It's like how players pay attention to undead that drain levels. The consequences of getting hit are severe, and so they wake the fuck up. This is for the typical "2D6 Zombies" encounter. But carry it over to a zombie infestation scenario...

#2. The players may be smart, but all the NPCs, who are reacting as if they are real people, not a relativley disposable RPG character, fucking panic. They try to save their infected friends and family. They try to hide their bites and find sanctuary with other people. Civilization breaks down. There are no safe harbors, just panicked people and zombies chomping on them. There is no more supplies, no arrows, no blacksmiths to fix your armor, no food or water except what you can gather for yourself. Clerics and others with the magical ability to "cure zombie infection" are mobbed by desperate people. There's no way they can cure them all before they turn.

World War Z (The book) is a great example of how people acting like people will quickly spread a zombie infection until it's way out of control. And once it's out of control, it becomes very difficult to engineer solutions. Your murder hole example, would quickly fill up with zombies until they're walking on top of it, while more are pouring around the corners.
And you'd better not expose yourself to zombie attack while building your traps and tricks...

Thanks for all the suggestions. There are a lot of good ideas. Here's my general thoughts:

Zombies as minions

The zombies get tactics in being directed by a boss of some sort. I think this is fine. It's the typical way that I've seen zombies used in fantasy games. For example, the original Ravenloft module had variant "Strahd zombies" which made slightly grosser by having limbs keep fighting after they are hacked off. Plus they ambushed characters from under shallow water.

In general, I think my initial issues are with the zombie movie genre where zombies are the primary enemy. They can work fine as occasional threats in a fantasy game, especially with some of the suggested spices.

New powers

Some cool ideas here - though some are arguably substituting a different monster instead of zombies. New and/or different monsters instead of zombies can be cool, but something like the aliens in Carpenter's The Thing are really a different category.

Smart zombies that work as pack hunters are more dangerous, and they sidestep the problem of walking into a trap over and over. I am currently reading "I am Legend", which I saw both movies of but never read the story. The vampires there are a bit of a puzzle. They can talk and seem intelligent in some ways. The story has women vampires often taking off their clothes to try to lure Neville out of his house, for example, and one talks to him. But physically they never try anything beyond throwing stones or hitting things with their fists, and they're unable to break into a boarded-up house.

I'll finish the story maybe tomorrow and have more comments.

New transmission and Fast zombies

If the zombies are still mindless and the core enemies, I think this still runs into the same problem of tactics. 28 Days Later (2002) and Dawn of the Dead (2004) both featured fast zombies, but I thought both demonstrated the stupid tactics problem.

Making zombies mindless but more dangerous could force the players more into only building zombie traps, and never facing them up close. Which could be an interesting puzzle game, but it's very different than the genre and lacks a certain excitement.

Quote from: jhkim on May 02, 2023, 05:22:52 PM
There are plenty of solutions, I'm think. I've got some ideas of how I might deal with this if I wanted to do zombie horror, but I'll leave it as an open question at first.

Mostly the solutions come to: make the zombies living. Living things want to reproduce, and continue living. Living things have a variety of strategies for this.

I've thought a bit about how I'd treat the zombies presented in The Last of Us. In that story, a fungus takes over people's nervous system and makes them aggressive, and eventually turns them into giant fungal blobs. Like most zombie stories the various details ignore basic laws of physics, and is not even internally consistent, eg if they can survive in a basement for decades without eating, why are they predatory at all? Other stories like The Walking Dead say you must destroy their brain, but why? Because it's sending signals to the body? But if the body has rotted, so have the nerves, so by what means are they transmitting the signals? etc. There's also the issue of transmission speed: in reality, a communicable disease which passes between people very quickly can be contained in one spot, like ebola. The more dangerous (to the general population) ones are those which have an incubation period of at least a week.

A better zombie fungus would have them working like this. The fungus invades their body, gradually taking over the nervous system, with the aim of producing as many fungal spores as possible before the expiration of the host. It's 1-4 weeks before symptoms. Both the host and the spores, then, require energy from food. Meat is higher-energy than any naturally-occurring food, and in particular fatty tissue. So the zombies will happily eat fruit and so on, and animals - but in the modern world, humans are the most commonly-occurring meat, and they have large fatty brains.

The zombies are mindless in the sense of no consciousness, but they're not stupid - more like a bunch of not-very-bright feral dogs. They won't co-ordinate with each-other, but they won't simply walk off cliffs etc.

Humans and their brains to eat may not be immediately available, so the zombies will wander. They can eat other zombies, but have an aversion to the fungus - if the fungus won't reproduce well if the hosts keep killing and eating other hosts. The zombies also instinctively form small packs, since it's easier for them to take animals and people in a group of several than if they're on their own.

Still, food will be limited at times, and the zombies being mindless won't be able to store it by refrigeration, smoking etc. And so they can go into hibernation. Just as normal humans get an insulin surge after a big meal and feel sleepy, so too the fungal zombies. They kill, gorge themselves, then lie down in a corner nearby. Once they're fattened up, they stay in that corner and hibernate. As we see on TV shows like Alone, a starving person loses about a pound a day. So if the zombies are in the healthy or slightly overweight (for humans) bodyweight range, they can spend 1-7 days absolutely gorging themselves and then rest for 1-4 weeks, so long as they get some water.

The major obstacle for a human doing a gorge-and-rest cycle would be boredom and loneliness; as seen on Alone, the average time before people are pulled for medical reasons (almost always starvation) is 58 days, but the average time for them to quit is 27 days. A zombie being relatively mindless (its brain being taken over by a fungus) is indifferent to loneliness or boredom, so it can just lie around until it needs to feed again.

Over time more of the zombie's body would become fungus until it's unable to move, the host starves to death and then the body is mostly covered with fungus and explodes spores on anyone wandering by. People can be infected by being wounded by a zombie, but that more often leads to being torn apart and eaten, anyway, so...

And so we'd get zombies lying around waiting to wake up when adventurers come by and attack them, zombies in smallish packs, and apparently dead zombies still being a danger. People get hit by spores and have to wait some weeks to find out... which makes people paranoid about anyone who shows any bad temper or aggression, which of course makes them react aggressively, which... and thus society breaks down.

Quote from: jhkim on May 04, 2023, 12:52:04 AM
I am currently reading "I am Legend", which I saw both movies of but never read the story. The vampires there are a bit of a puzzle. They can talk and seem intelligent in some ways. The story has women vampires often taking off their clothes to try to lure Neville out of his house, for example, and one talks to him. But physically they never try anything beyond throwing stones or hitting things with their fists, and they're unable to break into a boarded-up house.

I think the actually-dead vampires at least only have (some) memories of things they did and experienced while alive; they're not conscious and have no original or creative thought. So they'll keep on doing the same things repeatedly. They'll also do weird stuff like try to turn into a bat and fly, if they saw Dracula doing that at the movies. But they don't coordinate together to eg make & use a battering ram. Being slightly intelligent is even arguably a downside, compared to World War Z type zombies - they will avoid a trap pit, not repeatedly fall in & fill it up. They won't form mashed-together body pyramids that let them overcome obstacles.

Quote from: David Johansen on May 03, 2023, 11:31:43 PM
oooh dance fighting West Side Story zombies....brrrrrr....

Scary indeed :)

Quote from: jhkim on May 03, 2023, 12:23:16 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on May 03, 2023, 11:43:48 AM

Quote from: rgalex on May 03, 2023, 09:54:31 AM
One of the most unique takes I saw a GM use was transmission via sexual intercourse.  The virus took 1 year to take hold and change the person.  Procreation was a death sentence but humanity had to do it to survive.

So, two people fuck, get infected and become zombies one year latter... Leaving a 3 month old infant orphan. How come the infant didn't get the virus?

But never mind the baby not getting it. For humanity to survive you need 1.5 births per death, in that scenario you have 1 birth for every 2 deaths. Yeah, there's no hope.

