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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kzach" data-source="post: 5361871" data-attributes="member: 56189">Firstly, anyone who is playing in a Zombie Apocalypse game has to first agree not to be a whiny douche if their character dies. The simple fact of the matter is that the character IS going to die. The odds are against you surviving at all. That's kinda the point of the scenario.Once everyone accepts that it's as good as a given that their characters are going to die, you can then bring up the roleplaying requirement. Zombie Apocalypses aren't, as most people might think, all about the head-shots and ghoulishness. They're about disparate groups of people having to work together to survive and about human nature our self-destructive behaviours.If you're group isn't into roleplaying, then I think you'll find the entire situation of a Zombie Apocalypse will become boring very quickly. You need to have PC's with strong personalities and players who can be trusted to clash in game but not out of game. This is one of the few instances where you actually want someone to play an evil sonofabitch. That guy who blocks the door when you're moments away from being swarmed by an army of undead. The one who hoards the last candy bar and sleeps through his watch. But you can't kill him, 'cause he's human.The next thing you need to do, as a DM, is setup encounters that fool everyone into thinking they're completely boned, but in actual fact, the encounter is just dangerous enough to give a sense of urgency and fear but not overwhelming enough to end the game in the first session.This is... tough. It's not something you can do without knowing your group well. Some groups will find a perfectly balanced encounter to be a nightmare whilst others will breeze through it and wonder if the DM is just giving away XP.Minions, in this case, I think are essential. I would make 90% of encounters with minions and I'd say every hit on a minion is a head-shot, automatically. They're the slow moving zombies that are easy to target and hit. They're the ones that form mobs and grow into a massive swarm before you even realise how screwed you are.As for bites being lethal, this is where you really have to run with the entire concept of hit points being representative of more than just actual physical damage. A bite, for instance, turns out not to have penetrated the jeans. Everybody in the team watches you for a day or two before trusting you again. Personally, I'd probably go with a critical confirmation roll to determine whether or not bites transfer infection. Ie. if a zombie gets a crit on you, do damage as per normal but roll again. If the subsequent roll is another 20, the character is out of luck and just got infected.This can lead to some bizarre, but fun situations. The hero gets swarmed by a pack of zombies and manages to get out bruised and battered and even cut, but not infected.Head shots are your biggest problem, IMO. I would probably increase the threat range of weapons as a start, from 20 to 19-20. Any crit being a head-shot. I'd probably also say that any maximum damage roll is also a head shot, so that even if you didn't roll a 19 or 20, but you rolled maximum damage, you still hit the monster in the head. I'd do the same for kill shots, ie. the shot that reduces the zombie to 0 or fewer hit points is automatically a head-shot just by virtue of it killing the zombie.The problem with that then becomes weapons with multiple die rolls. A shotgun, for instance, you would think would be something like 4d4 or 3d6 or something. And it's more likely that a shotgun blast would blow something's head off than a single shot (and therefore single die) weapon.Some things to think about, anyway.</blockquote>

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