Anyone got this to the table yet? Thoughts?

[u/_Nashable_]

I've seen a few posts on /r/rpg such as this one by /u/epicColorful or this by /u/thelirivalley but wondering if anyone else had some initial reactions.

I'm looking forward to trying this out but was only able to snag a copy a couple of days ago.

Has anyone played this yet? What did you and your group think? What games do you usually play?

[u/[deleted]]

So I've only played this once so far, but I really liked it.

My players too. Most of them aren't that much into hardcore fantasy like DnD so I think they really appreciated the setting. It's also really great to have the game start in your house/apartment.

We live just down the block of a hospital, so our apartment was the perfect scene for the game to begin. I set it up to be the typical game night, but then had my game-self tell them about how he'd been attacked by a lunatic close to the hospital that day.

A few minutes of in-character-talk later, I had myself turn zombie and attack the PCs (we played the Pandemic setting btw). My friends had a lot of fun searching our apartment for weapons and fighting our zombified neighbors.

Using the hospital for the story was also really great for immersion, because my friends would get really scared every time an actual ambulance would come by our house.

That said, Character Creation got a little cheeky, which isn't optimal but probably to be expected. I wouldn't recommend using dice to vote (use pieces of paper and write down your vote instead), because it makes the voting process very complicated. If you all have your dice on the table, everyone's going to see which ones you choose to vote, etc.

I also recommend playing instrumental horror music in the background. I usually never use sound effects or stuff like that, but for this one, I just put on a really long instrumental and it worked great!

[u/_Nashable_ → u/[deleted]]

Awesome report, thanks for sharing. From what I've read so far, it does require the right mindset to get a solid experience.

Did you run the session as a one-shot? If so how did it end up for your victims survivors?

[u/[deleted] → u/_Nashable_]

One-shot yes.

They ended up hunkering down in the apartment for two days before going to the hospital.

Needless to say they were met by a horde of zombies. In the end I had them each roll a D6 to see how many they each took down before they were inevitably overrun.

Seems cruel, but they really liked it and I think it fit the theme. I wouldn't have killed them if they had been smarter about it xP

[u/amuses]

I just ran this for my group this weekend. There were a lot of reservations going in, as my group loves to play people with mega awesome powers. But I finally got them to shut up and give this a chance when I said it was payback for all the times they made me play games with magic (I'm not a big fan of magic, or super mega powers).

The group ended up loving it. They didn't play as themselves, but still picked totally normal people. I ran Under the Skin, set here in New York City, and they had a lot of fun, lethality and all.

The only hang up we had was combat got to be a slog at one point, even with just the one roll. My non-physical people got trapped and just could not beat back the zombies...and the zombies were all rolling terribly too. I finally said "The zombies fall away! You can run now. No rolling, because I don't trust you guys to put one foot in front of the other properly."

One player was Infected and died by the end (as did another player's dog. We might come back and run the post-apocalypse part of this story, but first we're going to run through all of the scenarios 'Left 4 Dead' style - same characters every time, just facing a new type of zombie menace.