First thoughts on of The End of the World: Zombie Apocalypse

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TheFlatline
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First thoughts on of The End of the World: Zombie Apocalypse

Post by TheFlatline »

So on a lark for something different I coughed up 20 bucks for the PDF of FFG's End of the World Zombie Apocalypse game. It's the first of 4 apocalypse games coming out from FFG, and ironically probably the one I'm least interested in (the other 4 being Aliens, The Gods of Old coming back (not sure if Cthulhu or Zeus or whatever), and Machines Take Over). However, I wanted something new to read and fuck it.

Few things first off. This is a translation of a Spanish-language RPG that's been kicking around for a while I guess. They mention it on the FFG web site but don't talk it up much. Probably because they want 40 bucks a book for a 120 page count book. 20 bucks for the PDF. Which is all kinds of ass-reaming. I mean, Numenera's core book runs 20 bucks for the PDF. So for something that basically cost licensing and translation fees from FFG, they're charging a metric assload. Critics on the forum also note (and probably rightly so) that the mechanics system is basically the same across all 4 games and so you'll be paying 40 bucks a pop for only 50% new material after the first book. In this case, I would have actually liked to see a nWOD approach as odd as it sounds, where you buy the core book and one scenario, like zombies, since zombies are going to be your hot seller, and then sell the splat books for 20 bucks a pop for alternate scenarios. The problem I see here is that you'd be charging 20 bucks for *about* 60 pages of content.

There are two "catches" to TEOTW- first, you're nominally supposed to play yourself. You whack out a character sheet of yourself and the group is supposed to vote to tweak your sheet. Second, the game specifically states that this is meant to be a one-shot or short campaign. While there are character advancement rules, the whole system is set up that you will suffer party attrition and really the improvement system isn't meant to be long term.

So with all that in mind, it's a hard sell financially with such a high price point yet limited play depth. But whatever, let's take a look at how the world ends.

Mechanically, we're looking at a D6 system. You have 6 stats to a character, each stat rating 1-6, which consist of an "offensive" and "defensive" stat for physical, mental, and social. When you want to do something, you add 1 die to your roll pool. If you have people helping you or tools, you add a die. If you have a relevant advantage (some descriptor that you pick at the beginning of the game) you add a die. Etc etc... Rolling under your stat is a hit. Also, when you roll, the GM will add difficulty dice. The difficulty varies but usually is 1-3. If you have a relevant trauma (semi-permanent injuries and setbacks), you add difficulty dice rated to the trauma to the pool. The difficulty gets rolled. Matching numbers on the difficulty dice to the player's dice pool cancel out. Uncancelled difficulty dice turn into stress.

Stress is your immediate hit points. Each of the three stat categories has a track of 9 stress points, 3 points per level. Filling any stress meter up to 9 basically kills you (there is a chance to survive but it's pretty ugly and hard). Every stress meter you fill up lets you soak 1 point of relevant stress. So stress 3-5 let's you ignore 1 stress inflicted, and stress 6-8 let you ignore 2 stress. So as you can see, pretty much doing anything is going to generate stress pretty quickly. Which nominally would result in death. However, there is a mechanic that lets you deal with the stress. That would be Trauma

Trauma is what you can choose to accumulate when you have a chance to catch a breather. If you get 5 minutes to gather yourself, or take a breath, or check yourself over, you can choose to shift stress over into trauma. You gain a relevant trauma to your situation with a magnitude of 1 per every tier of stress that you have any points in. So 4 points of stress will equal a level 2 trauma. Doing that resets your trauma though to 0. You can only ever have 3 traumas per category at once. If you get a 4th trauma for whatever reason you die instantly (or go insane, or go catatonic completely).

Trauma can heal. The level of severity shows the relative amount of down time necessary to roll a heal check. Level 1 trauma takes a day of rest. Level 2 takes a week. Level 3 takes a month. If you succeed, it downgrades a level. This means, oddly enough, that broken legs heal completely in as fast as 5 weeks. Whatever it's a narrative right?