I think I'm missing something in the premise. If the virus is 100% lethal in 1 year, then if someone hasn't had sex in a year, then you know they're not infected. It makes it pretty easy to tell who is infected and who isn't.

This is why highly lethal diseases generally don't spread effectively, at least with human transmission.

The game used a variant of the Legacy - Life Among the Ruins rules.  Generally the game takes place in 2 phases that go back and forth.  Phase 1 is a macro-setting level where each player is deciding the actions of entire factions and dealing with things like resources, alliances, cultural shifts, etc. 

The other phase zooms in to focus on a particular event that is of significance to the setting.  Something like the emergence of a new type of zombie, a power-plant being overrun, a new medical breakthrough could all be examples in this case.  For these instances everyone jumps down to individual characters to play it out and see what actually happens.

The game is specifically set up so that it's possible to skip large chunks of time between macro phases.  In some of the setting it may be generations going by.  In this one the GM had it move by seasons.  The threat from the zombie infection was that, yes, you will be losing population.  How do you handle that?  Do you let your only mechanic do what he wants or do you lock him up because you can't risk losing him? Who do you trust to raise your kid because you are going to have to hand it off? It goes back to the threat of the zombies is that it makes other people a threat.

Quote from: S'mon on May 04, 2023, 06:04:14 AM

Quote from: jhkim on May 04, 2023, 12:52:04 AM
I am currently reading "I am Legend", which I saw both movies of but never read the story. The vampires there are a bit of a puzzle. They can talk and seem intelligent in some ways. The story has women vampires often taking off their clothes to try to lure Neville out of his house, for example, and one talks to him. But physically they never try anything beyond throwing stones or hitting things with their fists, and they're unable to break into a boarded-up house.

I think the actually-dead vampires at least only have (some) memories of things they did and experienced while alive; they're not conscious and have no original or creative thought. So they'll keep on doing the same things repeatedly. They'll also do weird stuff like try to turn into a bat and fly, if they saw Dracula doing that at the movies. But they don't coordinate together to eg make & use a battering ram. Being slightly intelligent is even arguably a downside, compared to World War Z type zombies - they will avoid a trap pit, not repeatedly fall in & fill it up. They won't form mashed-together body pyramids that let them overcome obstacles.

OK, I finished the story.

SPOILER WARNINGS













I'd class the vampires in the same non-threatening class as the OP -- less so than the movie adaptations or most zombie movies. More than once, Neville goes on a drunken binge and charges out into a group of them at night, and then stumbles back inside with no serious damage. His biggest danger seems to be loneliness and possible suicide. Among the vampires few strategies is women vampires taking off their clothes outside his house to tempt him.

Neville does well in research considering he is a not a doctor or scientist, but he has virtually no tactics. He is completely safe just by boarding up his windows and hanging garlic. And he kills hundreds of them because they are helpless during the day and most make no effort to protect themselves during that time. But over months of hunting, he fails to track and find Cortman who hides in the house across the street from him.

To break up the vampires into their types:

Dead vampires: These seem to have high animal intelligence. His dead coworker Cortman can only speak one repeated phrase, but he does reason some things, like understanding when he tests the superstition of running water. Cortman seens exceptional though - as he hides effectively, which even most living vampires do not. Still, the most the dead do is punch with their fists and throw stones, and they are unable to break into a house.

Unorganized living vampires: In principle, these have human intelligence. It is implied they are the same mentally as Ruth and her people. However, Neville theorizes that they are insane, which is why they try things like jumping off a lamp post and flapping their arms. This prevents them from any effective action.

Organized living vampires: i.e. Ruth and her people. These instantly overwhelm Neville as soon as they decide to attack him. They use cars, axes, guns, and pikes.

I am rather partial to the real world zombie, the "Serpent & the Rainbow" blowfish toxin paralytic torpor & judgment soporific mixed with cultural cosmology. The zombies are people who are still alive but put through a multiday torpor nightmare, then traumatized by the funeral and subsequent grave robbery, and finally stuck in a crippling "afterlife" nightmare of sodium-deprived pre-frontal cortex damage (affecting speech and suggestion resistance) & redosing cognitive soporific. Obedience is more resignation, though brief moments of resistance can occur if the deed asked is grossly against values, though such resistance can be eroded by further conditioning.

It makes you NOT WANT to wander blithely in and mow down zombies. There IS a chance to save them if you can sneak salt (like NaCl) in their food, which is just regular food WITHOUT salt PLUS occasional mild redosing of other hallucinogens and depressants. The earlier you can rescue and treat them the more of their pre-frontal cortex you can save.

Part of the fun would be the potential "dialogue" one can have with zombie servants. They could answer with hand gestures, possibly be negotiated with or outright left alone if it is not relevant to their orders, even have moments of humanity as they pause in a rare moment of moral resistance. It turns the experience more into a stealth mission deep into enemy territory surrounded by reluctant, mostly mute, dominated victims.

Creepy and more challenging that hack 'n slash.

I think you're running into the problem that something that is horrific is not necessarily threatening.  It is not hard, mechanically, to inflict enough harm on an unarmored human body that the body, regardless of its animating intelligence, can't walk, crawl, or work its jaw; it's much harder when you're outnumbered and lacking proper equipment, but still not a significant problem.  Fighting a horde of shambling zombies with a polearm and some decent terrain is high-risk if you mess up, but so is any fight where you're outnumbered; a dagger blow can kill you just as well as a magic illness.  A survivalist with a thousand rounds of .308, a good bolt-action hunting rifle, and the ability to keep moving and get in and out of his fortification, and facing TV Walking Dead style slow-walkers, should be absolutely able to clear his town of a hundred or so zombies.

So, the answer is clear; you recognize that certain character types don't play well with zombie horror, and both engineers and prepared survivalists are not it.  If you want a traditional zombie horror story, then you will need to exclude certain elements that neutralize the scenario.

Mind you, my own preferred answer is to lean into the engineering solutions when I get them, and just reflect them.  Once you've got PCs in the mindset of designing the most efficient kill-traps for zombies, then you start introducing other dangerous, panicking people, who keep acting not like engineers and threatening everyone around them (including themselves), and wait to see how long it takes for that efficient, problem-solving mindset to solve the problem.  Then iterate and repeat with just a little less-dumb survivors, until the PCs are safe and secure in the little corner of the apocalypse they've carved out for themselves, and then reflect on who they had to carve through to get there.

  I ran a setting using GURPS where the characters were all 50 point characters.  The characters being "normal people" in an abnormal situation made the whole thing dangerous.  I loosely based the setting off of the xbox game State of Decay, where there are lots of shambling zombies, some running zombies, a few "feral zombies " (which are fast moving berserkers with strength far beyond an average human can who can run down slower moving cars), and a few Juggernauts, which are extremely hard to kill, destroy cars that run into them and are about as strong as an enraged grizzly bear.   

     I think a party of experienced adventurer types are hero level people and are unlikely to be threatened by zombies unless there is a veritable army and the group is in terrain not of their choosing.  Having mundane people who need to go out and find canned food and anti biotics and who are in no ways assured of hitting a moving target in the head be the party....well the tone and nature of the game becomes much different.

Quote from: FingerRod on May 03, 2023, 07:08:18 PM
What about turning zombies on their head? What if you made a single zombie in the spirit of Jason Voorhees?

Getting hit bypasses all accrued hitpoints and is an opposed roll based on base HD die.

So a fighter might roll a d8 plus Con vs. a d8 rolled by Jason. You might survive one hit, but likely not two. Cannot be killed by normal means. Etc.

A zombie with regeneration powers...

COOL!

You could use the Juju Zombies from Monster Manual 2, but give them faster movement. A mob of those would be pretty tough on almost any group, save high-level clerics.

