All Flesh Must Be Eaten

[TeknoXI]

Damn you EndGame. Now I'm back on my zombie kick...

Anyways, I was talking with EndGame the other day and were talking about playing a Zombie RPG. This came up in the past but was never fully realized. Out current idea would be to play a game where we were the characters. The characters' stats would be based off of our real-life skills and such.

To help keep it as close to the actual person as possible, the character creation process will be partially done by other people to keep it fair and not over-powered. Since a few of us did meet in real-life, it would not be all to difficult to do. The person being created can argue and persuade how they are perceived. I think this would be really fun.

Thoughts?

Note: I'm not saying we should stop playing Rifts, but have this game maybe later or something. I just wanted to throw it out there.

[EndGame]

You know i'm down for it.

[Miniwolf]

So if Bodah plays he'll have +15 Sandwich making skills... he can make and throw sandwiches to keep the zombies distracted

i am very tempted by this idea who's goig to GM it?

[Spectrum]

Hmm. I've tossed around Mortals games in the past with character stats based off of the person playing them, but they've never turned out well in the times I've actually played them. (I remember one BESM game...sigh...)

Either the characters are so terribad because you're dealing with a bunch of gamers and you need a very flexible GM and creative players to not TPK the first session or the characters in no way resemble the players because of bloated egos. (Ie, no, Tekno does not actually get Ninja +7 as a skill.)

I'm always interested in AFMBE, but I'm fence-sitting as to real life based, even if I understand the appeal.

I was interested in GMing (though I'd likely have done semi-homebrew StoryTeller system), but I was holding off until my schedule cleared up. That hasn't happened, really. =X

[TeknoXI]

It would be more like a wide array of skills, even if they have no applicable uses in a zombie situation. Like EndGame would take some sort of computer and art related skills for his skills in graphical artwork and Miniwolf would have some points in sports for his rugby.

I wouldn't say I would get +7 towards martial arts...just like +3.

[EndGame]

In addition. The whole point of having others create the character you play is to avoid the "inflated egos". Others would be more critical of skill point allocation, abilities, etc.

The player would have some say of course, after all they know themselves best but the stat decisions and abilities and such would be made up to the others. The player would actually play the character and fill in all the backstory. Also I don't think the point is to win the game, if players die, they die. The point is to see if we would survive a zombie uprising. Considering the chance of it happening in real life is nil, I think it's a close second to simply create ourselves in a game and play the characters as we would to the best of our ability. (Obviously our characters aren't going to act as they actually would considering we would not actually be in mortal danger at every turn, but we can strive to act as how we think we may act during such an event.)

It's not the destination, it's the journey.

Flagpole also came up with a neat idea. If your character DOES die you could simply roll up whatever character you want and continue playing as that, the point would be made that in the event of a zombie invasion, you died.

Overall I think it would be a fun idea, of course it goes without saying that special abilities, (ie: miracles) are not allowed.

The only question at this point is to decide if a single bite infects you for your later death, kills you eventually, or simply does damage.

I prefer the whole zombie bite = infection that slowly weakens you until you die and rise to devours your friends. (For some added fun we could make it where, when you died you could RP as your zombie self.)

After going through the rulebook, there is ALOT of versatility as to the strength of the characters and the strength of the zombies. In my opinion it's kind of the point to have regular joe type characters, there are plenty of other games where you can be uber badass amazing characters that are nigh unstoppable. I think it would be more fun to play characters that have a high chance of dying, and keeping it in a modern setting will also allow for familiarity with every day life and technology giving rise to more focus on the characters themselves instead of their surroundings.

That being said, I'd rather play than GM but barring anyone coming forward to GM I feel comfortable enough with the Unisystem to be able to effectively GM the game. That and it's something more familiar to me than Rifts or even D&D, I could worry less about the rules (since it's a system i know somewhat well) and more about the game itself (Which is based on real life which i know well enough ^.^)

Of course, I am also not suggesting that this replace the Rifts game on sunday's (I'm having WAY too much fun with my character to abandon that.) So i'm not sure when a game like this could be played.

[Spectrum]

Originally Posted by EndGame

The player would have some say of course, after all they know themselves best but the stat decisions and abilities and such would be made up to the others.

The question then becomes whether you're forced to play a character that hasn't spent all their points simply because the group feels it's 'realistic'.

Originally Posted by EndGame

The only question at this point is to decide if a single bite infects you for your later death, kills you eventually, or simply does damage.

I prefer, if I were STing, to simply not to tell the players right off the bat.

It's a zombie game. You figure out whether it's wise to start amputating limbs.

[EndGame]

If it's the best representation of you as a character then yeah, that may be the case, not really a big deal.

[Spectrum]

So, just to bring some life back into this. I'm more seriously considering running this. However, I would be asking for unique characters, instead of playing yourself. (If I ran a game based on playing yourselves, I'd run Hunter or Mage.)

What are people looking for if I ran an AFMBE game? Comedy? Drama? Plot-based? Character study? What level of power would people want? I'm inclined to keep it lower end and ramp up gradually, but if people want to play super soldiers, you fuckers are going to be fighting Lickers.

I'm looking at a contained scenario, perhaps a handful of sessions, given that with the nature of online play pacing I don't think a one-shot is suitable.

[EndGame]

Meh nothing like super soldiers for me. I prefer just average everday joes dealing with zombie outbreak, make the zombies your classic, "one bite and you're fucked like, 1 or 2 days later"