Anyway the system is pretty brutal. Combat inflicts stress and weapons add stress onto your combat roll, so combat is pretty straightforward and simple. However, considering that nearly everything accumulates stress, it's up to the GM to really stay on top of difficulty levels and control the pacing of the story or you'll end up with a TPK and everyone grumbling.

Anyway, that's the first half of the book. It's intentionally simplified, with a few exceptions like "your inventory is what you have on you or near you at char gen. Seriously, write down the change in your pocket and the percentage of battery life on your cell phone. This is a limited resource". GM notes suggest that this is a game of managing resources and trying to survive, and to beat that in over and over again. I find the GM notes discussing pacing to be lacking though. A good zombie film/story requires good pacing.

Next up are the 4 zombie apocalypse scenarios. I'll type those up tomorrow.
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Post by Reynard »

Stats are 1-5, if I remember correctly.
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Post by Username17 »

Do you count hits on a per die basis or something? Rolling more dice would seem to make it harder to roll under something and canceling dice would seem to make it easier.

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Post by Tannhäuser »

FrankTrollman wrote:Do you count hits on a per die basis or something? Rolling more dice would seem to make it harder to roll under something and canceling dice would seem to make it easier.

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They do count per die, it's like playing SR3 or old World of Darkness, with variable target numbers and dice pools, except it's roll under.

Also, the way you can get stressed for taking any kind of action really discourages taking actions that the GM can call for a roll for. It's really bugging me in the campaign I'm in.
Last edited by Tannhäuser on Tue Feb 24, 2015 7:40 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Reynard »

I gave it a cursory look (by the second page I decided I'd rather step on d4 than actually play it), so I might be wrong (also sleep deprivation). But the task resolution was this:


1. GM decides what dice you will roll every time (game was a bit OCD about this), but players are explicitly supposed to "get creative" with whatever could give them bonus to rolls and beg GM to give them that bonus. Both things were actually written there.

Positive Pool gets a minimum of [1 plus whatever characteristic GM chooses] dice.

2. Roll 2 dicepools (positive and negative) simultaneously.

3. Remove matching pairs of dice in both pools. I.e. 2 in positive and 2 in negative. Not 2-2 in positive or 2 in positive and 2-2 in negative.

4. If at least one remaining die in Positive Pool "rolled under" (equal to or lower than your stat) you got yourself a success. If several dice rolled under - that's greater degree of success.

5. Number of negative dice remaining is the Stress points you get (add to one of several kinds of Stress and subtract Resistance).


I was actually laughing at this point, so that might not have been the end of it.
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Post by TheFlatline »

FrankTrollman wrote:Do you count hits on a per die basis or something? Rolling more dice would seem to make it harder to roll under something and canceling dice would seem to make it easier.

-Username17
Yeah sorry I was writing that during my free moments at work and didn't proofread like I should have. On review it came out muddled.

It's a roll-under system that counts hits.

Also, Reynard is correct your stats can't raise above a 5.

Anyway, the resolution system is basically correct. There's a few smaller things. The idea is that anything you do is probably going to cause you stress. There's a lot of bitching about this in the forums, probably rightly so. There are house rules varying anywhere from any negative dice that roll above your stat and aren't cancelled out are stress to surplus hits can cancel out negative dice to a few other ideas to make the game less lethal.

Basically there's no real long-term survival chances in the game. There's also this weird state where if you're hanging onto life by a thread you're harder to kill because you soak significant amounts of stress. The system as written almost seems adversarial between the players and the GM because doing anything is meant to have the real risk of harming you somehow, so that means that players will be avoiding rolls and GMs will be basically attacking the PCs every time a roll is made that has difficulty dice.

