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American Foreign Policy · 09/04/2012, 07:50 am

First off I like to say that I'm a fan of the Zombie genre and RPGs, but not JRPGs or the doom & gloom European Zombie genre.

There's the obvious appeals:

Anarchy, chaos & breakdown of order.
Violence & shoot em up.
Survivor horror.

But then there's the genre's cliches:

Hand-waving modern military power.
Hand-waving the physics of decaying bodies.
Hand-waving the existence of militarized borders and quarantine.
Supernatural infection.
Massive inflation of the undead.
Everyone dies.

The power-gaming stat fiddler in me is bugged by the hand-waving of reality, but it's not a big bother.

I can stand most the the cliches but the RPG enthusiast in me can't get around the last one; everybody dies. It's the same problem I had with the book series, if the supporting characters keep getting killed off and replaced then it's hard to get invested especially if the main character is just a sock puppet for the player. (yes yes not everyone dies in the book but I hated the frequency of character turnovers)

What characters do we have left? Kenny the broken, Ben the traitor, 3 strangers, and the child. There isn't much to go for except the child-guardian relationship. I don't like it, I don't expect it to change since it's a bad precedent to cave to fan pressure post-release, I guess I was just in for another type of RPG.

09/04/2012, 07:50 am	#1
American Foreign Policy Junior Member Join Date: Sep 2012 Posts: 14	Thoughts about the Zombie genre First off I like to say that I'm a fan of the Zombie genre and RPGs, but not JRPGs or the doom & gloom European Zombie genre. There's the obvious appeals: Anarchy, chaos & breakdown of order. Violence & shoot em up. Survivor horror. But then there's the genre's cliches: Hand-waving modern military power. Hand-waving the physics of decaying bodies. Hand-waving the existence of militarized borders and quarantine. Supernatural infection. Massive inflation of the undead. Everyone dies. The power-gaming stat fiddler in me is bugged by the hand-waving of reality, but it's not a big bother. I can stand most the the cliches but the RPG enthusiast in me can't get around the last one; everybody dies. It's the same problem I had with the book series, if the supporting characters keep getting killed off and replaced then it's hard to get invested especially if the main character is just a sock puppet for the player. (yes yes not everyone dies in the book but I hated the frequency of character turnovers) What characters do we have left? Kenny the broken, Ben the traitor, 3 strangers, and the child. There isn't much to go for except the child-guardian relationship. I don't like it, I don't expect it to change since it's a bad precedent to cave to fan pressure post-release, I guess I was just in for another type of RPG.