One of my players has really been wanting to do a zombie campaign for awhile, and I have been scratching my head for awhile to figure out how to manage this. The obvious problem being paladins and clerics who would just steal everyone's thunder. Then inspiration struck me on how to balance everyone out and make low level undead a threat.
Have the players play npc classes.
The game series Left 4 Dead played a huge amount of inspiration here for me, and I had a lot of fun adapting special infected from the game.
Anyways to keep from making this post obnoxiously long I will be using spoiler tags.
Player Creation:
Stats: 3d6. No Switching. Reroll Allowed if no statistic is over 13 or
if total modifier is +0 or less
NPC Classes Only and only one of each:
One Adept
One Aristocrat
One Expert(Experts receive one free non-combat feat at first, and
choose one save to be their high save)
One Warrior
Players receive full hit points at every level
Fast XP Track
Two Traits
No Bestiary Races
Players Start with 3 Hero Points, a boon from their Deity. A hero
point can be spent during stat rolling to re-roll 3d6.
NPC Class is Favored Class: +1 HP or Skill Point. No Variants
780 Starting Gold
Recommended Guidelines
350 Weapon
200 Protection
80 Limited Use
150 Gear
I am also working on special traits for this style of play, as I see
this for more arcade style play. and i could definently see it turning
into a lot more grind and a lot less roleplay. Most of them would be
class specific... some examples
Mass Ego - Aristocrat
You were born with silver spoon firmly in mouth, you feel entitled to
everything and have quite a superiority complex. You gain a bonus to
starting gold due to your pampered lifestyle. On the other hand your
massive ego will not allow anyone to enter a room before you, you must
always walk through a door first.
Beware The Sacrilege - Adept
You were raised to fear and hate the undead. Any undead without a
channel resistance is not allowed a will save against your positive
energy. On the other hand you have a crippling fear of touching their
dead flesh and take a -4 penalty to any roll requiring that involves
touching undead(unarmed strikes, melee touch spells, combat
maneurvers). Attacking with positive energy touch spells does not
incur this penalty.
Militia Minded - Warrior
You have seen combat and are skilled at getting others combat ready.
Your instructions in combat give your allies +1 to attack rolls,
however keeping a watchful eye on them leaves you distracted and you
take a -1 penalty to saving throws.
Pig Farmer - Expert
You start play with your prize pig. The pig behaves just like a normal
animal of its kind, its keen scent is very good at tracking down food
supplies. You may slaughter your prize pig for to supply food for your
party, the succulent choice meats giving the party the will to live
and grants a +2 to either attack rolls, skill checks, or saving throws
for 24 hours. However the smell of that clings to you increases the
chance of encounter of undead with the Scent ability.
Bloody Mess - Any Class(And why yes I do LOVE fallout)
People tend to die around you in the most HORRIBLE manner. Whenever you make an attack, treat your threat range as though it were doubled. Whenever you are attacked, the attacker treats its crit range as thought it was doubled.
So I guess the idea here is for more arcade style action than normal. I am toying with other ideas such as stealing the critical charts from Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader, and having players not go unconscious when below 0, simply staggered and with the chance of taking critical damages from the chart(losing limbs and such).
The plan is to make the basic rules for random encounter hordes and the special infected's statistics. Then we can pass those around my group whenever someone wants to DM a session, with players coming up campaign modules beforehand that they can run the party through. Also when a player dies, instead of having them sit around until they discover the player's new character, you can pass off special-type zombie pages to the dead players at the table when they come up. Allow them to play against the party, less work for you and more fun for them, even better is if you give them an incentive, a hero point for a pc kill, an extra feat for your next character if you manage to wipe them out.
Anyways I definitely want to hear you guy's comments and ideas, if people want me to post some of the specials I adapt or make I can do so, also if anyone wants to try this out and playtest I would love feedback on that.
Thanks for reading, and as always remember to aim for the head.
The Aristocrat and the Warrior are going to outpace everyone else in survivability, because they get heavy armor and tower shield proficiency. The Warrior gets a d10 HD, too. In a frantic, battle-based L4D-type campaign, they'd be able to turtle up and slow everyone else down. The Adept is going to be super-squishy - with a D6 HD and 1/2 BAB progression, their mediocre spellcasting is not going to pick up the slack.