It's... not a great system. I get the idea that it reflects a war of attrition but it seems particularly harsh to me. The only way you *don't* TPK in one game day is by spacing things out and giving the PCs time to heal their trauma, which can take anywhere from a day to a week to a month.
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Post by Username17 »

If you wanted to do something like that, it seems obvious that what you should do is roll a big pile of stress dice at the beginning of a scene and let people cancel stress dice out with each action. So it encourages action instead of inaction. Thematically then, if you run out of stuff to do, the zombie horde comes and overwhelms you. Also thematically, victory in a scene is merely escaping without being broken down.

I don't know if you'd bother with trying to keep the roll under thing, but probably not. If your chainsaw attack removes a stress 4 and a stress 5, who gives a shit if it "succeeded" or not?

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Post by Aryxbez »

I saw this game awhile back, wasn't really interested in playing "myself", though now I feel interested in it, dammit. I myself am really into Zombie Apocalypse scenarios, to point I kinda want to make my own RPG of it. Though I'm not sure what mechanics would be best for such a game, how you'd make varied 6-man parties of mundane folk, and so on. Since it seems they're more like "scenarios" to do in a pre-existing RPG, possibly some dicepool mechanic (generic dice-pool game seems hard to find), or just use FATE?

Anywho, why do so many systems use Roll-Under with varying degrees of success, compared to your own stat? For Rules-lite games, I get its easier to not have to make up DC's that way, as it's all on the PC's capability. Though why people think degrees of success is easier when rolling low, I don't understand (least AFMBE got it right to roll high for degrees of success).
FrankTrollman wrote:If you wanted to do something like that, it seems obvious that what you should do is roll a big pile of stress dice at the beginning of a scene and let people cancel stress dice out with each action.
TheFlatline, how doable is this houserule for that system? Especially compared to the other "houserules" on the forum for that game? If Frank is informed of the RPG or read it, then I inquire to him of this as well.
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Post by TheFlatline »

It's doable. The mechanics are there to vaguely represent what you're capable of and to accumulate life-ending stress as you try to survive a hostile environment. That's the two mechanical "themes" of the game. It pitches itself as a "rules lite" game so really you could probably do anything up to and including a lightweight Minds Eye Theater where you get adjectives to describe yourself and you bid them in rock-paper-scissors. If you lose all your traits you die or are out.

I mean, any resolution system that emphasises survival would fit the bill here mechanically. The scenarios are all non-systemic enough that it's not a big deal to plug them into anything that tickles your fancy.

But, and I'll get to this when I get into the scenarios, they're all ideas we're familiar with. You could probably stop and think of the 5 zombie senarios they list in the book.

Think for a minute.

Okay so the scenarios are: Radiation from meteors turns all dead creatures into ghouls but aren't infectious (Night of the Comet anyone?), Hell is full (aka Romero zombies and are infectious), zombies are meat puppets (thing The Thing meets zombies), 28 days later zombies, voodoo zombies taken over by voodoo masters bent on ruling the world (the serpent and the rainbow? This is probably the borderline most offensive of the lot).

You probably could write each chapter on your own right now from just those queues. There's some useful stuff in here, and post-zombie-apocalypse scenarios if you want to take things to a more extreme. The most meat is probably in the post apocalypse scenarios.

Strangely enough, between the apocalypse and the aftermath scenarios, I kind of want to run a game based on The Stand after reading the book.
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Post by Tannhäuser »

There also seems to be a real lack of resisting actions; you do something and it succeeds or fails based on the character taking the action, with little change based on who the action is being taken against. I might be wrong about this, since this is all based on playing, and not reading much of the rulebook.

Treating zombies as a big ball of stress would be interesting.
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Post by TheFlatline »

There are opposed tests in the game, where the most hits/highest relevant stat on ties wins. Both sides have negative pools, so you may win but rack up way more stress than the loser or vice versa.

I'll try to get to the scenarios today. Yesterday I was exhausted and had a splitting headache and am lucky I was functional all day.
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Post by Username17 »

If I was going to redo this game from scratch, I would make there be a big pile of dice, most of which are rolled at the beginning of the day as 'threat'. Every action people take involves rolling a small pile of dice based on their stats and equipment. Every die can be used to cancel one of the dice in the threat pool with the same number. But if you don't have any dice left in your rolled pile, you don't succeed. And if you don't have a 5 or 6 left in your pool, you lose something.