Another idea is the undead tsunami like Wights in Game Of Thrones. A horde of thousands of them are accompanied by a blizzard or dust storm that makes it almost impossible to see them until they're almost on top of you.

Classic Undead Shamblers who infect through a bite are scarier proportionately to how 'realistic' (Outside of walking corpses) you make things.

I've heard lots of talk about making 'Zombie Traps' and 'Murder Holes' that don't take realism such as wear and tear, and what it really means when *Only* severe trauma to the brain is the way to put them down.

Even shows like 'The Walking Dead' started playing it very fast and loose on how easy it started to get to take down 'Walkers' in the end.

The real problem comes with the inevitability of weapon degradation. If you're using realistic takes on weapons, then things like swords, hammers, axes, knives and the like are going to *BREAK*, become dull, and practically useless by around the 10th body or so that you're putting down. Again also, you're having to make sure you're doing enough damage to damage the brain enough to destroy it. Most knives are only going to really be good for killing *ONE* zombie before getting stuck in the skull or the blade bending. Your Katana or Longsword is going to be broken and dull by about the first dozen brought down if you're luck... and once more you're assuming head shots and not missing and catching a limb, which the zombie won't react or care about as it moves forward to bite and consume you.

Using the 'Cattle Gun' method specifically mentioned... In most studies conducted. Cattle guns only caused instant death 84% of the time.... that sounds like a lot... until again you're factoring in it's an undead creature that doesn't feel pain, and therefore when the stun gun fails, you're probably dead.

Whose also going to clean up the bodies when they go into your murder hole and start piling up? You're going to have to effect basic repairs, and endanger yourself just to make sure the murderhole/trap is clear enough to start it's job again. Wear and tear is going to effect it, you're going to need more parts.

The sheer numbers are what are going to make your Zombie traps break, bust, and stop working... that and again, taking into account the destruction of the brain being the only sure fire way to kill them.

World War Z (the book not the shitty movie) goes into this quite a bit... and has a section where it talks about how most forms of explosives are actually terrible to use on the Undead, because it doesn't liquify their brains... which is what you need to cause death... at most you might take some limbs off and then you have crawling undead hidden among the rubble.



This means *Guns* are actually the best way to kill Zombies, but the noise of course attracts more undead. A bullet to the head, to make sure you're out of range, and it's typically going to be a Hollow Point which is again, a good thing because it'll bounce around in the brain and shred it up... Better than a FMJ which could go clear through the skull and might not cause enough damage.

This is why so many nerds don't think Zombies are scary... they go with the assumption that their swords will never break, their traps will never gum up, that destroying the brain is something easy and simple and they'll have no problem doing in the heat of the moment.

Basically people who've never been in a real fight in their life.

Quote from: migo on May 02, 2023, 06:34:11 PM
There are several takes. One is that it doesn't matter if you've been bitten. If you die, you rise a zombie. That's more of an original idea (I think one of the Romero movies was more like that), and also in The Walking Dead.

All of the Romero movies work that way. Bite kills but if you die normally you are also gonna rise as a zombie if your brain hasn't been destroyed.

I think zombies work better as a "trap/challenge" than a real monster to fight.

Quote from: Orphan81 on May 09, 2023, 03:07:55 PM
I've heard lots of talk about making 'Zombie Traps' and 'Murder Holes' that don't take realism such as wear and tear, and what it really means when *Only* severe trauma to the brain is the way to put them down.

Quote from: Orphan81 on May 09, 2023, 03:07:55 PM
This is why so many nerds don't think Zombies are scary... they go with the assumption that their swords will never break, their traps will never gum up, that destroying the brain is something easy and simple and they'll have no problem doing in the heat of the moment.

Basically people who've never been in a real fight in their life.

Operating a zombie trap isn't fighting, though. It's developing reliable safety procedures, like when dealing with animals, heavy equipment, or toxic material. For example, a bull is extremely dangerous when loose. It has enormous strength and a very thick skull. I had a cousin who was killed by a bull on his farm. But operating a cattle chute isn't dangerous if proper procedure is followed. Stuff can and will break, but there can be procedures to handle broken equipment.

If a cattle chute gets gummed up, the result isn't death for all the handlers. It just means that cattle stop getting killed until the foul is cleared. Dealing with zombies via trap is very similar.

If we supposed something like Night of the Living Dead where survivors are in a house surrounded by zombies. Picture that there's a small hole in the side of the house, just big enough for one zombie to crawl through at a time. But when a zombie crawls through, they're in a small chamber where they can't move effectively. The operators inside pin the zombie from outside the chamber, then use a hammer or something to destroy the brain. It may take a few tries, but since the zombie is pinned and unable to move its limbs, there is no rush. They pull the zombie through, dispose of the body, and let the next one in.

------

Quote from: robertliguori on May 06, 2023, 07:50:58 AM
Mind you, my own preferred answer is to lean into the engineering solutions when I get them, and just reflect them.  Once you've got PCs in the mindset of designing the most efficient kill-traps for zombies, then you start introducing other dangerous, panicking people, who keep acting not like engineers and threatening everyone around them (including themselves), and wait to see how long it takes for that efficient, problem-solving mindset to solve the problem.  Then iterate and repeat with just a little less-dumb survivors, until the PCs are safe and secure in the little corner of the apocalypse they've carved out for themselves, and then reflect on who they had to carve through to get there.

That's a good point. That sounds like a long campaign, but I wonder if there is a way to handle that in a one-shot adventure.

It's the "Contagion" that's scary in infectious zombies, not so much the undeath. It turns everyone into one-hit-wonders, dropping you to undead automation, a disease that dominates judgment. The other infectious "Contagions," like Vampirism and Lycanthropy, are frightening because of the awareness retained, a disease that corrupts judgment through hunger & atavism.

So typical Romero zombies mostly frighten through the fear of stolen autonomy and isolation of grinding hordes rendering your world into minority pockets. Yes, it's very much a metaphorical commentary upon society. But that's 100% normal as horror has always been a metaphorical processing of one's conscious and subconscious fears.

So really, one has to break down WHY you are wanting to use Undeath, what TYPE of Undeath you want to portray, and whether you NEED Contagion to represent that. THEN you break down that Contagion's elements, and WHY you want to emphasize that metaphorical element of horror. Me personally, I don't find the tactics of survival, or the mechanics of monstrous threat development, as interesting as the elements exploring the comprising fear. So that's why I think you should start at the core and draw forth creatively from there.

I am oddly reminded of an old Hellboy story where Hellboy gets called out to this little Eastern European village that had a zombie outbreak. Not to handle the outbreak, though, but to tidy up some questions (the last intact zombie kept saying his name). Seems the villagers had stomped out the zombies just fine.

There's a reason zombies are typically low-level fodder. Honestly, I would throw tougher undead, rather than feed the zombies metagame steroids. Ghouls, wights, etc.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 10, 2023, 09:47:39 AM
I am oddly reminded of an old Hellboy story where Hellboy gets called out to this little Eastern European village that had a zombie outbreak. Not to handle the outbreak, though, but to tidy up some questions (the last intact zombie kept saying his name). Seems the villagers had stomped out the zombies just fine.

There's a reason zombies are typically low-level fodder. Honestly, I would throw tougher undead, rather than feed the zombies metagame steroids. Ghouls, wights, etc.

Yeah.  Zombies are zergs.  If you want to give your players the power fantasy from the feeling of wading through acres of enemies, zombies are pretty good.  If you are looking to challenge the strategies or tactics of your players, you have to change the zombies to the point where they are zombies in name only...

I already think zombies are threatening.  Give them a to-hit bonus for flanking and crowding around players.  Give them an ability to grapple/drag players down to the ground to make them prone, and then you'll be exposed to more attacks as they keep dragging you down and holding you down.

