I bought this new RPG from Fantasy Flight Games as an impulse buy at my local game shoppe. A few thoughts and/or comments:

(1) I guess there are 4 books in the "series" and only the Zombie one is out yet. All focus on the end of the world. One is an alien invasion and I think one has Cthulhu-like gods taking over the world. I forget the theme of the 4th one.

(2) It doesn't use funky dice. All d6's. You have positive and negative dice of different colors, but that should be easy enough to find. The basic conflict resolution mechanic seems pretty easy to run.

(3) It assumes that "you" are interacting with zombies (or whatever) in "your hometown", which is kind of cool. There are rules as to how to create a character which is a fantasy representation of "you" (as opposed to running some superhero character). Seems like finding good maps of my home town area could be a pain, but I like the concept.

Anyone else seen it? What do you think?

Quote from: finarvyn;807352Anyone else seen it? What do you think?

4th is Killer Robots.

The concepts sound like fun, I'm definitely interested.

A certain other gaming site threw a collective hissy fit over the game encouraging you to play yourself, but you could use those exact same rules to make any other character you wanted, so... it's pretty much a non-issue.

Quote from: Ladybird;807365A certain other gaming site threw a collective hissy fit over the game encouraging you to play yourself, but you could use those exact same rules to make any other character you wanted, so... it's pretty much a non-issue.

I don't know anything about other discussion on this (other than a quick peek at the FF boards) but the "play yourself" concept is one I've pondered before and kind of like.

(1) The idea of being a "regular guy" is cool. I like the notion that you can see what you have in your pockets, what you could scrounge from your own house, how much gas you currently have in your own car, and so on. It adds a neat "what if this happened ... this afternoon!" kind of element to the game.

(2) The rules have you stat yourself and then the group votes on if you have given yourself numbers too high or too low, then you tweak and vote again. I don't have the feel for how this works yet, but it sounds like character creation is a collaborative process and could be fun in itself. Or, as you noted, you can just create fictional characters from scratch.

(3) On the subject of "play yourself", when I first mentioned this to my sister she said something to the effect of "I don't want to play myself because if I really saw a zombie I'd run and hide. Not much fun."

I did a play yourself game once as a one shot. It was actually a lot of fun especially when other players questioned the pencil flares on my character sheet saying I would never have those. I just walked out to my car grabbed the set there and showed them.

I am not so sure as to the campaign aspect of it though but as a short series it would be interesting. Save me time from yelling at the Walking dead about how to build defenses and always traveling in at least twos.

I'm currently running a game like this using 3e modern rules.  Players are "regular guys" hiking North on the Appalachian Trail.  Game starts as characters hit Baxter State Forest.  Aurora tripped power outage, escaped convict, meteorite falling from the sky, aliens, fanatics, large communities of people just disappearing.  Good stuff.  Have fun with the theme, there's a lot to work with.

I remember someone else mentioning this line of FFG Rpgs on the RPGSite a few months ago. Including the premise of playing yourself.

The zombie apocalypse one is the least interesting to me. The Wrath of the Gods, and the Alien Invasion releases would tempt me to spend some cash.

We played ourselves in a CoC game when we were 16 or so and its the default character creation method in V&V.

One of my problems with a lot of "apocalypse" games and with a way a lot of folk play CoC as well is that he heroes are supposed to be normal but give the players the heads up on what's going on and everyone is an ex-special services guy with a basement full of automatic weapons.

I think playing yourselves is great. Failing that a random generator for occupation would be good.

Collaborative chargen is best chargen method, always.

I think "shit self and hide in corner" would, if we're being honest, be many people's legit reactions to an actual alien invasion or whatever. You kinda have to assume that the game version of you is going to take action, in order for the game to work; it's just the same as getting players to buy into any other game premise.

We made ourselves in GURPs back in 3e Revised days.

25 point starting points for average characters.

I enjoyed playing a -75 point character...


In reality, for any of these scenarios were to happen; I know I would be one of the initial casualties...

I, like Peterson, am waiting for the Aliens and Wraith of Gods books (zombies are my least favourite apocalypse scenario). But from what you wrote, I think they might be good additions indeed. I'm looking forward to combining the Cthulhuesque one with ToC's Apocalypse setting.

Though I find the idea of playing myself interesting, I am not sure that extends to playing myself in an apocalypse in my home town. My concerns would be very personal (saving my family) and the idea of the GM playing my wife and kids in that situation (or trying to avoid that by killing them off) doesn't appeal.

Quote from: Skywalker;807417Though I find the idea of playing myself interesting, I am not sure that extends to playing myself in an apocalypse in my home town. My concerns would be very personal (saving my family) and the idea of the GM playing my wife and kids in that situation (or trying to avoid that by killing them off) doesn't appeal.

+1.  Having kids, the idea presented in the game has no appeal to me.

Played the Zombie one. Character creation based on yourself is cute, but takes too long in practice for my tastes. Mechanics are OK. Really didn't get much into it as I'm not all into futile imminent apocalypse premises.

Might have something to do with my understanding of logistics, and the futility of PvP to scrape by another day (a la Walking Dead intra-human drama), leave me unable to suspend belief to care — sorta like Supers and their moral conceits.

The rest of the other players found it a hoot exploring new ways to collapse the party and die horribly.

I hear several of the tables inside are pretty good. Helped whip up encounters rather smoothly on the fly, too, as I heard they were d6 based and thus easier to memorize.

As for playing regular people in a game and not "Adventurers" I likes Stalking the night fantastic, Fringeworthy and Incursion (I think it was called) for that.

You started out being normal everyday folk. IN some you got a crash course in some combat stuff but mostly you depended on every day skills.

Or you could play yourself. The systems character creation was set up for it. You could be ex special forces or whatever but it went against the spirit of the game.

Quote from: Skywalker;807417Though I find the idea of playing myself interesting, I am not sure that extends to playing myself in an apocalypse in my home town. My concerns would be very personal (saving my family) and the idea of the GM playing my wife and kids in that situation (or trying to avoid that by killing them off) doesn't appeal.

This is precisely the reason that I've turned down playing these sorts of games in the past. I mean, all of the other players had no girlfriends, wives, children or other such responsibilities so for them such a campaign would be fun. Not so for me.

What I'd really like to see is a generic "End of the World" rpg that has tons of looting tables for urban and rural environments, as well as basic rules for several different apocalypses (eg.: zombies, giant insects, freakish weather, aliens, supernatural etc...) and even sub-types of each (eg.: rage zombies, giant termites, early ice age, enslaving martians, biblical plagues etc...). All in one book. That would be super sweet.

Actually, we should kickstart funds to get Kevin Crawford to write that!