Expect a lot of Humans with Cleave, if you're throwing hojillions of wussy mobs at them.
Just basically make sure everyone knows you're going to die every ten seconds, and as long as that's the tone of the game, it shouldn't be too bad.
it may very well need some tweaking, depending on how poor adepts do, I may switch out their familiar ability with channel energy. still the main thing I want to try to get here is that the party has to stick together and work together to keep EVERYONE alive, because they are screwed otherwise. And yes the Warrior and Adept are going to have the highest odds of survivability, the expert is going to be needed for his skills(in the city I am working on for this I am making sure that every skill is useful at least at one point or another, I am planning on throwing out some scrolls here and there to allow the adept to shine a bit more, and I see a lot of the party's ability to proceed down certain paths attributing to the expert's choice of skills.
Still I do see your point Llama and I thank you for your input, I will most definitely take it into account as I am designing
I do like the base idea of suing NPC classes. I might try something similar as a one-shot.
Also, instead of the crit charts from there, you can also use Paizo's Critical Hits deck, which is a neat thing.
With the loss of class abilities, you could expand the use of certain skills, up to and including the healing provided by the heal skill.
The problem with standard D&D is that it assumes a certain level of "superhero" tone in combat. Take a beating at full strength until you fall unconscious, etc.
You've kinda started addressing this with the whole "staggered below 0" thing, but what you could do is something like the following:
1. When at full health, you have a +2 bonus to all rolls. This is easier than applying a penalty when injured, since you are probably going to spend most of your time at least partially injured in this kind of game.
2. Have a threshold of hitpoints that are considered a "base". This is where you can get to when you catch your breath (get a few moments, a round or two, of inactivity/not being threatened).
This can be a percentage of hitpoints, or 1 hp per hitdie + X, or whatever.
When below this threshold, you have a -2 to all rolls.
3. Allow the heal skill by itself to get someone to this "base" state quicker (even from staggered, such as below 0 but not dead).
Allow using a healer's kit to bring them up higher, but without the 1 hour time requirement that the normal rules need.
4. Allow a healer's kit and a high DC to bring someone back to life if they died within a short period (rounds).. perhaps a scaling difficulty depending on how long they've been dead, etc.
What this will do is give a gradation of effect on health, which can add to the sense of dread as things get ever closer to death. When you start seeing people dying or getting near death around you, but if you can make it to a defensible position, you bring people back up to a crippled surviving state and limp onward.
On the flip side, it gives the group an expanded way to survive, without relying totally on magic or class abilities.
It also means the Expert (who is likely to have a greater skill base) can be an effective healer alongside the adept, if built that way... and technically anyone would be able to pick up some ability to do this if needed (putting a few skill ranks into heal, if not having a high Wisdom).
While the -2 and critical decks could mean the party is in for some perpetual pain and crippled state... the added functionality of healing can mean they will stick around longer than 10 minutes of play.
wow that is a really great concept Kaisoku. I am definently going to try that system out. I will tinker around with it a bit and come up with some dcs and the like, as this is exactly the kind of thing I think this session needs, and it sure as hell beats having cure light potions everywhere like medpacks(a little TOO arcade i feel).
What I am thinking is this
100% HP
+2 to d20 rolls
50% HP
Baseline
No Penalty or Bonus
0 HP
Staggered
-1 HP standard/strenuous action
-2 to d20 rolls
Halfway to Death
Staggered
-1 HP standard/strenuous action
-2 to d20 rolls
Subject to Critical Charts
DEAD
DC 20 Heal check will revive to 0 so long as it occurs within number of rounds equal to the corpse's HD. Add +1 for each round after.
hmmm i don't think that is quite perfect... still needs some tinkering. still tinkering with that particular system can probably wait till after a playtest or two.
These were ideas I'd been mulling over for an E6 game, where access to 5th level spells (and thus raise dead) was way beyond the 3rd level spell cap.
You may even want to consider E6 or some version. Basically, cap out the bonuses at a certain point and just give feats after a while. That way your 1st level zombies, sent as a hoard, don't get completely overwhelmed by 15th level Warrior's ridiculously high BAB.. or an Adept's 5th level spells, etc.
I guess if you intend to go the full gamut of undead, right up to vampires, liches and greater wraiths (oh my!), then you might need the high levels.