Cattle in a chute are not trying to murder you with an instinct so strong to do so they will endure any punishment or damage to do so.   Murder chutes sound great,  but workplace accidents happen ALL the time as things fail, people get careless, or just screw up.  This combined with the fact the overwhelming majority of people have never been in a fight (as orphan mentioned) means people getting hurt and killed and freaking out left and right.  Dealing with that level of adreneline takes practice, and the sort of practice is extremely dangerous.    I think zombie shamblers against borderline superhumans (pcs in most dungeons and dragons like rpgs) is a wash for the characters....but shamblers against man on the street level characters?  Going to be a bloodbath just like real life would be.

Quote from: oggsmash on May 11, 2023, 12:45:39 PM
Cattle in a chute are not trying to murder you with an instinct so strong to do so they will endure any punishment or damage to do so.   Murder chutes sound great,  but workplace accidents happen ALL the time as things fail, people get careless, or just screw up.  This combined with the fact the overwhelming majority of people have never been in a fight (as orphan mentioned) means people getting hurt and killed and freaking out left and right.  Dealing with that level of adreneline takes practice, and the sort of practice is extremely dangerous.    I think zombie shamblers against borderline superhumans (pcs in most dungeons and dragons like rpgs) is a wash for the characters....but shamblers against man on the street level characters?  Going to be a bloodbath just like real life would be.

Workplace accidents do happen all the time, but then, there there are millions of people working. The fatal accident rate is around 3 per 100,000 full-time workers. The most dangerous professions are typically those with low supervision and workers take risks to get the job done quicker and boost their pay - like roofers or fishermen.

Safety procedures make a huge difference in reducing accident rates. Nuclear power plants, for example, have a near-zero injury rate - while other electrical plants have a much higher rate. There are tons of dangers in both - high voltage electricity, high pressure steam, volatile materials, etc. I agree that people often get careless and screw up. That's why older, poorly designed plants or factories would kill or maim people much more often. They were designed for maximum profit over safety.

I agree that typical man-on-the-street could easily make mistakes that result in a bloodbath. But avoiding a bloodbath doesn't require near-superhuman combatants. It's mainly a matter of people keeping their cool and coming up with good procedures.

---

This probably doesn't make for exciting movie drama or fun RPG play, though. For RPGs, an ideal solution is something more plausible to encourage risk-taking without punishing intelligent play. Something I hate in a lot of RPGs is when the players come up with a smart way to deal with the problem, and the GM shuts it down because it isn't exciting adventure.

With zombies, the most appealing that I heard was letting intelligent player tactics work - and then having them deal with less-tactical or practical NPCs.

---

As an example, one thing that bugs me with zombie films is characters dealing with zombies wearing a t-shirt and shorts -- even after they know that zombie bites are guaranteed fatal. Human teeth aren't very long or sharp. Just a bit of leather and/or padding will prevent them from being able to penetrate, which could easily be homemade.

Good procedure should be to always wear safety gear, even when operating a zombie trap that shouldn't let them loose.

I'd want to encourage thoughtful preparation like this.

Quote from: jhkim on May 11, 2023, 01:39:29 PM

Workplace accidents do happen all the time, but then, there there are millions of people working. The fatal accident rate is around 3 per 100,000 full-time workers. The most dangerous professions are typically those with low supervision and workers take risks to get the job done quicker and boost their pay - like roofers or fishermen.

That's not entirely wrong, but it is a little misleading.  The most dangerous jobs are dangerous because the jobs themselves are inherently dangerous to a certain degree.  You can't let your attention lapse for even a moment--which is difficult for people to do when tired, from say, heavy physical labor.   You can do everything "by the book" with every safety precaution, and all it takes is being unlucky when your one attention lapse happens.  Plus, you get two extremes:  Loggers are examples of one, where "by the book" still doesn't account for everything a tree can possibly do when cut.  Farming is on the other side, where a big part of the problem is not so much the routine stuff but the sheer variety of dangerous tasks to do.  You can' t be an expert on everything.

In a zombie story, I'd expect a good dose of both.  Keep throwing the zombie at you, that's like the logs jumping off the tree before you cut them and tracking you back to base camp. Then your resources are running out, so that you have to keep improvising.  Plus, the whole thing is draining, so that it is effort to pay attention all the time.  Games are only so/so at modeling "the will to pay attention for long periods because it matters", but whatever the game can do to hint at that aspect will help. 

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on May 11, 2023, 01:51:46 PM

Quote from: jhkim on May 11, 2023, 01:39:29 PM
Workplace accidents do happen all the time, but then, there there are millions of people working. The fatal accident rate is around 3 per 100,000 full-time workers. The most dangerous professions are typically those with low supervision and workers take risks to get the job done quicker and boost their pay - like roofers or fishermen.

That's not entirely wrong, but it is a little misleading.  The most dangerous jobs are dangerous because the jobs themselves are inherently dangerous to a certain degree.  You can't let your attention lapse for even a moment--which is difficult for people to do when tired, from say, heavy physical labor.   You can do everything "by the book" with every safety precaution, and all it takes is being unlucky when your one attention lapse happens. Plus, you get two extremes:  Loggers are examples of one, where "by the book" still doesn't account for everything a tree can possibly do when cut.  Farming is on the other side, where a big part of the problem is not so much the routine stuff but the sheer variety of dangerous tasks to do.  You can' t be an expert on everything.

I feel this underestimates the effect of safety precautions. Obviously, no safety precaution is foolproof -- so the rate will never be completely zero -- but that doesn't mean that precautions don't make a huge difference to the chance of an accident.

Operating a zombie trap like I described doesn't require constant attention for hours. If the people feel tired, they can stop and go lie down to take a break. They only need to stay alert over the time period of letting a zombie in and killing it, which takes a few minutes at most.

--

In the bigger picture, this is obviously short-circuiting an action genre. Especially to make a fun film, it might be better to just ignore nitty-gritty details like this and instead go with the head-shooting action. But one of the interesting sides of RPGs is getting to explore alternatives to what they show in the movies.

More broadly than zombie movies, action films and TV often have nearly nonsensical tactics. It can be interesting in RPGs to make it into a more competitive and intelligent game -- instead of quick-cut emotions on screen.

  Nuclear power plants are inherently safer than other power plants and as most of the employees are from the Naval Power program and are smarter and better trained than other power plants.  Not the best example...as mentioned the reduction in accident rates is due to HEAVY regulation and training...something that will not be there in a post apoc zombie kill chute.

 Combined with most jobs do not have lethal creatures that want to kill you at all times involved.  You can say keep your cool...but just how many fights for your life have you been in?  I think everyone can learn to be calmer in a situation like that...but that learning comes at a price and one goof and you are done.  I would also say people who work hard physically for living have been doing so for years...we are tossing randos into a scenario where they do not understand their limits or even recognize when they are tired.   It can work with limited zombies, but any real pile up or length of time operating and there will be fatalities.

This is also not to say I do not think a kill chute is a good idea.  I just think if we are making the assumption the working crew is going to made up of a completely random mix of americans for instance....it will be a shit show.   If its a crew of construction workers, soldiers, or people I get to pick to do the job with me....then I have much more favorable outlook as to how it goes.   I just think comparing cattle to horde monsters hungry for blood is the first mistake.   I do think such monsters could be lured into a chute, I just think keeping them killed at a rate and preventing a pile up is where people are going to start to make mistakes, flavored both by terror and bravado.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on May 11, 2023, 01:51:46 PM
Games are only so/so at modeling "the will to pay attention for long periods because it matters", but whatever the game can do to hint at that aspect will help.

Pulling this point out to agree with it. RPGs (and most wargames) are games and while mental fatigue is a super important issue, it's really sidelined because tracking it would be so fiddly.

Quote from: jhkim on May 09, 2023, 05:10:12 PM
If a cattle chute gets gummed up, the result isn't death for all the handlers. It just means that cattle stop getting killed until the foul is cleared. Dealing with zombies via trap is very similar.

