The four games of Zombies in the Vineyard (ZomV for short) I've run have been lots of fun, but the rules are still a work in progress. If you're not interested in chewing over rules you can ignore this with a clear conscience, but if you'd like to weigh in with your opinions or questions I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'm looking to emulate Romero movies, in particular to explore what desperate people do under unbearable pressure, and the tradeoff between survival and humanity (do you risk your life for a chance to save the schoolbus full of stranded kids?). I'm not trying to emulate Resident Evil or survival horror games. That might be better done with Feng Shui, although I haven't given it much thought. == Current differences between DitV and ZomV: Setting is modern day. There's no demons or heirarchy of sin. That's a useful tool for building towns, but at least so far gripping situations are easy to come by in ZomV. Proto-NPCs are used. Zombies have no acuity or heart scores and add the dice from those to body and will respectively. Typical traits are "Unfeeling" "Inhumanly Strong", "Slow", "Hungry for Flesh", "Unthinking", "Relentless", or so forth. They can usually ignore talking raises, unless someone's trying to distract them from a target, or like that. Zombie mobs add 1d6 to each of Body and Will for each additional zombie, and each trait is treated as a particular characteristic of one of the zombies until those dice are used, then use the relationship dice, then the Free dice (if desired), then just 1d6 for the remaining zombies. No coats. Instead of the "I'm a Dog" trait, PCs have a trait "Still Alive" (or anything along those lines). If someone escalates in a conflict, other people who weren't in it can join in (unless they were in it earlier and gave). Stats already used in the conflict are considered to have already been used by the new people. (This is taken from Vincent's game-in-playtest, Afraid.) Relationships can be to people, places or organizations, but no sins or demons. You can start with any relationships, not just to people. Should sins still be available? Is Despair a sin? Would being able to take a relationship to Hope, or Love, or Despair, or Anger, be interesting and useful? Zombie bites do 1d10 fallout, same as guns. Players are encouraged to apply the fallout from bites to their "Still Alive" trait. I thought about making guns only 1d8, but I like the way with d10 any bullet might be the one that kills you. Explosions and being run over by trains are d10. A gun jams/runs dry/gets lost if its d4 rolls a 1 when you bring it in (although you can still use it in that raise). I was thinking about making that happen if any gun die came up 1, but that would make more sense if excellent things had a d8 and big things had 2d6, backwards from currently. Maybe that's just sim reflex talking. Maybe instead this should be that if any die on your gun rolls a 1 and you take fallout, you should take it as losing the gun? PCs start with three belongings that get dice. Would 4 be better? I like having it be small enough that you can't take everything -- que es mas macho - gun or flashlight? Instead of Demonic Influence, there's Zombie Infestation Level, based on PC knowledge. Currently I used this as 1d10 for one zombie, 2d10 for small groups, 3d10 for evidence it's citywide, 4d10 for nationwide, 5d10 for the whole world. The scale may need tweaking. For example, discovering that it's not just zombie bites that cause the dead to rise, but that anyone who dies will rise, might worsen things. Maybe it should be some kind of scale that goes up and down based on the level of hope and despair. So if you come across an organized outpost of civilization the level decreases, or a plane flies overhead, or what have you. Suggestions welcome. == Things I want to playtest: Bonds adapted from Afraid. ONE die from your traits can be assigned to a bond instead, if you want to. You roll bonds at the beginning of the conflict, with stats and relationships, every conflict, as long as the bond remains true. There are bonds of conscience and bonds of tradition. (Afraid also has bonds of nightmare, which ZomV does not.) Bonds of conscience, for instance: I always keep my promises, I'm faithful to my lover, I protect children, I trust my partner, I never hit a woman, I leave no man behind. Bonds of tradition, for instance: I pray 5 times daily to Allah, I never cut my hair, I don't eat meat, I only wear black, I'm always the boss. There should also be Bonds of Purpose, unless those are just a subset of conscience. For instance: I've got to reach my wife, I've got to keep my son safe, etc. == Things I don't want to use from Afraid: I don't like Afraid's "escalating on a see automatically blocks the raise for free." == Things I'm thinking about. In Afraid, the Acuity+Will arena with d10 fallout is Murder, not Guns, as opposed to Body+Will 1d8 for fighting. I'm inclined to leave it the same in ZomV as in DitV, though. Limiting beginning chargen to 3 items worked well, although I also considered 4. An alternative idea I have for items was to let everyone take one each of crap, normal, big, excellent (or one big excellent item plus one normal and one crap item), and allow any of the dice not used for items to be added to their available relationship pool instead. If I do that, then should they be able to spend dice out of their relationship pool for gear instead (not d10s of course!)