As part of wanting to learn FATE, I'm pondering using it for a grim post-apocalyptic story in the vein of The Last of Us. Perhaps even in that setting, or taking a lot of inspiration from it, anyway. FATE looks to be quite useful for a heavily narrative-focused game that relies on characters interacting with one another, the scene, and the fiction itself to really immerse oneself into the setting.

Here's what I want to do with the mechanical elements, and being new to the game I'm not 100% sure how to do them all. Maybe with some help I'll be able to come up with something fun.

• Zombies: These come in different varieties: fast, slow, mutated, and animal zombies. They're undead (unless I go with TLoU, in which case they're living fungal zombies), and can only be truly killed by destroying the brain (severing the head counts) or incinerating the body. They don't tire and are generally stronger than in life. Some intelligent mutant strains exist, but generally, it's pure predatory instinct and very limited predatory intelligence (point A to point B).

• Virus: This can spread several ways. People who die generally rise up to become zombies (probably a narrative worry that doesn't need rules) regardless of whether or not they were bitten. Transfer of bodily fluids can do it. Bites or scratches can infect but aren't guaranteed to do so every time (which adds more tension, I think, the wondering). Zombie corpses in food and water supplies can taint them.

• Survival: For these types of games, I like to embrace the "survival" part of "survival horror." Scavenging, gathering supplies, scrounging and cobbling together remnants and ruins into something resembling function, etc. Also, community-building stuff.

So what I am wondering is if I shouldn't have an additional stress track for something like infection, where multiple wounds and partaking of tainted food and water can build it up. The risk grows as you take more chances, and potentially leave yourself vulnerable. Really, I'm willing to play with any aspect of the system here, and between Fate Core and the toolkit, should probably be pretty covered.

If you have any ideas, by all means, please share your thoughts, rules, Extras, everything. Whatever will help bring to unlife a bleak, post-apocalyptic world infested by zombies and worse things (like people).

This message was deleted by a moderator, as it was a double post, at 04:16, Thu 17 Aug 2017.

heres what you do watch the walking dead or other zombie movies emulate the plots
play resident evil do your best because the point about storytelling is concept content and ending

I appreciate the thought, and yes, I definitely draw inspiration from those things. What I'm mostly concerned with at this point is how to create these things mechanically.

I don't recommend an extra stress track, or death/zombification as a failure mode. Focus on other kinds of failure, like the collapse of the colony, or a takeover by opportunistic badguys.

What might be interesting in that kind of vein - is also the possibility to build up one's immune system against it.

I can't say I'm the biggest zombie connoisseur in history, so I'm sure it's been done but I've not seen it myself - at least not confirmed, anyway. However, if you did play the stress track idea of a gradual infection, then why shouldn't it be plausible that someone's immune system could actually start to fight it off?

As a whole, though, I get what others are saying here too - the mechanics of the virus itself aren't necessarily the driving factors, just like they aren't in any of the other million zombie movies and books out there. The real core of any zombie situation is the survival of the people in the setting.

I'm with engine in this respect:  the zombies in a zombie apocalypse are troublesome, certainly, but it's just inhuman what other human beings can do to a group just to enhance their own chances of survival.

That t-shirt that says, "In case of a Zombie Apocalypse I'm tripping you," is not really a joke - it points to that darker side of human nature that we all have within us which only awaits a crisis of sufficient severity to rear its ugly head.

That's an angle worth conjuring with in a game of this genre.

Sure, and I intend to. There's a lot about the "survival" part that I like. But I am curious how best to manage some of this stuff, namely the zombies and the virus and such, mechanically. Anyone have any ideas for that?

In reply to Samus Aran (msg # 8):

Well, Fate is all about aspects. Everything can and most things do have aspects. Decide what aspects you want your zombies to have. Not all of them have to have the same ones, and sometimes zombies that are the same as every other zombie might have some different aspect to emphasize a different thing about them. Maybe some zombies have "Slow as the grave" and "Hungry for flesh," good standard zombie aspects, but later, as a huge group (and as more of an environmental hazard) they have "They're Everywhere!" and "Strength in Numbers."

Do you feel you have a good handle on aspects in general?

Yeah, and I quite like aspects. I'm looking forward to using them.

How about zombies as enemies that can't be killed save by the few methods mentioned? Also, how would you put some rules to something like "Loud noises and things you make can draw zombie attention"? That's one of the things I considered for a possible like environmental stress track or the like. Breaking windows, shooting guns, yelling, etc., all has a potential to draw zombie attention and maybe bring down a horde on top of you.

hmm we can work together

It's sort of like an overriding aspect on the setting. Call it "Inexorable Foes" or something. When the characters are in a situation in which they lack the means to easily dispatch the foes, you're essentially invoking that aspect. Tell the players that they can't currently hope to kill the zombies without sacrificing someone, and give them each a fate point.

If they want, the players can use their skills and aspects to try to change or remove the aspect that's preventing them from killing the enemy. It's basically "Creating an advantage." You would set the difficulty (figuring out how to kill zombies in an open field would be harder than figuring out how to kill them in a hardware store) and they would make a check to see if they could create a helpful aspect. Or, maybe they just give their fate points back and say "Look, we're in a Costco and we each have a feat that makes us good in combat and in improvising weapons. We can kill zombies."