(https://i.giphy.com/media/nTfdeBvfgzV26zjoFP/giphy.webp)

QuoteIf we supposed something like Night of the Living Dead where survivors are in a house surrounded by zombies. Picture that there's a small hole in the side of the house, just big enough for one zombie to crawl through at a time. But when a zombie crawls through, they're in a small chamber where they can't move effectively. The operators inside pin the zombie from outside the chamber, then use a hammer or something to destroy the brain. It may take a few tries, but since the zombie is pinned and unable to move its limbs, there is no rush. They pull the zombie through, dispose of the body, and let the next one in.

Who cut the hole in the house? How did they avoid the zombies while cutting a hole in a house? Did they have to cut through pipes and electrical wires? Did they build a special chamber inside the house that's just big enough to trap zombies? How the hell do you determine the details of such a chamber? How long did all this rennovation take? Did they get a permit to remodel their home? How will this affect the resale value?

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 12, 2023, 08:01:18 AM

Who cut the hole in the house? How did they avoid the zombies while cutting a hole in a house? Did they have to cut through pipes and electrical wires? Did they build a special chamber inside the house that's just big enough to trap zombies? How the hell do you determine the details of such a chamber? How long did all this rennovation take? Did they get a permit to remodel their home? How will this affect the resale value?

And that's ignoring that while death is not a common occurrence when working with a cattle chute, it's a definite possibility for someone not paying attention.  Getting hurt or maimed is always a possibility.  It's not as bad (or as slow and inefficient) as trying to do certain operations on the cow or bull without the chute, which  is why the chute is a thing. 

It seems to me we are kind of in a circular thing here.  It goes something like this:

1. The game doesn't need to model fatigue, stress, strain, etc. because this is heroic fantasy and we model it more abstractly.

2. The way we model it abstractly is to have rolls that on the surface don't seem to have a high percentage for success for heroes, but that's because "shit happens" when you are doing something dangerous.

3. Messing with zombies is inherently dangerous, just like a lot of real-world things.  So our model applies.

4. Later, someone changes the model because they think that heroes should be more competent than that. 

5. Now we want to go back to zombies being dangerous, because when you've got a 90% chance of splatting one and no consequences to splattering them all day, they don't seem like such a threat.

So it's not an accident that many of the answers here have been some variation on:

- Amp up zombies to make them appropriately threatening to highly competent heroes.
- Make the heroes less competent.
- Change the model to handle strain a different way more pertinent to the zombie genre.

Or even better, given the way the zombie genre works, all three.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 12, 2023, 08:01:18 AM

Quote from: jhkim on May 09, 2023, 05:10:12 PM
If we supposed something like Night of the Living Dead where survivors are in a house surrounded by zombies. Picture that there's a small hole in the side of the house, just big enough for one zombie to crawl through at a time. But when a zombie crawls through, they're in a small chamber where they can't move effectively. The operators inside pin the zombie from outside the chamber, then use a hammer or something to destroy the brain. It may take a few tries, but since the zombie is pinned and unable to move its limbs, there is no rush. They pull the zombie through, dispose of the body, and let the next one in.

Who cut the hole in the house? How did they avoid the zombies while cutting a hole in a house? Did they have to cut through pipes and electrical wires? Did they build a special chamber inside the house that's just big enough to trap zombies? How the hell do you determine the details of such a chamber? How long did all this rennovation take? Did they get a permit to remodel their home? How will this affect the resale value?

I'm not sure the point of these questions. One doesn't have to be outside the house in order to cut a hole in it -- obviously it would be cut from the inside. Where to make the hole depends on the house design. The hole could be the bottom quarter of the back door, for example. As to how to construct the chamber, that depends on the material available. I think modifying a sturdy old-fashioned dresser or wardrobe would be an easy choice - though the ideal would be a narrowing space that starts bigger and gets tighter (like a cattle chute). It needs to be something a zombie can't crawl out of, but still has holes to see and do things like poke a spear/stake through. (One can obviously add holes to the initial chamber, of course.)

Quote from: oggsmash on May 12, 2023, 05:35:44 AM
Combined with most jobs do not have lethal creatures that want to kill you at all times involved.  You can say keep your cool...but just how many fights for your life have you been in?  I think everyone can learn to be calmer in a situation like that...but that learning comes at a price and one goof and you are done.  I would also say people who work hard physically for living have been doing so for years...we are tossing randos into a scenario where they do not understand their limits or even recognize when they are tired.

I don't agree about this. Again, someone could screw up majorly and, say, the zombie gets an arm loose. Or they hurt themselves or a friend swinging the hammer wrong. It's not like the only possible outcome is death.

I'm not saying that it is perfectly safe. But it is much safer than the sort of tactics one typically sees in zombie movies -- like distract the zombies and make a run for it through the crowd of them.

Quote from: David Johansen on May 03, 2023, 11:31:43 PM

Quote from: GhostNinja on May 03, 2023, 02:15:12 PM
how about Zombies with leather jackets and switchblades?  ;D

Now that's threating.

oooh dance fighting West Side Story zombies....brrrrrr....

Damn.  Adventure idea. 
You have to kill a horde of dancing zombies to get to the big baddie demon in red who wants to kidnap the towns children for nefarious purposes.
(https://italiapost.it/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Thriller-michael-jackson.jpg)

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on May 12, 2023, 11:33:57 AM
So it's not an accident that many of the answers here have been some variation on:

- Amp up zombies to make them appropriately threatening to highly competent heroes.
- Make the heroes less competent.
- Change the model to handle strain a different way more pertinent to the zombie genre.

Or even better, given the way the zombie genre works, all three.

I don't think this by itself gets at the issue from the OP.

I think there have been some good answers in the thread. However, just making an individual zombie more dangerous or the heroes less competent makes it all the more sensible to approach them with an engineering-type solution. For example, making zombies run fast (like in the 2004 Dawn of the Dead) makes it much more dangerous to try to excitingly rush past them -- but it makes no difference to the operation of a zombie chute.

If the heroes are less capable of fighting an individual zombie in the open, then it pushes them much harder to an engineering-type solution. There are a number of engineering-type solutions other than the zombie chute, but I feel like other posters are pushing mostly against engineering-type solutions in the first place.

I'm a little confused about the zombie chute being the main way of dealing with the zombies. It seems like a short term solution where you're dealing with one zombie at a time whilst ignoring anything else that happens outside, depends on the zombies all going for that one whole and totally discounts the threat of luchadore, nanite, kung fu or controlled by dark lord zombies. You really need to get AFMBE to explore options.

Quote from: Garry G on May 12, 2023, 02:17:25 PM
I'm a little confused about the zombie chute being the main way of dealing with the zombies. It seems like a short term solution where you're dealing with one zombie at a time whilst ignoring anything else that happens outside, depends on the zombies all going for that one whole and totally discounts the threat of luchadore, nanite, kung fu or controlled by dark lord zombies. You really need to get AFMBE to explore options.

The zombie chute is one example of an engineering-type solution. It's specifically a tactic for a situation like in the original Night of the Living Dead as well as often at points in other zombie movies.

The main characters have barricaded themselves inside a building to hold off a zombie horde outside. Their defenses are successfully holding, but they are trapped because there are too many zombies outside for them to rush out and fight. What do they do?

---

A dark lord is a definite fix to this. The zombies aren't mindless -- they act on the orders of their lord, and he won't keep falling for the same trap.

As long as zombies are mindless, relentless killers, though -- then engineering-type solutions seem ideal. The classic mindless zombie horde will keep attacking regardless of how many of them are killed.

EDITED TO ADD: To clarify -- adding powers but not intelligence to the zombies will changes the specs of the engineering, but an engineering approach is still best.

In the Walking Dead they channeled a bazillion cgi zombies into a quarry.