? Only at chargen? Anytime (with a valid explanation of how)? I'm thinking of a dice cap on traits and bonds (but perhaps not relationships). Max of 6d4, 4d6, 3d8, 2d10 (easily remembered as max of 24). Bigger traits are reasonable in Dogs where the PCs are the hands of God, but in the kind of zombie movie I'm trying to emulate people are just people. Should relationships be capped too? Also at 24, or maybe at 32, for 8d4, 5d6, 4d8, 3d10? If I do use caps, should you be able to improve 4d6 to 3d8 with one use of experience or do you have to change it to 3d6 first and then raise to 3d8 (thus using two experience). I kind of like the latter, since it means there's an interesting decision when improving from 3d6 whether to go for 4d6 or 3d8. I'm still mulling over whether to try using Circumstances from Afraid. In Afraid, you can have any combination of Alone, Lost, Unprepared, and In Trouble, and these can be added or removed by conflicts or as fallout or experience. They were kind of cumbersome in the two games of playtest-Afraid I played locally a few months ago, but that may have just been our unfamiliarity, so I'm thinking about them. Helping: In The Princes' Kingdom, if you help someone with their see by giving some of your dice to them, and they take the blow, you take the damage instead of them. (And if they see with three dice including the one(s) you give them, YOU take the fallout instead of them - it's not a block like in DitV.) I like that, since it gives you the option to sacrifice yourself for someone else. TPK doesn't seem to reduce your next raise if you help others, and doesn't seem to limit the number of dice you help with, I don't know if there'd be a problem with people pushing their last few dice over to help someone else before giving. TPK doesn't seem to have helping on a raise, just on sees. So my inclination would be that you can give one die to help someone else on a raise or see (with appropriate justification), and your next raise will only be with one die. But if the person you're helping takes the blow with 3 or more dice (including yours), the fallout goes to you. This would allow classic "I'll hold them off while you escape" that it's important to model. What if two or more people help? Maybe the person being helped gets to divide the fallout dice between all the helpers, or is that too complicated? == Chargen At the moment I'm just using DitV chargen, but maybe it would make more sense to use Afraid-style PCs, since these are ordinary people, not hands of God? On the other hand, the PCs are the lucky survivors (for at least a while) so maybe they *are* special. Accomplishments are something important that the character hoped to do in life, happening before the outbreak. DitV uses: Well-Rounded: Stats 17d6, Traits 1d4 4d6 2d8, Relationship 4d6 2d8 Strong History: Stats 13d6, Traits 3d6 4d8 3d10, Relationship 1d4 3d6 2d8 Complicated History: Stats 15d6, Traits 4d4 2d6 2d10, Relationship 5d6 2d8 Strong Community: Stats 13d6, Traits 1d4 3d6 2d8, Relationship 4d6 4d8 3d10 Complicated Community: Stats 15d6, Traits 6d6 2d8, Relationship 4d4 2d6 2d8 2d10 Afraid uses: (Would need different names.) In Afraid only Veterans can start with bonds or supernatural weapons, but in ZomV I think anyone can have a bond. Veteran: Stats: 12d6, Traits: 2d4 2d6 1d8 2d10, Relationships: 1d4 4d6 1d8 Investigator: Stats 14d6, Traits 1d4 3d6 2d8, Relationships 4d6 1d8 Attached: Stats 11d6, Traits 1d4 3d6 1d8 1d10, Relationships 1d4 2d6 3d8 1d10 Entangled: Stats 13d6, Traits 1d4 3d6 1d8 1d10, Relationships 4d4 2d6 1d8 In Afraid everyone gets a lot of reflection experience every time a PC dies. I'm thinking about whether that should be the case in ZomV. == Play notes I suggest starting the game at a location familiar to the players, and based on play so far strongly recommend starting all the PCs together in the same place, although they may not know each other yet. So far I've always started things off with a bit of conflict between the PCs, then introduce one zombie (usually demonstrated on an NPC), then progressively more, but it would also be possible to run a game starting later in the zombie uprising, in which case you may want to make the accomplishments be something that happened on the first day of the outbreak, not something earlier in life like the default. The actual nature of the zombies is discovered in play; I like classic slow strong dumb zombies who spread infection by bite, and usually I raise first to grab a victim, and if that blow is taken bite on the next raise. Whether a bite is fatal (d10 fallout) is up to the fallout dice, and remember that a "dead" result is up to the player to narrate, and can happen later. The player should get to make a statement about his character in the manner of his passing. == Whew, that's a lot, so if you made it all the way to the end, I invite comments and questions to cdr at telemancy.com . And if you run it, I'd be very interested in hearing how things went!