Zombie Survival (Would love feedback!)

MMO? It depends on how complex it will be. There are some very complex board games out there. Its a matter of audience.

I may not be willing to slog through a 50 page rule set but some people are and some people like complex systems. It gives them a big game space to explore.

Sounds like you could easily produce this as a sourcebook for an existing system - GURPs, D&D (sounds contemporary Ravenloft) or d20, Call of Cthulu, etc. Which is kind of what Fhizban suggests. There's still quite a thirst for roleplaying games out there (we regularly play one called Blood and Treasure which is a lulu.com that is based heavily (read almost copied) from D&D).

In my experience roleplayers are more willing to read through lots of pages of rules for an RPG, than boardgamers would for a boardgame - but then they're very different beasts (the games and often the gamers! ;-)).

A quick search on google brought back some hits for forum roleplaying in this vein, but nothing published that I could see.

HTH

Sounds like an interesting concept!

I'm not a die-hard RPGer, but I've played lots of different systems in bits and pieces. One that you might want to have a look at is Savage Worlds. While I don't think they've done the zombie apocalypse thing, they do have a campaign setting which is WWII with zombies. They may even have a Wild West meets zombies.

They've done some things really well - they built the system to revolve more around story than combat (though it does obviously have a combat system), and it is a pretty easy game for a Game Master to get an adventure going.

Anyway, thought it might be interesting for comparison purposes.

http://www.peginc.com/games/savage-worlds/

Good luck!

Cheers,
BadStrategist

Just some feedback off-the-cuff, but I don't think that it's so much a question of whether you are getting too complicated or not, as much as it's an issue of how you choose to present whatever degree of complexity is involved.

Consider the specific setting of this zombie apocalypse of yours, and the caravan concept that you want to incorporate. Where are your characters starting at, and where are they heading off to, and why are they heading there? A zombie apocalypse can encompass a multiplicity of different possible scenarios. You do the choosing between them, and then try to offer it to prospective players in such a way that their anticipation outweighs the cost to the player, in terms of time and thought invested to grasp a given rule that you incorporate.

In the very first sentence of your posting in this thread, you stated, " There is really no "winning" in the traditional sense." That bit prompted me to think, 'Hey, what if the object is to survive - over the long term, and not merely for the duration of a single game session.

In other words, players will strive to survive each game session, but each new session that they play, if their character(s) survived the last game session, they get to pick up where they left off.

How would you track that? What kind of map would facilitate that? Not that you should do that, or that you shouldn't do that. I am merely using that as an example to illustrate how to approach your particular take on a zombie apocalypse for gaming purposes.

If the game, itself, has high replay value, then an ongoing, perpetual game, of this sort, might work well. One aspect of game design may compliment another, and vice versa.

With regard to "a way to measure time spent gathering a resource, resources gathered, and the like," you could implement that via one of several different ways.

The first thing that I thought of to facilitate such was a track of some sort, maybe off to the side of the board, or as an individual track that each player has as part of their basic packet of player materials. Are players limited to a particular sub-set of possibilities? Or, since the game that you envision has a role-playing component to it, are the possibilities unlimited? For example, even though the setting is a zombie apocalypse, what if the player decides to build a casino or to try and create a moon base to escape the zombies?

The second mechanism that I thought about to handle this was a rolling of dice. Maybe the player in question rolls a dice, or maybe all players roll a dice, to provide a way to take into account luck and fate and chance impacting the amount of time it takes to accomplish a given undertaking relative to the localized threats and obstacles to achieving such. It's more abstract than gathering wood, but it might work (or it might not).

Just some thoughts that came to me.

When I'm watching a zombie movie or television show, two things maintain my interest. In the short term, I get pumped when the zombies pour in on or surround potential victims, and I wonder how or if anyone is going to survive against seemingly overwhelming odds. In the longer term, I co-mull strategic considerations with the actors, yelling at the screen when some idiot proposes a stupid idea or expresses a naive wish.

This dichotomy of thrills would keep me involved with a zombie RPG as well. The day-to-day braining of zombies is overlaid on the tapestry of a greater plan or goal. If you don't want to have a single game goal, perhaps a battery of referee-variable scenarios would fit your bill. I recall once visiting a D&D-type website that could generate hundreds of unique and random quests for role-playing games. There's also an outfit called Wordplay Games (http://wordplaygames.co.uk/) which uses a freestyle method of character generation and description which might also help you solve your game time issue.

That's a nice way of summing it up.