(https://i.pinimg.com/736x/84/73/3c/84733cc25321279c0b3bbb8faad9f13f.jpg)

Quote from: jhkim on May 12, 2023, 11:37:34 AM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 12, 2023, 08:01:18 AM

Quote from: jhkim on May 09, 2023, 05:10:12 PM
If we supposed something like Night of the Living Dead where survivors are in a house surrounded by zombies. Picture that there's a small hole in the side of the house, just big enough for one zombie to crawl through at a time. But when a zombie crawls through, they're in a small chamber where they can't move effectively. The operators inside pin the zombie from outside the chamber, then use a hammer or something to destroy the brain. It may take a few tries, but since the zombie is pinned and unable to move its limbs, there is no rush. They pull the zombie through, dispose of the body, and let the next one in.

Who cut the hole in the house? How did they avoid the zombies while cutting a hole in a house? Did they have to cut through pipes and electrical wires? Did they build a special chamber inside the house that's just big enough to trap zombies? How the hell do you determine the details of such a chamber? How long did all this rennovation take? Did they get a permit to remodel their home? How will this affect the resale value?

I'm not sure the point of these questions. One doesn't have to be outside the house in order to cut a hole in it -- obviously it would be cut from the inside. Where to make the hole depends on the house design. The hole could be the bottom quarter of the back door, for example. As to how to construct the chamber, that depends on the material available. I think modifying a sturdy old-fashioned dresser or wardrobe would be an easy choice - though the ideal would be a narrowing space that starts bigger and gets tighter (like a cattle chute). It needs to be something a zombie can't crawl out of, but still has holes to see and do things like poke a spear/stake through. (One can obviously add holes to the initial chamber, of course.)

Quote from: oggsmash on May 12, 2023, 05:35:44 AM
Combined with most jobs do not have lethal creatures that want to kill you at all times involved.  You can say keep your cool...but just how many fights for your life have you been in?  I think everyone can learn to be calmer in a situation like that...but that learning comes at a price and one goof and you are done.  I would also say people who work hard physically for living have been doing so for years...we are tossing randos into a scenario where they do not understand their limits or even recognize when they are tired.

I don't agree about this. Again, someone could screw up majorly and, say, the zombie gets an arm loose. Or they hurt themselves or a friend swinging the hammer wrong. It's not like the only possible outcome is death.

I'm not saying that it is perfectly safe. But it is much safer than the sort of tactics one typically sees in zombie movies -- like distract the zombies and make a run for it through the crowd of them.

Distract the zombies and make a run for it through a crowd of them is a straightforward plan, with less "moving parts". You don't need to build elaborate traps with dubious effectiveness. Just throw a rock or something and then run for it.

Quote from: jhkim on May 12, 2023, 01:02:12 PM

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on May 12, 2023, 11:33:57 AM
So it's not an accident that many of the answers here have been some variation on:

- Amp up zombies to make them appropriately threatening to highly competent heroes.
- Make the heroes less competent.
- Change the model to handle strain a different way more pertinent to the zombie genre.

Or even better, given the way the zombie genre works, all three.

I don't think this by itself gets at the issue from the OP.

I think there have been some good answers in the thread. However, just making an individual zombie more dangerous or the heroes less competent makes it all the more sensible to approach them with an engineering-type solution. For example, making zombies run fast (like in the 2004 Dawn of the Dead) makes it much more dangerous to try to excitingly rush past them -- but it makes no difference to the operation of a zombie chute.

If the heroes are less capable of fighting an individual zombie in the open, then it pushes them much harder to an engineering-type solution. There are a number of engineering-type solutions other than the zombie chute, but I feel like other posters are pushing mostly against engineering-type solutions in the first place.

Yes. You have to have tools, materials and competence in order to build just about anytyhing. Hell, I couldn't even weave a basket to save my life. If you're lucky enough to get trapped in a hardware store with a carpenter and a slaughterhouse designer, maybe your chute idea would have some merit. But most people couldn't saw a hole in a wall without cutting their fingers off, even assuming they had a saw handy.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 13, 2023, 12:37:55 AM

Quote from: jhkim on May 12, 2023, 01:02:12 PM
If the heroes are less capable of fighting an individual zombie in the open, then it pushes them much harder to an engineering-type solution. There are a number of engineering-type solutions other than the zombie chute, but I feel like other posters are pushing mostly against engineering-type solutions in the first place.

Yes. You have to have tools, materials and competence in order to build just about anytyhing. Hell, I couldn't even weave a basket to save my life. If you're lucky enough to get trapped in a hardware store with a carpenter and a slaughterhouse designer, maybe your chute idea would have some merit. But most people couldn't saw a hole in a wall without cutting their fingers off, even assuming they had a saw handy.

If you're assuming that the protagonists are so hopelessly incompetent that they can't make a hole in a wall, then they are going to die no matter what. They won't be able to barricade the house to keep zombies out, for one. Even if they do, they won't be able to get food for themselves or do the rest of surviving without iPhones and GrubHub.

Zombie stories aren't usually about hopeless incompetents. They're not superheroes -- but they have some skills among them. In Dawn of the Dead (2004), they trick out two buses with welded-on armor, a cow-catcher, and spiked tops. In the Walking Dead, they grow food and build shelter and barricades and other efforts at points. In The Last of Us, the protagonist was a contractor. There's similar for many others.

It feels to me like you're saying that characters shouldn't try to be clever or tactical at all. To me, that's a big part of the appeal of post-apocalyptic stories and RPGs. It's thinking of how to survive in a difficult world.

Quote from: jhkim on May 13, 2023, 02:21:22 AM
If you're assuming that the protagonists are so hopelessly incompetent that they can't make a hole in a wall, then they are going to die no matter what.

Further, it's assuming that people are not able to figure something new out, or learn new skills.

There will of course be a number of completely hopeless people. But I think we can assume they're wiped out early on, that's part of why the postapocalyptic world has so few humans. It's also the appeal of settlements with an unhinged tyrannical leader - you can be a bit useless and he'll keep you alive, so long as you're loyal.

Quote from: jhkim on May 13, 2023, 02:21:22 AM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 13, 2023, 12:37:55 AM

Quote from: jhkim on May 12, 2023, 01:02:12 PM
If the heroes are less capable of fighting an individual zombie in the open, then it pushes them much harder to an engineering-type solution. There are a number of engineering-type solutions other than the zombie chute, but I feel like other posters are pushing mostly against engineering-type solutions in the first place.

Yes. You have to have tools, materials and competence in order to build just about anytyhing. Hell, I couldn't even weave a basket to save my life. If you're lucky enough to get trapped in a hardware store with a carpenter and a slaughterhouse designer, maybe your chute idea would have some merit. But most people couldn't saw a hole in a wall without cutting their fingers off, even assuming they had a saw handy.

If you're assuming that the protagonists are so hopelessly incompetent that they can't make a hole in a wall, then they are going to die no matter what. They won't be able to barricade the house to keep zombies out, for one. Even if they do, they won't be able to get food for themselves or do the rest of surviving without iPhones and GrubHub.

Zombie stories aren't usually about hopeless incompetents. They're not superheroes -- but they have some skills among them. In Dawn of the Dead (2004), they trick out two buses with welded-on armor, a cow-catcher, and spiked tops. In the Walking Dead, they grow food and build shelter and barricades and other efforts at points. In The Last of Us, the protagonist was a contractor. There's similar for many others.

It feels to me like you're saying that characters shouldn't try to be clever or tactical at all. To me, that's a big part of the appeal of post-apocalyptic stories and RPGs. It's thinking of how to survive in a difficult world.

No. I'm saying the more elaborate the plan, the more failure points it has. I can put a hole in a house as well. Can I cut a hole and construct a chute to catch zombies, with minimal expertise and prep time, maybe I have tools and materials, maybe not, all the while doing it while being assaulted by undead monsters who are lurking about looking to bite somebody?

Part of being clever is coming up with clever plans. And clever isnt' necessarily complicated.

