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Message: <blockquote data-quote="QuietBrowser" data-source="post: 7077369" data-attributes="member: 6855057">Here's something you want to think about before doing anything: just how lethal do you want your "not!Walkers" to be? The Walking Dead is basically set in a world where zombies might only be doing d6+1 damage with their bite, but even a 20th level character only has 1+Con bonus hit points; it's an entirely different paradigm to the "heroes are tough and powerful" one assumed in D&D.Secondly, I just want to point out that horror is a subjective thing in its own right, but trying to evoke horror through powerlessness... is a very fine tightrope to walk. Sometimes it can work, but it can easily backfire, making your players be not so much scared as annoyed. You have to remember; characters being in danger aren't the same as the players being in danger, and that disconnection can act as a buffer.And, truth be told, I don't think you even need powerlessness to make horror work. I'm a big fan of Dead Island and Nazi Zombie Trilogy; in both of those games, you're nowhere near as vulnerable as the survivors are in the Walking Dead, but you still feel the horror in them from both the practical (how many zombies are coming? Got to make each blow count or you'll run out of combat for the next attack!) and the atmospheric attributes used in those games. I'm not scared of the zombies themselves, I'm scared of the situation, of the world I'm in, of the things I'm seeing. In Dead Space 2, once I have my Plasma Cutter, I'm scared because I can hear people around me screaming, fleeing, dying, I can hear myself being stalked, I can find the detritus of what were once people, and even if I can protect myself, I can't do anything to save them.There's an art to scary zombies, really, and it mostly depends on the world-building rather than the shamblers themselves. Oh, and avoid getting too preachy with them, because that hamfisted symbolism is what ruined Romero's post-Night works.</blockquote>

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