Again, what is this? What are these symbols and terms and modifiers all over the place? Who designed this? Imagine not knowing the rules to the game and being given this character sheet. Worse, imagine trying to refer to this in the middle of a swarm of zombies, and pulling out the difference between a skill, a trait, and a Gestalt skill bonus.
But back to character generation. The book provides two main options for creating a character, which is irrelevant because one of them is essentially the same as the other but with extra steps. You can fill out a questionnaire on the website, which will give you your basic attributes based on the answers you provide.
This is a cool idea, but one that is both fruitless and poorly implemented. For one, once you do that you still have to work out skill levels, traits, advantages and disadvantages, and backgrounds, so what is the point of starting with my attributes?
Moreover, the questionnaire is far from subtle. But that done, you have to contend with training bonuses, which mostly raise your skills, motivations and backgrounds, disadvantages which seem to give you no incentive to take, but I could be wrong , advantages, equipment, and Gestalt level. The Gestalt level is a design concept that some baggage underlying an interesting idea. It basically represents anything your character should know or be able to do, but is not encompassed by their skill list.
Some people would say this falls under basic common sense for the GM, but I am attracted to the concept of putting some limitations on what a character can do mechanically.
The Gestalt level also ties into some other things, like language and skill advancement, in ways that takes a little bit to parse. However, the basic idea is there, and I would like to see some syncopation on this idea in more games. This part I did like. The scrapbook style can give you a well-crafted sense of immersion, as if you have found the last artifact of an already dead group. Or so it would seem at first.
You see, the entire point of a percentile based game, such as Warhammer Fantasy or Basic Roleplaying, is the simplicity that sits at the core of the rules. Everything else tends to modify or play off of that system, but essentially allow the core mechanic to speak for itself. Not Outbreak: Undead though! Oh no. It may seem strange that I have spent so much time talking about symbolism and so little the actual rules, but that is only because the two are inextricably linked to one another.
There are no basic concepts that you can get down and move onto playing the game. Rather, the rest of the book is subsystem after subsystem explaining in nuanced detail the rolls, bonuses, and penalties you need to complete every conceivable action.
Exploration, combat, equipment, base building, et cetera all rely on their own specific set of rolls and costs that you need to check the book to understand. This leaves you with two basic options: 1. Remember me. Error: No match for email address or password. Password forgotten? Click here. Cyberpunk Sale. Rule System. Product Type. Core Rulebooks. Non-Core Books. Hunters Entertainment. Pay What You Want.
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Gift Certificates. My friend Mark and I had unceremoniously been denied entry into a NERO boffer event, having been told that it was for teams only, and despite us finding a team eager to have two competition level fencers and experienced boffer fighters to die happily at their side, we were civilly informed that our tickets would not be accepted.
Yet as luck would have it, our mutual friend John let us know about a demo going on that he was signed up for which was looking for more players. Outbreak: Undead is a tabletop roleplaying game released by Hunters Books and Apparel in , with a second edition co-published in by Renegade Games and Hunters Entertainment.
It is an RPG simulation of survival during the outbreak of a zombie apocalypse. Laser-focused on the concept of team work and survival against ever-increasing desperation, Outbreak: Undead uses a comprehensive character sheet with a percentile system to determine degrees of success or failure when either attempting a dangerous task, or a general task wherein a measure of success might shift the odds of later survival.
The game itself is expansive and its focuses on a modular design allows it to be applied to many different outbreak and survival scenarios. Every year new forms of zombie apocalypse horror media are created, be they films, novels, video games, or comic books. The obsession with the horror of the zombie is ubiquitous to the modern world, and indeed if there is one monster who truly represents the fear and anxiety of the late 20th, early 21st century, it is the zombie.
And as with our ever-changing modern world, the rules of the zombie apocalypse shifts with every new iteration of the story. Outbreak: Undead wisely takes note of this, and focuses not on the specific rules of the undead which threaten the survivors who make up the player characters of the game, but on the toll which survival takes on those survivors.
It is this focus where Outbreak: Undead shines. Players either use the SPEW AI to build themselves using an online survey, or they can construct different survivors using a point buy system. The game then uses these traits to generate a series of Skill values, each presenting the value you are aiming to roll under when making a percentile check.
Roll under, and you succeed. Roll over, and you fail. For every value of ten you succeed or fail by, your success or failure is that much more pronounced, to a total of five degrees of either. As one might expect, Gear is a major factor in survival, and relevant Gear in the game adds directly to the target value of the check.
The final piece of the puzzle when making a check in Outbreak: Undead comes from Gestalt: a means to represent relevant experience had by the character which exists outside the rest of the rules of the game. This can mean anything from common internet memes on messenger boards when the world went dark to being able to balance a healthy diet from canned goods.
Gestalt becomes d6s you can assign during character creation or during play and serve to improve your roll, rather than detract from it. This creates an incredibly dynamic and unpredictable resolution to nearly any action in the game, though especially so in combat.
Combat in Outbreak: Undead is as fast as it is brutal, befitting the world it attempts to convey. As with most zombie-based environments avoiding combat entirely is generally the smart choice, but when one must fight, it is best to do it with all the odds stacked in your favor. While the Outbreak: Undead core rules provide the means to generate a Survivor from any concept, it is the experience of placing yourself into the survival scenario of the game where the innate potential of Outbreak: Undead is truly revealed.
Mark, a computer engineer with a penchant for firearms and martial arts, seemed like a natural shoe-in for Best Survivor at the Table.
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