HinterBlog

So, another point that came out of the play test this weekend is that I suck at titles. No real news there but specifically they felt Zombipocalypse was:
1. A good name for a campy zombie genre game.
2. Not a good fit for the what they considered a sci-fi game with zombies in it.

Now, by “they”, I mean one player. The rest seemed good with the name. An alternate that he came up with was Xenopocalypse…

This leave me flat.

Linda suggested “Infected” but I am pretty sure that is in use.

I appreciate what is being said and I do like Infected better but I also think Zombipocalypse cuts to it as well.

I often feel i am going around in circles…grrr.

This weekend I had a pretty good field test of Zombipocalypse. Amongst other things, I felt two things leapt out. The first I will call the kill ratio. This is the how what the PCs kill combined with the “feel” of it. For instance, with ZP, you can have a bunch of light and moderate wounds dealt but then, blam! the critical comes across and you are down. The second was the give and take of the PCs’ and foe’s damage. It seemed a bit one-sided.

With kill ratio, it seemed like it was a bit easy to go from fine to dead. There is something to be said about this but I was a bit put off by it. With Iridium, my original baby, we have a very long gentle slope to death. You have plenty of opportunity to back up, apply healing or generally save yourself. In the play test, it seemed the players were…alright for the most part. The enemies were fine until they weren’t. It was abrupt and, although I think this is an interesting element that reflects an aspect of the genre, it makes me wonder about the enjoyability of play.

This leads to questions about the PC damage. It seemed a bit light. We had a couple of guys get beat up a bit but, I feel, there was no time when they said “Holy carp! We are in trouble”. Now, was that me and a new scenario? Was it the system? Was it the sense they were playing in a play test? Just not sure.

I love Star Trek. I think its optimistic view of the future is cool. I love Kirk and TOS. I think the new stuff is o.k. but I seem to like the ones others hate like Voyager and Enterprise while despising the stuff others like such as DS9. No biggie, suffice it to say I have a wide range of Star Trek RPGs and all of them fail to varying degrees to handle the issues of incontinuity of the Star Trek franchise.

Sacrilege you say! Death to the infidel!!

One of the reasons I made up D.R.A.T.S, a diceless RPG with rotating GM responsibilities was to deal with the incongruous details that come up through the long running series being written by a varying army of writers. In my view, you have several points of incontinuity:
1. Tech as related to Star Power. Scotty con modify the thransporters to store his pattern for 75 years, on the fly, on a crashed ship, with a wounded crew mate as his help but Star Fleet R&D can’t come up with a better improvement than adding range to the transporters given 120 years to work with them. Geordi…he does anything. Belana…flunked out of SFA but she is sarter than any SF trained engineer. Sure, you could explain this with hero points but…damn…

2. Tech Amnesia. This is when something amazing happens, that is a major break through, but then is forgotten. For instance, what i all the “Riker Duplicate”. This is when Riker, several years before being on the Enterprise, was on an away mission and his transporter beam was reflected back to the planet but also appeared on the ship. This meant a duplicate was made on the planet. Think how awesome this would be. You could have a technology that would allow you to store the patterns of the Away Team. If anyone died, you just beam them back to reality and little Timmy does not have to deal with the loss of his mother. But no, this was a freak accident…or it would destroy the series as a plot ender.

3. Ethics Benders. Many fans of canon will tell you that Trek is all about the morality. That if the group gets out of line, have Star Fleet lay the regs down on them. This is another point that does not hold up. How often did Kirk piss in the pool of the Prime Directive? How often did we hear how “This civ is stagnant” or “already polluted”. Hell, even Picard, mamby pamby by comparison, would agonize over it and decide int he end, the Wesley boy just stepped on the grass and your rules do not apply to us so, suck it.

In the end, the problem is that all this points are plot driven. RPGs are not plot driven, at least not the ones that normally are used to try and model Star Trek (LUG, Decipher, FASA). You cannot assign a single use tot he Transporter when you have an Engineer in the group. All he needs is technobabble and he is on his way to having whatever magic ite…ah, technological marvel he might need.

I believe this principle could be applied to any story that is long running and has multiple authors. Some stories, not all, do not translate to games.

So, I went to the zoo. I did some voice overs. Too geeky? Not entertaining? Useful for an adventure intro? You decide.