Dead State Forum Activity

Brian has extended the open forum Q&A for his upcoming indie RPG as this week’s Monday Design Update. Good questions keep coming in, with good answers to fit.

Do allies dieing from a zombie bite become less effective at everything they do during their 3 day spiral to zombiehood?

No. It would be too punishing on the player to try and keep them alive.

How easy are zombies to get away from? Say if I move 2 feet over behind a wall and thus completely out of sight of the approaching zombies, they won’t just stop in their tracks will they? Is there a skill that affects this besides being smart enough not to make tons of noise?

They’re attracted to movement and sound – they’ll still know you’re there for a little while and will continue looking for you for a bit.

Can allies abandoned in the field every possibly be found alive again?

Probably not. If you’re abandoning them, they were probably in a hopeless situation – that’s what we’ll assume, anyhow.

Do you plan to have exhaustion affect panic? I think I would scare much more easily if I feel too tired to effectively fight or run away

Exhaustion already has some pretty heavy penalties, so we don’t want to make it a death sentence.

Will potential allies ever refuse to join, or people threaten to leave, while certain characters are allowed to remain an ally?

Yes, it’s possible. At the very least, they may strongly disagree and lose confidence in you if you’re not able to convince them it’s a good idea to have that ally around.

Survivor interaction- Just how much will you be able to interact with individual survivors? Will it be general checking up and whatnot such as “Hey, how are you?”, “I’m good, thanks”, “Bye, talk to you later.” or will it go into more depth? Can you make best friends forever with anyone? Will deeper interaction be limited to certain named npcs? Will there be any *Gasp* Romances? (And before anyone says things like omg, its zombie apocolypse! No romances! I will say that if you are truly going for an authentic experience with the psychology of being leader of a post-zombie apocalypse survivor group, your interaction with the opposite gender IS going to come into play. I would also point out that this could cause an interesting scenario, say you as leader are getting into it with person A, and person B comes along who also likes person A. This could cause some survival horror drama, with possible morale repercussions.) It was also mentioned that if morale got bad enough, and there was another survivor with leadership skills he could supplant you and it would be game over. Would it be possible to identify this person before things got bad and actively try to make him like you to make this less likely?

Interaction with survivors depends on the personality of the survivor and how much they approach you. You can be on good terms with people, to the point where they will have your back if you make an unpopular decision.

There won’t be “romances” really for the player, though some people in the shelter may get involved with one another – realize that the player could have lost someone or multiple people they were close to at the beginning of the story, so it wouldn’t fit every player’s motivation. The PC also doesn’t necessarily have to be heterosexual, so that would also limit romantic options, if we had them. There are a few people in the shelter that the player might be able to have some kind of intimate relationship with, but they’d really have to work at it and have the right people in the Shelter. If we get to a point where it would really add more dramatic possibilities for the player and works with the characters without feeling forced, we’ll add some more options.

As far as identifying the people who might be working against you – if you have loyal allies, most likely one of them will hear something and pass it on. Oh, but before you go snuff out a troublemaker, make sure you’re positive that your “pal” isn’t just feeding you info to gain points with you.