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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6109338" data-attributes="member: 4937">If you haven't read them, definitely read: "Calibrating your expectations" and "Gandalf was a 6th level wizard".  These are two of the best essays of the 3rd edition era, and should be required reading with things like "The Seven Sentence NPC".May I suggest that if you are going to do that, you might consider having a level/class based bonus to AC.  There are going to be some balance issues I don't think you are expecting otherwise.D20 variants that are going for gritty usually do this.  One typical rule is to set the massive damage threshold at Con score, possibly also with having Con add to hit points only at 1st level (to prevent Con from being the single most important stat in the game).If you are looking for gritty gun rules, may I suggest searching for Ken Hood's Firearms pdf.   While you are at it, it might be informative to acquire a copy of Ken Hood's 'Grim and Gritty' rules set for D20 which gets rid of hit points entirely and instead tracks wounds.DR as armor has some pitfalls.  If you go with DR as armor, I highly recommend looking into the way the D20 Conan rules handle things.Also, in general, you might want to consider looking at the D20 Modern framework as the basis of your house rules for a zombie apocalypse type game rather than D&D.Anyway, my point being is that a lot of the heavy lifting of what you seem to be going for has already been done elsewhere if you know where to look.  Depending on your feelings about hit points, you might do something like D20 Modern with Conan RPG rules for armor and Ken Hood's firearm rules, or you might want to just adopt Ken Hood's 'Grim and Gritty' rules entirely.I guess that depends on the lethality you want.  I'd suggest that zombies can only bite if they've successfully entered a grapple and successfully won a grapple check to inflict damage.   Typically in my game disease and poisons keep inflicting damage every interval until you've passed two successive Fort saves, and for something like a typical 100% lethal zombie plague I'd have a 1 day interval and a Fort save above that which a player could be expect to survive by luck - say DC 26.  Thus, a player that wants to survive getting bit usually needs some sort of extraordinary medical intervention.  Or, if the PC does manage two DC 26 fort saves before dying, then you could have that be the campaign changing medical miracle - the character is now immune and a vacine can be produced from the antibodies in his blood potentially saving all of humanity.Anyway, have fun.</blockquote>

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