Quote from: jhkim on May 13, 2023, 02:21:22 AM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 13, 2023, 12:37:55 AM

Quote from: jhkim on May 12, 2023, 01:02:12 PM
If the heroes are less capable of fighting an individual zombie in the open, then it pushes them much harder to an engineering-type solution. There are a number of engineering-type solutions other than the zombie chute, but I feel like other posters are pushing mostly against engineering-type solutions in the first place.

Yes. You have to have tools, materials and competence in order to build just about anytyhing. Hell, I couldn't even weave a basket to save my life. If you're lucky enough to get trapped in a hardware store with a carpenter and a slaughterhouse designer, maybe your chute idea would have some merit. But most people couldn't saw a hole in a wall without cutting their fingers off, even assuming they had a saw handy.

If you're assuming that the protagonists are so hopelessly incompetent that they can't make a hole in a wall, then they are going to die no matter what. They won't be able to barricade the house to keep zombies out, for one. Even if they do, they won't be able to get food for themselves or do the rest of surviving without iPhones and GrubHub.

Zombie stories aren't usually about hopeless incompetents. They're not superheroes -- but they have some skills among them. In Dawn of the Dead (2004), they trick out two buses with welded-on armor, a cow-catcher, and spiked tops. In the Walking Dead, they grow food and build shelter and barricades and other efforts at points. In The Last of Us, the protagonist was a contractor. There's similar for many others.

It feels to me like you're saying that characters shouldn't try to be clever or tactical at all. To me, that's a big part of the appeal of post-apocalyptic stories and RPGs. It's thinking of how to survive in a difficult world.

  I think he is assuming the same thing I am, the sample group of people in question is from the average population of the USA.  We end up with fat people who have never worked in construction (probably can not change a tire) or physical labor and likely have never, ever been in an actual physical fight and certainly not one where their life was at stake.   So extremely low tolerance for stress of the physical or mental sort combined with no working knowledge to use on the fly.   

Quote from: oggsmash on May 13, 2023, 06:09:53 AM

Quote from: jhkim on May 13, 2023, 02:21:22 AM

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 13, 2023, 12:37:55 AM

Quote from: jhkim on May 12, 2023, 01:02:12 PM
If the heroes are less capable of fighting an individual zombie in the open, then it pushes them much harder to an engineering-type solution. There are a number of engineering-type solutions other than the zombie chute, but I feel like other posters are pushing mostly against engineering-type solutions in the first place.

Yes. You have to have tools, materials and competence in order to build just about anytyhing. Hell, I couldn't even weave a basket to save my life. If you're lucky enough to get trapped in a hardware store with a carpenter and a slaughterhouse designer, maybe your chute idea would have some merit. But most people couldn't saw a hole in a wall without cutting their fingers off, even assuming they had a saw handy.

If you're assuming that the protagonists are so hopelessly incompetent that they can't make a hole in a wall, then they are going to die no matter what. They won't be able to barricade the house to keep zombies out, for one. Even if they do, they won't be able to get food for themselves or do the rest of surviving without iPhones and GrubHub.

Zombie stories aren't usually about hopeless incompetents. They're not superheroes -- but they have some skills among them. In Dawn of the Dead (2004), they trick out two buses with welded-on armor, a cow-catcher, and spiked tops. In the Walking Dead, they grow food and build shelter and barricades and other efforts at points. In The Last of Us, the protagonist was a contractor. There's similar for many others.

It feels to me like you're saying that characters shouldn't try to be clever or tactical at all. To me, that's a big part of the appeal of post-apocalyptic stories and RPGs. It's thinking of how to survive in a difficult world.

  I think he is assuming the same thing I am, the sample group of people in question is from the average population of the USA.  We end up with fat people who have never worked in construction (probably can not change a tire) or physical labor and likely have never, ever been in an actual physical fight and certainly not one where their life was at stake.   So extremely low tolerance for stress of the physical or mental sort combined with no working knowledge to use on the fly.

Unless you're playing old school CoC style (the early editions didn't even have healing rules and GMs just figured that was because there weren't supposed to be survivors) in the first week or two of the outbreak, those people have already joined the zombie ranks.

Optimistic estimates in event of things going to hell is a modern city is dead in a week or two without modern infrastructure. In a zombie apocalypse I'd say mere days before 90% of the population too stupid to live ceases to do so (someone has to fill the ranks of the zombie hordes).

Anything past a couple weeks and a lot of the incompetence has largely been bled out of humanity. The survivors are predominantly rural, with life experience to match; farmers, ranchers, hunters, miners; and the process of survival in the first weeks is probably going to weed out the bottom 90%.

That said, while a part of the genre, the history of disasters puts a lie to the idea that people are generally bastards who will turn on each other as soon as the veneer of civilization is gone. Rather, disasters tend to activate humanity's latent ability to put aside differences in an emergency and act in unison.

Yes, some thugs are going to loot, but if authority granting them cover is gone, the majority of the troublemakers are going to be shot in short order. The apocalypse will probably not be a good time to be an asshole in the real world (versus the unparalleled success they have in such scenarios in fiction... where the message is often that humanity is actually more terrible than the monsters and so maybe deserves to be wiped out).

Quote from: oggsmash on May 13, 2023, 06:09:53 AM

Quote from: jhkim on May 13, 2023, 02:21:22 AM
Zombie stories aren't usually about hopeless incompetents. They're not superheroes -- but they have some skills among them. In Dawn of the Dead (2004), they trick out two buses with welded-on armor, a cow-catcher, and spiked tops. In the Walking Dead, they grow food and build shelter and barricades and other efforts at points. In The Last of Us, the protagonist was a contractor. There's similar for many others.

  I think he is assuming the same thing I am, the sample group of people in question is from the average population of the USA.  We end up with fat people who have never worked in construction (probably can not change a tire) or physical labor and likely have never, ever been in an actual physical fight and certainly not one where their life was at stake.   So extremely low tolerance for stress of the physical or mental sort combined with no working knowledge to use on the fly.

Sure, most people have never been in a fatal fight. Even among police officers, 75% have never fired their service weapon on the job. Zombie movies don't tend to be about veterans combatants. Still, the lead characters have some competence. In a GURPS game, say, I'd probably have PCs as 50-point characters like the one your mentioned. 50 points is easily enough to build a useful asset for survival like a competent contractor, registered nurse, mechanic, farmer, or police officer. Others like children, elderly, or those with no useful skills would be NPCs they are helping.

However, I've played a few games with less competent characters - like a handful of games where the PCs were pre-teen kids. Even though they couldn't build a zombie chute, though, I think it's even more important for characters like that to *not* just run through or fight the zombies, but instead come up with plans.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 13, 2023, 04:08:58 AM

Quote from: jhkim on May 13, 2023, 02:21:22 AM
It feels to me like you're saying that characters shouldn't try to be clever or tactical at all. To me, that's a big part of the appeal of post-apocalyptic stories and RPGs. It's thinking of how to survive in a difficult world.

No. I'm saying the more elaborate the plan, the more failure points it has. I can put a hole in a house as well. Can I cut a hole and construct a chute to catch zombies, with minimal expertise and prep time, maybe I have tools and materials, maybe not, all the while doing it while being assaulted by undead monsters who are lurking about looking to bite somebody?

Part of being clever is coming up with clever plans. And clever isnt' necessarily complicated.

I wonder if we're still talking past each other. Again, the zombie chute is an example of a plan for the specific situation of the protagonists have successfully barricaded themselves into a building. This happens regularly in zombie movies/shows. They are safe from the zombies but have finite supplies of food and water. So they have days or weeks to plan, depending on the supplies in the building. Dawn of the Dead they spend several months in the mall, for example. You refer to them being assaulted by zombies while they are doing construction, though. So we're talking about different cases. If they are actively being attacked, they need to work on the barricades. Only after the barricades hold can they plan.