That would encourage action and create death spirals. About all you want in a "survive the zombies" type game.

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Post by TheFlatline »

FrankTrollman wrote:If I was going to redo this game from scratch, I would make there be a big pile of dice, most of which are rolled at the beginning of the day as 'threat'. Every action people take involves rolling a small pile of dice based on their stats and equipment. Every die can be used to cancel one of the dice in the threat pool with the same number. But if you don't have any dice left in your rolled pile, you don't succeed. And if you don't have a 5 or 6 left in your pool, you lose something.

That would encourage action and create death spirals. About all you want in a "survive the zombies" type game.

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I think you just *did* rewrite the system. It wasn't that complicated to begin with.
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Post by Username17 »

After having thought about it a bit more, I think you should need to keep a 3 or 4 to avoid losing ground to zombies and keep a 5 or 6 to avoid losing an item. If you do something risky, you also have to keep a 1 or 2 to avoid getting bit.

people have base dicepool traits in the 2 to 4 range and you can't spam actions. Equipment is worth 1 to 4 dice but you risk the item you're using if you get no 5+ to keep.

Add some chargen, do some MC advice, and set some threat levels and it sounds like we're pretty much done.
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Post by Shatner »

FrankTrollman wrote:After having thought about it a bit more, I think you should need to keep a 3 or 4 to avoid losing ground to zombies and keep a 5 or 6 to avoid losing an item. If you do something risky, you also have to keep a 1 or 2 to avoid getting bit.

people have base dicepool traits in the 2 to 4 range and you can't spam actions. Equipment is worth 1 to 4 dice but you risk the item you're using if you get no 5+ to keep.

Add some chargen, do some MC advice, and set some threat levels and it sounds like we're pretty much done.
If you were using an item, would you need to keep both a 3-4 and a 5-6 to prevent losing an item and losing ground, or would the 5-6 cover both?

If you need both, items of value 1 and 2 would be short-use if not outright disposable since their average contribution to your pool would not cover their own preservation (i.e. you need to add three dice to on average get the extra 5-6 needed to keep the item adding the extra dice in the first place). Would that be a bug or a feature?
Last edited by Shatner on Thu Feb 26, 2015 8:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

A 1 die item would basically use up its own die if you wanted to keep it. Still advantageous in that more dice gives greater chances of getting specific numbers you need to cancel in the threat pool.

But yes, I consider that a feature.

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Post by Shatner »

FrankTrollman wrote:A 1 die item would basically use up its own die if you wanted to keep it. Still advantageous in that more dice gives greater chances of getting specific numbers you need to cancel in the threat pool.

But yes, I consider that a feature.

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That's fine, I just think the game fluff should be cognizant of that behavior to improve immersion. So 1-die items would be things like a two-by-four, a corner-store first aid kit, or a barely functioning truck where having them work once and then break/be exhausted is fine and them continuing to help out is a perk of rolling really well and not actually needing them in the first place.

2-die items would be lost just under half the time they end up being needed (4/9 chance of not rolling a 5-6 on either of two dice), so we're looking at a gun prone to jamming, a sturdy bat or hammer which could break or get lodged in a zombie, or a flashlight which ran out of batteries.

3-die items should be expected to stick around except when the shit hits the fan or the universe hates you, like a crank flashlight breaking, a well-serviced gun getting grabbed out of your hand and lost in the zombie advance, or a decent car flipping for no damn reason along a country road.
Image

4-die items should be awesome and/or character defining like finding an authentic katana, a zombie-proofed humvee, or a full set of riot armor. The sort of thing where a character would be expected to whine about losing during downtime.
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Post by TheFlatline »

So you have that big pile of threat starting at the day. Do you *have* to cancel out pairs? Or do you choose to ignore them and risk that they become overwhelming?

