Hi Sam! I decided to hold back on my review of ZOMBIES RIGHT NOW. I think I didn’t play it with the right group, or perhaps didn’t guide enough as host, to get a fair experience out of the game this time around…
So pretty quickly the game went full flight of fancy. I stepped back pretty significantly as host, not moderating any actions that were proposed once people got the hang of it. I wanted to see where it went.
It went into nearly joke territory, visiting the Minecraft Nether, the Mar-a-lago, etc…
Everyone had fun, but I get the sense they saw no long-term viability in this type of game. Nor any serious way to play this type of game.
I was left a bit unsatisfied with this experience. It felt like no one was… taking it seriously? Or rather, didn’t focus on the problem of zombies.
There were several qualms of other players that I think didn’t get addressed. What is the challenge in a cooperative game where any suggestion could succeed? Why can’t we just teleport to the end, should we propose to?
I plan to play it again with another group and try to get the experience I am looking for… but would appreciate some advice 🙂
Sam W., blogger over at QuasiWizard (take a peek!)
Hey Sam! First, a flippant question back:
How do you normally maintain tone at the table?
In a sense, it’s immersion we’re after (dangerous word). And as you point out, Sam, in this post about “immersion games“, an understanding of the world and how it operates is the backbone to this kind of play. That gets us pretty quickly to why I released Zombies Right Now as a starter matrix game: it’s an “Earth, But” premise.
Understanding the World
“It’s Earth, BUT there are zombies.”
That way there’s lots embedded understanding into how things operate. Things like roads, cars, supermarkets, running, are all fairly understandable when they work similarly to how they do in our world. I say similarly because this is a game about story: sometimes the laws get bent because it’s dramatic and fun.
This means “what happens next” falls within that framework and shared understanding of our world.
In Zombies Right Now, rules out the box, really the only thing to work out is how zombies work. How do they operate in this scenario?
At my table it was pretty easy because my cousins have all been into the zombie media. “So these zombies work like the ones in The Walking Dead, right? Got it.”
Aside: if you have some zany characters (Santa Claus, Scooby-Doo, time traveller, etc) there may be some more questions to answer, but really, just handwave as you choose. Talk it over as a table as necessary.
The table works as the GM: they construct the world together. It’s “play worlds, not rules” taken to a group level.
Example of this in play: My wife decided that a particularly handy zombie siphoned the gas of the cast’s getaway vehicle.
“Now they can’t drive away!”
“What happens next?”
“How did the zombie siphon the gas?”
“Uh, it sucked it up through a rubber hose.”
“So the zombie has gas in it’s stomach?”
“Uh oh.”
“Hunter shoots the zombie with his pistol and ignites the gas. Fireball!”
Then there was disagreement. Would that work? Did it jive with our shared understanding of the world? To be fair, we already had some action-movie shenanigans happen… But normally this is where a GM would step in and make a call, the most common method to maintaining a game’s tone.
So what are the options to resolve this? After some talk…
- It happens as the player said.
- The player decides to take it back.
- It’s decided that the action is possible, let’s roll for it.
- The host decides that goes too far and vetoes it.
That last option is the nuclear option for safeguarding the game’s tone, one I haven’t found necessary yet. But it’s available, it’s in the rules.
Our group decided a fifth option: phone an expert and stand by their judgement. We called up my brother-in-law, the firearms fanatic:
“Yeah it wouldn’t work like that.”
That settles it, looks like the zombie gets shot, no explosion. What happens next?
Seriousness
Not taking the game seriously is all well and good. Did I mention a zombie siphoned a car with a rubber hose AND CHUGGING?
It’s when people aren’t playing sincerely that things become problematic. Trolling, flippancy, antagonism directed at players, etc are all examples of this. If it’s been established that sincerely playing the game means addressing the problem and seeing what happens, then that’s the goal.
If the goal is just to have a starting line (ZOMBIES!) and run in any direction (“what GTA-style stuff do we do now?”), then it’s really no harm, no foul.
Overall, sounds like a case of unspoken expectations, willing to be called wrong on that.
If it’s jokes and fun and that’s what you want, do it! Minecreaft Nether? Mar-a-Lago? A zombies game can be zany! I love Shaun of the Dead!
That and I have yet to play a sincere game of Electric Bastionland without tearing up laughing…
Cooperation and Challenge
In traditional RPGs, the GM-Player dynamic is not competitive. It’s not. We know this because winning with an unlimited arsenal is not interesting.
The relationship is built on trust and is therefore cooperative. The trusting elements are in union, interplaying with one another.
Does being cooperative mean that the GM is working with the players to ensure that they beat all the baddies, get all the gold, loot every room? By no means!
Cooperation is engaging if it’s challenging. Anyone can have the zombies threaten, maim, kill characters at any point. There’s a thrill in that, especially if a player goes hard after the survivors. Who gets out alive? Who doesn’t? What do they have do in their situation?
As many wiser folks have pointed out, being a GM is like being a teacher: they introduce obstacles to assess skills. Good teachers do not fall into either ditch of giving all the answers away or being punishingly difficult.
Therein lies the platonic ideal: everyone being at the table being good teachers for each other. Each pushes the drama forward, asks leading questions, and puts others in a spot that produces clever solutions and interesting outcomes.
To answer your question, you could teleport to the end if you like: “The remaining survivors get into the Jeep and drive to the safe house. No more zombies along the way.” I mean, that is saying what happens next. But is that interesting to the table? That’s not just a rhetorical question, the answer could be “let’s end it here.”
If the game has gone on long enough, if there’s no adventure left, those are good reasons skip to the end, but that’s up to y’all. Maybe a lot has happened already and you gotta turn in for the night. Then just pause the game or resolve the problem real quick.
Ultimately, saying what happens next is a gauge of player interest. What do you focus on? Is there a scene you want to see? Do you want to skip ahead to something else? Does some dramatic dynamite go off? It’s up to the table, led initially by individual players who declare what happens next.
End
Honestly, this is the kind of feedback I like to hear: constructive, also firm in it’s difficulties and aversions in the play experience.
Do matrix games need examples? Or written guidance from the author?
The answer could be a resounding “yes”.
DREAMING DRAGONSLAYER 