It's all about aspects.

None of those things need extra rules in Fate. They can all be handled by aspects, skills and challenges.

As a challenge: https://fate-srd.com/fate-core/challenges
They're sneaking around downtown to find parts for a radio. They need to find the store (Notice), get inside quietly (Burglary), and lug the equipment out (Athletics). Maybe toss in a general roll for being quiet (Stealth).

You come up with the difficulties, and then the scene is narrated, with spots in the scenario for those skills to matter. As the rules say "after the rolls have been made, you’ll consider the successes, failures, and costs of each action as you interpret how the scene proceeds. It could be that the results lead you into another challenge, a contest, or even a conflict." Or, maybe something happens as soon as they flub a roll. Maybe they can succeed with bad rolls, but only at a cost, like someone hurting their back keeping a rusty shelf from falling (earning them an aspect like "Serious back injury," which is bound to earn them lots of trouble and fate points in a zombie survival setting).

As simple as they are, I think challenges can be the core of most Fate games. Combat doesn't impress me much, and contests don't seem like common occurrences. It's worth noting that the example in the book is of someone holding off zombies, and that even Fight is mentioned as a skill that can be used in a challenge.

While everything has aspects, arguably they're not all on the table at once. We don't need to list that a machine gun has "Makes a huge racket," "Burns through ammo," and "Wildly inaccurate," even though those are all true and valid. I don't know if this is entirely supported by the rules, but I think it's proper for you to invoke aspects like that. If they're facing one zombie and all they have is Grandpa Vito's old Tommy gun, then tell the shooter "The gun makes a tremendous noise that can be heard blocks away," and hand them a fate point. This is the basic transaction for when something about someone (or about something they have or are doing) is going to cause them a problem. It's the inverse of "something about someone is going to help them out, so they hand in a fate point."

Make sense? I recommend wringing everything you can out of the basic rules before you start layering other stuff on. Otherwise, I recommend using a different system and taking useful advise from Fate, of which there is plenty.
This message was last edited by the user at 14:33, Thu 17 Aug 2017.

Have you had a chance to make progress on this yet? What approaches have you taken?

Still working on it, and I do appreciate your help. It seems to me like weaving together a lot of scene aspects and challenges would be pretty awesome, really make a scene engaging both mechanically and narratively. I still like the idea of a sort of scene stress track where if you do too much to draw attention, you end up calling down a horde or some kind of big monster zombie on you, but for the grim-and-gritty survival stuff, the real tense personal scenes, it looks like the game will work. I'd love to test it out sometime.

I think what makes me feel like this clashes a bit with the idea of Fate is that things in Fate don't necessarily happen because of a mechanical threshold, they often happen simply because it makes sense due to the prevailing aspects.

Read over "Compelling with Situation Aspects" https://fate-srd.com/fate-core...th-situation-aspects for some examples of this. In a zombie survival game, I might say:

Because the hardware store the survivors are searching suffers from Extensive Water Damage it makes sense that something would give way unexpectedly, causing a huge commotion. DTL.

And if I said that, all the characters in that scene would receive a fate point for that, because that's the reward in Fate for letting the game progress in an interestingly complicated way.

In a lot of games, having something like that just happen wouldn't seem particularly fair. If the players were being careful and looking out for problems, and doing everything smart players should do in a survival situation to keep from arousing trouble, then nothing should just happen. And if the players had worked to remove or nullify the Extensive Water Damage aspect, I would not have been able to compel it.

But a) aspects are everywhere, so they'd be hard-pressed to avoid every aspect, and b) if the fate point economy is working, players are going to want more points, to invoke their own aspects.

To be honest, I am a little uncertain as to how best to get the fate point economy chugging along if the group is conservative and cautious and really trying hard not to open themselves up to mistakes, which players almost always are anyway, but more so in a zombie survival game. I think in this kind of game, there would be some ultimate goal consisting of a challenge or contest (or even a conflict) involving really high difficulties. Maybe it's repairing a plane, or developing a vaccine, or even just getting across town without ever having to accept an Out of Ammo aspect, but the idea would be, I think that without a stack of fate points to invoke a lot of advantageous aspects, it's not going to work. In that case, I think players might be willing to accept a lot of troublesome compels. Otherwise, it's hard to see how it's worth it.

That's true, and I would not want to take that away. I do like the idea of a "risk/reward" mechanic, and the tension created by doing these things as you see you're risking a lot of danger in order to accomplish something. I just wonder if it wouldn't create a real palpable sense of dread and tension from an OOC standpoint, and of course in-character everyone would probably suffer that.



This sounds cool, and I'm going to read over that more. Because the idea of the give-and-take, and really playing up aspects (especially situational ones) is part of what I want to see in the system.



This is something I"d worry about, too. It seems like you'd have to have a group who really buys into the premise and all the associated things, like the system and the Fate point economy and everything. If you don't, the whole thing is going to be the wrong kind of struggle.