The only issue I can see with *having* to cancel out pairs is that odds are you're going to fail like a motherfucker in the morning.

I guess I'm not clear on how the threat dice would work. But I'm digging the ideas so far.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Maybe instead of "per day" you'd roll the pile of threat per scene, and at the end of the scene leftover dice distribute to the PCs as stress relevant to the scene?
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Post by Username17 »

Per scene seems reasonable enough, although since you are going to be forced to give ground repeatedly, "scene" is going to necessarily be a fluid concept. You also need a rule against action spamming to prevent people from just repeatedly scavenging or whatever.

Speaking of which, you need a scavenging gimmick mechanic. My thought would be that you can get an item valued at the number of dice you set aside that have the same number.

Also I think every time you give ground there should be an extra threat die rolled.

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Post by Grek »

TheFlatline wrote:So you have that big pile of threat starting at the day. Do you *have* to cancel out pairs? Or do you choose to ignore them and risk that they become overwhelming?

The only issue I can see with *having* to cancel out pairs is that odds are you're going to fail like a motherfucker in the morning.

I guess I'm not clear on how the threat dice would work. But I'm digging the ideas so far.
I think the idea is that you don't have to cancel pairs, but if you have any uncancelled threat left over at the end of the day, the zombies get into your base and start eating people.
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Post by TheFlatline »

FrankTrollman wrote:Per scene seems reasonable enough, although since you are going to be forced to give ground repeatedly, "scene" is going to necessarily be a fluid concept. You also need a rule against action spamming to prevent people from just repeatedly scavenging or whatever.

Speaking of which, you need a scavenging gimmick mechanic. My thought would be that you can get an item valued at the number of dice you set aside that have the same number.

Also I think every time you give ground there should be an extra threat die rolled.

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I'd probably describe a "scene" as a goal or something similar. So if you're scaveging, your "scene" is your attempt to scavenge. You may end up running across half the town because you're falling back/dealing with zeds but it's still one "scene".

I like the idea of adding back threat dice every time you give ground to an enemy.

Obviously if you're not using an item you don't have to worry about it breaking, and if you're in a situation where there's no zeds you don't particularly have to worry about bites or losing ground to zombies necessarily. Or maybe safe zones/walled up houses/re-purposed prisons can soak a number of "fall backs" and "zombie bites" per day. Maintenance can help but that means it's still possible to have zombies overrun the place in the middle of a tense negotiation or social interaction.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Grek wrote:
TheFlatline wrote:So you have that big pile of threat starting at the day. Do you *have* to cancel out pairs? Or do you choose to ignore them and risk that they become overwhelming?

The only issue I can see with *having* to cancel out pairs is that odds are you're going to fail like a motherfucker in the morning.

I guess I'm not clear on how the threat dice would work. But I'm digging the ideas so far.
I think the idea is that you don't have to cancel pairs, but if you have any uncancelled threat left over at the end of the day, the zombies get into your base and start eating people.
I could see it going both ways. Forcing canceling pairs would necessitate smaller threat pools so that players actually stood a chance of succeeding. In that event I'd say that every time you didn't roll an uncancelled 3-4 the threat pool regenerated or increased at a certain rate, perhaps related to how dangerous the overall scene is. This sort of deals with action spamming because even rolling 4D6 with no threat at all you still might not roll a 3-4 and the threat accumulates.

If you made canceling optional, you could roll larger threat pools and the game would shift in tone to narrative. Players would choose when they succeed at the risk of the hammer coming down at the end of the scene. The GM would have to not let players spam actions to wear down the threat pool and develop a sense of when to cut the scene.

I see benefits to either solution. It'd change the tone of the game kind of fundamentally I think.
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Post by TheFlatline »

Another interesting thought on how

Primarily, I was wondering how combat would work. In at least man vs horde, your threat pile actually is, again, in the abstract, your horde. Combat successes could modify your threat pool by removing dice out of it, just like zombie overrun could add dice.