If you intend to keep it downplayed with just some "special undead" being the only bump in difficulty, then having a ton of pluses might really feel empty for the players, where having more and more feats (giving more options) will feel more appropriate.
It also keeps the feel of "all the heroes are gone", so that the players are stuck at fairly mundane levels of ability... so they'll be forced to survive by wit and tactics more often than having a +30 to a roll.
...
Speaking of hoards of zombies.. I've been thinking of trying a set of rules to expand the "swarm" template ideas towards larger sized creatures. Treat a pile of medium sized zombies like you would a swarm instead of rolling for individual attacks, etc.
This works better for the slower but inevitable doom style zombies, while having the "fast zombies" as individuals running down a PC or two might make for an alternative that sticks with the normal rules (thinking Romero zombies in that instance).
I am unfamiliar with E6, however i am sure google will serve me well there. Well the basic plan is to actually have these be smaller sessions, if the players manage get out of the city, then they pretty much have won the campaign. Pretty much the max I can see one of these sessions getting to is level 5. More bite sized scenarios based off of these rules and concepts, and then you can switch out locales, or the players can run through the same locale and try out different things with the DM switching things up in that location.
I actually had a zombie army my players had to fight against while fighting a shadow elemental. Basically I treated it like a hazard, you take slam damage each turn you are in the horde, you can attack and if you deal damage you kill a zombie and can take his place and take a 5-foot step. Channeling was the key as a cleric could clear 30 ft spaces. The b$&!% of it was that when you cleared the spaces, they filled right back up on the horde's turn. It had a heap of hit points, but wasnt too bad. The horde could also attempt to grapple the player, however the players were good enough at this point that they could get out after awhile and they had two clerics... It was an interesting idea and I may try it here... I never actually got to use that encounter because they got teleported out of the darklands and into the mwangi expanse by a chaos fiend... wow that campaign got strange. sorry tangent.
One of the things I am wanting to do is have there be something special for all of the knowledge skills, so that when the players pick one they get an immediate in game bonus at the start. knowledge local would allow the players a map of the city. knowledge religion would allow them to know some knowledge of special types of zombies. etc. I also am going to put in some other survivors... some who have just lost their minds, and thats when you need conversation skills. i mean you can survive without them.. but it would have been nice if you could have talked that woman holing up in the tavern to give you her magic crossbow.
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I did something like this a while ago (in 3.5). To circumvent the issue of Clerics and Paladins, (who by no means shouldn't steal the thunder here), I made the zombie apocalypse a necromantic disease. In essence, I treated the zombies as living targets, allowing for crits and some other options that normally do not affect undead, and the "disease" inside of them to be affected be positive/negative energy only 50% of the time, (essentualy the actual body provided cover).
I also went a bit further in that the zombies could only die a few ways.
1.) is a Coup de Grace after droping them by Hit Point Damage.
2.) brain damage, (or decapitation or bodily vaporization, etc. . .)
3.) Nat 20 crits, (all others are treated as normal hits)
4.) final HP damage is dealt by positive energy effect (90%)
Everything else made them drop like normal, but I would roll a d20 every time, and when I rolled a 20 they got right back up with full "HP". If there where a lot, I would just roll a d10 and thats how many rounds they would tae to revive.
A couple of things...
First, I agree that if all you are worried about is the Cleric/Paladin issue then simply declaring that the zombies are the result of a plague and aren't effected by channel energy should suffice, though a zombie adventure using NPC classes does sound fun, for a night or two at least, I'm not sure you could make a campaign out of it.
Second, if you're looking for inspiration, Madhouse's latest anime is an adaption of the Highschool of the Dead manga.
The plot's fairly standard Romero fare, a bunch of high school students banding together to survive and find their families during a zombie apocalypse. But the animation is well done, and while the characters are pretty stereotypical anime high school students none of them are written as idiots. It also helps that the standard anime teenage angst is dialed down quite a bit.
I like that idea Beckett... I may make a variant zombie type like that... could definently be intriguing... if nothing else it would be great to throw those at my party after doing a few of these campaigns and seeing the look on their faces when I say "okay, the horde gets back up, their wounds closing as they do so"
and Firest, thanks for the recommendation, I had seen some of Highschool of the Dead and yeah... it really is not my bag personally, just far too much fan service for me to sit through the episodes.