The principle at work here is that zombies are mindlessly relentless. They will keep coming forward even if the front rank all dies. That sounds scary emotionally. Tactically, though, it means they'll keep falling for the same trick over and over. It's a potentially exploitable weakness.

For example, in The Walking Dead, when they were at the prison for months, the protagonists would take turns going up to the chain link fence. The zombies pressed up against it, and they stabbed them in the head through the fence. They would keep doing this regularly, and the zombies kept walking into it. i.e. The tactic works over and over. So they would use this approach if it happened coincidentally, but they didn't improve on the design or build things to use the tactic elsewhere.

I'm open to what strikes you as clever anti-zombie tactics for the sort of situations seen in films/shows/RPGs.

Quote from: jhkim on May 13, 2023, 07:04:52 PM

Quote from: oggsmash on May 13, 2023, 06:09:53 AM

Quote from: jhkim on May 13, 2023, 02:21:22 AM
Zombie stories aren't usually about hopeless incompetents. They're not superheroes -- but they have some skills among them. In Dawn of the Dead (2004), they trick out two buses with welded-on armor, a cow-catcher, and spiked tops. In the Walking Dead, they grow food and build shelter and barricades and other efforts at points. In The Last of Us, the protagonist was a contractor. There's similar for many others.

  I think he is assuming the same thing I am, the sample group of people in question is from the average population of the USA.  We end up with fat people who have never worked in construction (probably can not change a tire) or physical labor and likely have never, ever been in an actual physical fight and certainly not one where their life was at stake.   So extremely low tolerance for stress of the physical or mental sort combined with no working knowledge to use on the fly.

Sure, most people have never been in a fatal fight. Even among police officers, 75% have never fired their service weapon on the job. Zombie movies don't tend to be about veterans combatants. Still, the lead characters have some competence. In a GURPS game, say, I'd probably have PCs as 50-point characters like the one your mentioned. 50 points is easily enough to build a useful asset for survival like a competent contractor, registered nurse, mechanic, farmer, or police officer. Others like children, elderly, or those with no useful skills would be NPCs they are helping.

However, I've played a few games with less competent characters - like a handful of games where the PCs were pre-teen kids. Even though they couldn't build a zombie chute, though, I think it's even more important for characters like that to *not* just run through or fight the zombies, but instead come up with plans.

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 13, 2023, 04:08:58 AM

Quote from: jhkim on May 13, 2023, 02:21:22 AM
It feels to me like you're saying that characters shouldn't try to be clever or tactical at all. To me, that's a big part of the appeal of post-apocalyptic stories and RPGs. It's thinking of how to survive in a difficult world.

No. I'm saying the more elaborate the plan, the more failure points it has. I can put a hole in a house as well. Can I cut a hole and construct a chute to catch zombies, with minimal expertise and prep time, maybe I have tools and materials, maybe not, all the while doing it while being assaulted by undead monsters who are lurking about looking to bite somebody?

Part of being clever is coming up with clever plans. And clever isnt' necessarily complicated.

I wonder if we're still talking past each other. Again, the zombie chute is an example of a plan for the specific situation of the protagonists have successfully barricaded themselves into a building. This happens regularly in zombie movies/shows. They are safe from the zombies but have finite supplies of food and water. So they have days or weeks to plan, depending on the supplies in the building. Dawn of the Dead they spend several months in the mall, for example. You refer to them being assaulted by zombies while they are doing construction, though. So we're talking about different cases. If they are actively being attacked, they need to work on the barricades. Only after the barricades hold can they plan.

The principle at work here is that zombies are mindlessly relentless. They will keep coming forward even if the front rank all dies. That sounds scary emotionally. Tactically, though, it means they'll keep falling for the same trick over and over. It's a potentially exploitable weakness.

It is. In World War Z (Probably my favorite zombie fiction) there are specific instances where they use that weakness against them. But at first the attempts are inconsitent in effectiveness until they hammer out the best way to exploit those weaknesses, while protecting themselves from the zombies advantages.

QuoteFor example, in The Walking Dead, when they were at the prison for months, the protagonists would take turns going up to the chain link fence. The zombies pressed up against it, and they stabbed them in the head through the fence. They would keep doing this regularly, and the zombies kept walking into it. i.e. The tactic works over and over. So they would use this approach if it happened coincidentally, but they didn't improve on the design or build things to use the tactic elsewhere.

I watched the series up until about the prison. That seems magnitudes more feasible and "realistic" to me. Finding an already constructed, durable and defensible position and taking best advantage of it. Dunno why they didn't improve on the design or build similar structures later.

QuoteI'm open to what strikes you as clever anti-zombie tactics for the sort of situations seen in films/shows/RPGs.

Well, considering how a big trope of the genre is the survivors finding a defensible position, and that defensible position eventually fails at a critical time/spot, to ramp the tension back up, I'm not sure there is any that will stand the test of long term scrutiny. And most zombie fiction is fatalistic in that the survivors eventually escape to relative safety, and then the zinger is that the zombies turn up at their safe spot and attack them. And then the credits roll. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcZqrEbDR8k)

Heck, maybe your zombie chute plan could work. Part of the fun is coming up with scenarios and picking them apart to find their weaknesses. I'm just leery of overly complicated and/or involved plans, especially at the onset of a zombie apocalypse. IMO the survivor's best bet is to retreat and find a defensible position that works well against specifically zombie behavior, and then work from there to secure basic supplies and fortify. The point isn't to kill zombies, the point is to not get eaten. Stabbing zombies through a chain link fence might be a grimfun release of tension and frustration, but what does it get them in the long run?

Quote from: Ratman_tf on May 13, 2023, 11:11:53 PM

Quote from: jhkim on May 13, 2023, 07:04:52 PM
I'm open to what strikes you as clever anti-zombie tactics for the sort of situations seen in films/shows/RPGs.

Well, considering how a big trope of the genre is the survivors finding a defensible position, and that defensible position eventually fails at a critical time/spot, to ramp the tension back up, I'm not sure there is any that will stand the test of long term scrutiny. And most zombie fiction is fatalistic in that the survivors eventually escape to relative safety, and then the zinger is that the zombies turn up at their safe spot and attack them. And then the credits roll. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcZqrEbDR8k)

Heck, maybe your zombie chute plan could work. Part of the fun is coming up with scenarios and picking them apart to find their weaknesses. I'm just leery of overly complicated and/or involved plans, especially at the onset of a zombie apocalypse. IMO the survivor's best bet is to retreat and find a defensible position that works well against specifically zombie behavior, and then work from there to secure basic supplies and fortify. The point isn't to kill zombies, the point is to not get eaten. Stabbing zombies through a chain link fence might be a grimfun release of tension and frustration, but what does it get them in the long run?

Thanks for agreeing to consider about the zombie chute.

Your description about the zombie genre tension and zingers is on-point, I think. I feel like in many of the movies/episodes, things work or not based on what is dramatically appropriate. But that sort of dramatic logic especially becomes a problem in an RPG. If I'm playing a zombie survival game, I want my PC's plan to work based on its tactical merits -- not based on whether its dramatically timed for it to work or not. RPG plans should work or not based on the internal logic of the game-world.

A zombie chute is an advanced design. I don't think that characters would come up with it on the fly their first night of dealing with zombies. But if they keep having to fight - especially after weeks or months, they'll realize it's best for the zombies to be funneled to come in one at a time, for that one be hampered by the terrain/space, and then for that one zombie to face several people attacking it together while it is hampered. If they keeps pushing this tactic further, it becomes like a chute.

If you're interested in discussing -- there's further question of tactics I'd term the chameleon or the turtle. i.e. How does one safely travel?

Make them like in the movie my avatar is from, "Return of the Living Dead", where even their body parts are animated even when separated from the body and headshots don't kill.

SPOILER!!!!












Even burning them just spreads the contagion further.