Another idea. If we're going with the smaller dice pools and mandatory threat cancellations and we want the spiral of death as things get out of control, not rolling a 3-4 means that you roll additional threat dice equal to how many threat dice are showing 3-4, minimum of 1 die. Or would that be too much of a death spiral?
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Post by TheFlatline »

Necro'ing this thread as there's been mentions of the idea being appealing to some people.

I think I have a basic idea of how the threat pile and the "scenes" would work out, as Frank was saying that "scenes" are a fluid concept as you're constantly giving up ground to the zombies.

So instead of scenes, you have goals. One or two sentences that frames the action. The threat pool regenerates for each new goal.

"We need to forage for food"
"We have to save Jim!"
"We're meeting to trade with another group of survivors"
"We need material to reinforce our barricades"

Things like that which grow organically out of the story.

System intent: Give players some control over the story. Players can choose to succeed almost at any point in their actions but there will be potential consequences to just picking up a success.

System overview:

Evaluate the goal and figure out the steps necessary to complete it successfully. Foraging for food might require scouting to find the food and then a certain number of hits once a food source is found to represent enough food to survive on for X days or whatever (Say, 2 hits is enough to keep one person adequately fed for one day), then getting successfully back to the base of operations.

Threat pool is then built based on the zed hoard (say, rating 1-10, with examples of how heavy the zeds are), scene dice (basically environmental dangers), Goal difficutly (raiding a canned goods warehouse is going to be easier than hunting for game) and maybe other misc modifiers that you can chart out easily enough.

Roll the threat pile for the goal.

1. You roll your dice pool. Stats, items, assistance/situation modifier.
2. Cancellations are optional.
3. Spend your dice:
A. Any number: Hits
B. 1-2: Avoid being bit or injured or stressed if doing something risky
C. 3-4: Avoid being pushed back by zeds or suffering a scene setback
D. 5-6: Preserve any items you may be using.
4. At the end of the scene, un-cancelled dice are totaled and the total is either inflicted as stress on each participant in the goal or perhaps divided evenly among the players or even let the players divy up the stress however they prefer. I'd like to hear opinions on this.
5. If an action doesn't spend a 3-4 to keep the zeds at bay, additional threat dice are added to the pool. Potentially the number of dice added is based on the threat pool: Results of 3 or 4 in the threat pool add dice, minimum dice added equal to initial zombie hoard rating (or 1 or whatever).
6. I'm going back and forth on if the threat pool is re-rolled every round. So the situation shifts fluidly as players act. I kind of like that. Zeds come in and wander off, etc...
7. If we're doing walking dead style zombies, stuff like guns and loud noises will add threat dice to the pool potentially. I'd probably trigger it like if you don't spend a 3-4 the pool "pops". Which would really suck if you don't roll a 3-4 to begin with and use something like a gun. You'd get a double-whammy.

Run for your life!: You can choose to quit any time you like. I'd probably create some penalty- Roll the threat pool one last time. Cancelled 5-6 loses objects while you run. Each 3 or 4 counts as double stress. each uncancelled 1-2 results in a bite or a substantial injury. Story wise it could also result in a significant setback. Like losing your base.

The stress system from EOTW works fairly well as abstract damage/punishment. I probably would do some minor modifications on this.

Chargen probably would be point buy, as Frank mentioned stats 2-4. I might add some quick rules for "what was your career before?" that would give you one or two general fields you could get maybe a +1 die bonus in.

All you need at that point is a contested (human vs human) resolution system and I think I can start writing this thing up for playtest.

The only thing I can mentally think of that might suck is that the system encourages players to deal with the threat pile before trying to achieve their goal. Once the threat pile empties out you are home clear. Which you know isn't necessarily a *bad* thing. Designed right you could make that a total risk to spiral out of control the longer you engage the threat pile. I'm totally open to ideas.
Last edited by TheFlatline on Thu Oct 22, 2015 9:13 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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