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Message: <blockquote data-quote="phindar" data-source="post: 3343467" data-attributes="member: 37198">In the interest of full disclosure, I should point out that my players absolutely hated my zombie game.  Something that unrelentingly grim can be a tough sell, especially since players bring a certain mindset to D&D.  Its reflexive; I sold the game as "Survival Horror", I told them that the CR system was not going to be used in any form, that every encounter could be potentially overpowering, that they had no hope.  But when the minis are on the table, in D&D, the assumption is that you can take them.  Or that if you can't, there will be some way to get out of it.  It seems sort of irresponsible for a GM to put a party into a situation that is just a big, never ending pile of hungry zombies.It was the second session before the pc's figured out the undead weren't a localized phenom, and as they were running around my isolated Night of the Living Dead village I had one player state at a particularly grim moment that he was attempting to disbelieve the zombie horde.  Its not a bad reaction (it is what I'd probably do if confronted by the living dead), but everything he knew about D&D EL's and CR's ran completely counter to what he was seeing.  No matter how much I had prepped them for Survival Horror, they had D&D characters and D&D books and they were instinctively trying to play D&D; but brother, it wasn't D&D.  I would have thought it was a one-time problem, but after the first TPK in the second session, the group made higher level characters and I ran them through the Dawn of the Dead scenario in a large, abandoned city.  The first session went pretty well, but the second session we were right back where we started, with the players falling back into D&D habits and getting another TPK.  There was some bad blood after that one, and I wasn't unsympathetic to the players point.  About the only conclusion I came to from that was D&D thinking doesn't solve Survival Horror problems.</blockquote>

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