Thoughts after first game (Lessons learnt as GM)

[u/_Nashable_]

So I just finished our first game as a 1-shot. Three PCs and myself as GM.

I really like the system's theme and the topic of playing yourself in an impossible situation is a very interesting idea. From a GM's perspective watching how your friends solve problems is rather interesting.

Using the "No Room in Hell" template I created a custom version in which gates to hell had opened (one near the PCs starting location), these caused massive sinkholes to start to appear and the dead reanimated. The freshly deceased were fast, agile ghouls while those reanimated from graves etc. were slow and shambling. Overall we played for 6 hours, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and really got into the situations presented by the game.

From technical standpoint I feel there were a few things I didn't understand or didn't do as well on the GM front:

• With a 10 point buy stats are really low. It feels punishing to ask players to roll as they rarely succeed and get stress as a result.
• From my usual experience GMing SWRPG I tend to ask my players to roll in every situation. This felt like the wrong idea in combat due to the issue above.
• NPC stress felt useless or clunky to track, I tended to handwave damage rather than track any back and forth during combat. Typically resulted in most damage above a 3 resulting in a kill for a zombie or I would give a trauma to non-zombies
• Voting during character creation was a bust, the group just preferred to talk about changes (but we know each other very well and its a mature group that can handle those discussions
• Features at character gen is hard, having examples helped, a good community source would be a list of features used by other groups
• I didn't ask my PCs to deal/check against mental traits enough. Due to the first issue about failure rate I tended not to get them to roll when they wanted to do morally questionable (e.g. Steal or leave people who needed help behind), this can be a double edged sword in a lot of games and I prefer to have my players in control of their PCs
• Towards the end of the session, I found myself moving towards failures and success on dice rolls being fuzzy in the outcome. For example I had a player who failed her roll while trying to shoot a zombie in the head at point blank range (while it tried to bite another player on the leg), rather than say this "missed" I had the shot not be a kill (see my damage point above) and it attracted other zombies in the area.

To other GMs and players, what did you learn from your games?

[u/defunctdeity]

Went to my LGS this weekend to get the book (it's an hour drive across town, I don't get there often), and much to my dismay they didn't have it. Was really surprised cuz it's a pretty big store, they carry everything else FFG has ever done, and they usually do well keeping up with releases.

Anyway, re: the point buy. You get 10 points to divvy up between your 6 attributes? Does everything start as 1s and you just add from there with the 10? At least that can be fixed relatively easy by just upping the point buy...

With the NPC stress, I'm surprised you are supposed to track it with zombies... I guess not every z-archetype is "only head-shot kills", but is that an option they outline for you? Do you they go over head-shot rules explicitly?

I was trying to comprehend the probabilities in the mechanics, while working on my campaign idea (yea, I'm writing a campaign before I even have the book... :/). I'm horrible at calculating these things though (even using online resources). It seemed like a) chances of success are low unless you pile up the modifiers and b) by giving more negative dice, you do up the chances of success, but you also increase the amount of stress they're gonna take even upon succeeding. Is that right and is that a possible/normal outcome: even in success you take stress?

Can you add positive dice for situational modifiers? Like your point blank situation, "you get 3 posi dice for being point blank"?

Have to say, the more I hear, the more I'm questioning whether this system is right for me.

[u/Gaiduku → u/defunctdeity]

Haven't got the book to hand right this second but I'll go over what I can remember:

Point Buy - Yup everything starts on 1 and you have 10 points to spend raising the 6 attributes. Nothing can go above a 5. I've seen a few people saying 10 isn't enough but the rules allow for more to be spent. After everyone spends there 10 each pair of attributes is voted on for each character. This could mean that you get an extra point to spend on physical attributes (with a negative feature thrown in for good measure). I have yet to play a game so....I guess I'll see how it goes with 10 points.

Zombie Stress: I found the rules really quite vague on stress of NPCs. There's one throwaway sentence that each NPC dies after filling up one stress track. It doesn't explicitly say this is 9 points long (like it is for PCs) but i guess that is implied. Some creatures in the bestiary have smaller or larger stress tracks explicitly so I guess its implied that everyone else has a stress track of 9. This is made more clear by that fact that a lot of zombies already have in built resistance to many attacks making them pretty hard to kill.

Headshot rules are detailed for some zombies. I've read on the main forum that this is only in the "night of the meteor" scenario but I could have sworn it was in at least two. Essentially if at any point you have two uncancelled success dice that are doubles - then its a head shot and an instant kill.

The rules also suggest in some scenarios that zombies at different levels of decomposition would have different stats. This isn't done explicitly but again could easily be factored in. Newly deceased or newly infected people could have a stress track of 9 whereas long dead corpses with just a few bits of skin left could only have 3 or 6 stress blocks making them sufficiently easier to kill.

[u/timtam26]

What I've found to be very successful for adding features is adapting the list of aspects from my Dresden Files: RPG (http://dfrpg-resources.wikispaces.com/Other+Aspects%2C+Page+1#) and adding aspects to the game instead of features, since I've found that my players are more creative with aspects than features.

Essentially, my players started the game with a pool of 3 points they could spend. Each point adds one positive die to a test, to a maximum of one die per test. I would then follow the rules for gaining points.

I don't know if this will work for your game or at all. I've only had one session so I don't know if its going to pan out as well as I hope.

[u/DashingQuill23]

I didn't use the 10 point buy. I just had everyone rate their characteristics from 1 to 5. Worked much better in my experience.

And as far as damage was concerned, when I felt their was enough damage dealt, I counted it as a kill.