Monday, May 08, 2006
Coffee Break of the Living Dead
I wanted to make a few more comments about the All Flesh Must Be Eaten adventure I ran for my Sunday night gaming group. Coffee Break of the Living Dead is essentially a Night of the Living Dead scenario in which the PCs are stuck in an office building infested with zombies. It's during the big outbreak, and the PCs seem to be the only ones left alive in the building. Get out or die trying -- that's the goal.
I'll try not to put any spoilers. I'll just comment on the game, what happened, how things went, etc.
First off, Unisystem is not a bad game system. It's fairly simple and straightforward, and because players always know what they need on a die roll to succeed, a lot of time is saved. They know instantly when they've succeeded. They don't need to ask the GM if they made their rolls or not. Very nice.
The Rule of 10 and the Rule of 1, however, don't work so well and are anything but intuitive. In fact, they're difficult to explain; and they really don't have much effect on rolls. Really, the critical success/miss thing can go too far; and when it's present, it should be stupidly simple. This is not. Very unfortunate.
Damage and life points tend to be pretty high. A reduction in both could make it a simpler game from a combat damage standpoint.
Perhaps I'm being nitpicky about those things, but really, I think the game system is pretty good despite some annoyances.
Endurance points are a bit of a pain. It makes sense that characters become fatigued, but it's difficult to tell exactly when you should assign endurance "damage." Logan seemed to think it was a bit silly to get fatigued fighing zombies with a firearm. Maybe he's right. Maybe not. Firing a gun is definitely a physical activity. Being in great personal danger at the same time and being tense would likely be fairly physically (and mentally) stressful. Still, I don't know if I was really using those rules correctly.
Survival horror is not for everybody. In fact, horror is not for everybody. Xavier expressed an intense dislike for the game in an email this morning. He also had a similar dislike for Paranoia. That's kind of too bad, as horror is one of my favourite gaming genres. AFMBE was fun for me. I'd like to run Call of Cthulhu, but it seems that would be a bad idea (Logan isn't the biggest CoC fan, either). A good portion of my gaming collection is horror, actually, and now I can't really run much of it with the Sunday night group. :(
I'm going to give Coffee Break of the Living Dead another try. The Law is very interested in playing it, so we'll drag in a handful of people at some point in the next few months (hopefully) to play the adventure. When I do run it for The Law, hopefully the decisions made will be completely different from the ones made by the group last night so I'll have a different experience with the adventure.
It would also be fun to run CBotLD as a PBeM/PbP game. :-/
I'll try not to put any spoilers. I'll just comment on the game, what happened, how things went, etc.
First off, Unisystem is not a bad game system. It's fairly simple and straightforward, and because players always know what they need on a die roll to succeed, a lot of time is saved. They know instantly when they've succeeded. They don't need to ask the GM if they made their rolls or not. Very nice.
The Rule of 10 and the Rule of 1, however, don't work so well and are anything but intuitive. In fact, they're difficult to explain; and they really don't have much effect on rolls. Really, the critical success/miss thing can go too far; and when it's present, it should be stupidly simple. This is not. Very unfortunate.
Damage and life points tend to be pretty high. A reduction in both could make it a simpler game from a combat damage standpoint.
Perhaps I'm being nitpicky about those things, but really, I think the game system is pretty good despite some annoyances.
Endurance points are a bit of a pain. It makes sense that characters become fatigued, but it's difficult to tell exactly when you should assign endurance "damage." Logan seemed to think it was a bit silly to get fatigued fighing zombies with a firearm. Maybe he's right. Maybe not. Firing a gun is definitely a physical activity. Being in great personal danger at the same time and being tense would likely be fairly physically (and mentally) stressful. Still, I don't know if I was really using those rules correctly.
Survival horror is not for everybody. In fact, horror is not for everybody. Xavier expressed an intense dislike for the game in an email this morning. He also had a similar dislike for Paranoia. That's kind of too bad, as horror is one of my favourite gaming genres. AFMBE was fun for me. I'd like to run Call of Cthulhu, but it seems that would be a bad idea (Logan isn't the biggest CoC fan, either). A good portion of my gaming collection is horror, actually, and now I can't really run much of it with the Sunday night group. :(
I'm going to give Coffee Break of the Living Dead another try. The Law is very interested in playing it, so we'll drag in a handful of people at some point in the next few months (hopefully) to play the adventure. When I do run it for The Law, hopefully the decisions made will be completely different from the ones made by the group last night so I'll have a different experience with the adventure.
It would also be fun to run CBotLD as a PBeM/PbP game. :-/
// posted by Chris @ 2:36 PM 
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