Zombie Dice Game as a RPG Mechanic Idea

[dm4hire]

The idea came to me of using Zombie Dice for a dice mechanic for a horror rpg. My thought is that you reverse the dice results so that what would normally be a success is now a failure with the basis being you're rolling to see if your character fails in whatever they are trying to do. When the character goes to do some activity that would be an escape you count the foot prints as sucesses. Atacks are the gun blasts and the brains are of course failure. So whatever your character is trying to do they are trying to get three of of the others before three brains come up. Thoughts?

 

[Janx]

huh?

you might want to seque into what the smurf are zombie dice.

then get into why making me more likely to fail based on me having a higher chance of success is somehow good.

 

[Thornir Alekeg]

Let me get back to you after Christmas. I bought my son Zombie Dice for Christmas, but I haven't played with them myself.

 

[DragoonLance]

Zombie Dice is a really quick, simple game of chance. The players are zombies and must eat brains before getting a face full of shotgun.

Each dice has symbols for brains, footsteps and blasts. On your turn you draw 3 dice at random and roll to see what you get. If you get brains or blasts you keep them, footsteps mean the humans ran away. You can choose to end your turn at this point, keeping any brains you ate to your total, or draw more dice and keep rolling (you have to re-roll runaways.) If you get 3 blasts your zombie got killed and you score no brains for that turn. First zombie to eat the winning number of brains wins.

The trick to the game is that the dice have different amounts of stuff making some dice easier to eat their brains (your grandma) or more shotgun blasts (the sheriff) so you have to try and guess if you should try and rack up a big score or quit before you get blasted. So red die (hard) have 50% blasts and only one brain, while easy (green) die are the opposite, and yellow die have an even amount of everything.

This would be a great mechanic for a simple zombie game I think, just reverse the dice for humans. Simple tasks would use red die, while hard ones would use green. I'm really going to have to consider building rules for this since I have both zombie dice and the "Last Night on Earth" game, but would like something a bit easier for my kids to play. They can handle Ravenloft, but just.

 

[DragoonLance]

If anyone wanted to figure out a mechanic for this type of game the three dice types available are (all six-sided dice):

Red: 3 sides blasts, 2 run away, 1 brain
Yellow: 2 sides of each
Green: 3 brains, 2 run away, 1 blast

So all dice have 33% chance of running away, yellow has the same chance of any result, while red and green have a respective 50% chance of blasts and brains with a corresponding 17% chance of the opposite.

 

[Stormonu]

The simplest use would be "get X successes before 3 failures" (sound familiar?)

For example, you could make it for an easy task, you need 3 successes. A moderate task, 6 successes. A difficult task, 9 successes. An impossible task might require 12 successes. Roll 3 dice at a time, as per the normal zombie dice rules.

You could "modify" the roll by using the different colored dice - yellow dice would be standard, add green dice for positive modifiers, red dice for negative modifiers.