Why Video Game Zombies are better than D&D Zombies | Game Changer
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- čas přidán 22. 07. 2024
- In today's episode of Game Changer, we take a look at zombies from video games - they're like zombies from movies, but you can actually run a 5e game with them.
Better Zombies PDF (free!): trekiros.files.wordpress.com/...
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PNGTuber avatar by KoffeineYT [ / koffeineyt ]
Music: "The Last of Us" Gustavo Santaolalla
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00:00 intro
01:45 dnd zombies
03:58 zombie variants
08:16 infection mechanics
13:12 survivors surviving
15:07 outro
#dnd #ttrpg #thelastofus #daysgone #thewalkingdead #zombiesurvival #gamedesign
Just discovered this channel, gotta say I'm really impressed. Insightful, funny, clearly presented… great videos. Best of luck with the channel growth.
I’m in the same boat. Totally agree!
Me too! I've seen tons of channels with the same gimmick of giving you a free thing at the end, but none of the free things have been usable without heavy mods, but here? I've already found completely usable ones several times
Absolutely agree, looking forward to seeing more from you!
Friendly reminder that flavor is free. Slightly different than templates which were mentioned in this video. There are some fun and relatively simple monsters out there that could be "reflavored" into types of zombies.
Ankheg's burrow, have a lowered AC when prone, and acid spray attack comes to mind off the top of my head to be turned into a fun mutant zombie humanoid. Or dinosaurs like the Deinonychus for those fast, big damage, and knocking targets prone type human zombies.
Anyway, I wish this channel all the success it clearly deserves. Keep up the great work.
One option I have used in a semi-permadeath Minecraft datapack with no natural regeneration is that taking damage from a zombie always gives you the infected status but it then progresses over time in stages.
Stage 0:
You have been bitten!
Once per minute, if you have the absorption and weakness effects, you are instantly cured.
If you do not have those effects but have full health, you gain 1 immunity but take 1 point of wither damage.
If you have damage, a random integer value is picked from 1 to your immunity. If it is greater than your damage, you gain 1 immunity, otherwise, progress to stage 1. If you roll 10 or above, you are instantly cured.
Stage 1:
Once every 10 minutes, you roll your immunity against your damage relative to full 20 health. Upon success, you lose half a heart of maximum health. If you roll more than your current maximum health, you gain half a heart instead of losing one. You gain 2 immunity as long as you succeed. If you do so at full health you return to stage 0. You get nausea as a warning 1 minute before rolling. Having weakness and absorption gets you +5 immunity and gains half a heart of maximum health without rolling. Failing any roll causes you to go to stage 2.
Stage 2:
You can no longer heal by normal means because your maximum health is set at your current health. The rules for regaining or losing max health are the same except you get +3 immunity. Again, failing a roll causes stage 3 to activate. Succeeding at 20 health causes it to reverse to stage 1.
Stage 3: you begin to become contagious. Unarmed attacks spread the infection. You now get +4 immunity every 10 minutes. Hunger effect gets applied when this happens and to cure it you must make an unarmed attack against a living mob or player. Anything short of a full hunger bar causes an automatic failure of your roll. Absorption and weakness will no longer fully prevent side effects, only prevent you from failing your roll.
Stage 4: you are beginning to turn. You will have random fits of aggression every few minutes, dropping any tools or weapons in your hands, leaping directly at a living mob and attacking it viciously. You fail every roll under 20 unless you have absorption and weakness, and even then it's not guaranteed that you avoid being transformed. Succeeding gives you +5 immunity. Very few return from this stage.
Stage 5. You get repeated application of the wither effect as you are transformed into a zombie, dying and dropping your items. The zombie will initially have unusually fast speed and long pursuit radius as well as be capable of leaping at its prey.
This is great I'd love to see your take on handling swarms of enemies that is intense but also fast at the table.
The pdf linked in the description includes 2 types of swarms, one for runner zombies and one for walker zombies
My players handled 4 swarms of runners at level 3, using some of the siege defense mechanics also in that PDF, it was pretty fun
Before watching the video, you can nab a trick from the Savage Worlds TTRPG. Run the swarm as a single enemy, if it's a smaller group, or as an environmental hazard otherwise. Then, make the health proportional to how many zombies there are, and if you REALLY want them to be scary, you can give pluses to hit or damage depending on the amount of zombies
movie zombies are much closer to dnd Ghouls .. which incidentally is what Romero called the undead in his first film :) ghouls .. man eating, infectious bite, all that
This was perfect for my needs. We're starting a zombie apocalypse game using ZACS 5e.
My plan to mitigate infection is to use HP as a measure of luck/toughness/stamina for the fight. Every "hit" isn't necessarily an actual hit from an attack. How could a higher level characted take 10+ hits from a hunting rifle anyway? What the hits are are hits against your pool of luck, toughness and stamina. Maybe the player deflects the blow barely, or takes a grazing shot, etc. Once they're down to 0 HP from a zombie attack they have a 10% chance to get infected, and they must use antivirals within 24 hours of this infection once a day for 5 days to avoid becoming a zombie.
I ran a zombie horde scenario for my friends, I gave them the chance to set up barricades in a church and create chokepoints and so on, gave them some allies and then set them up against a massive amount of undead, way more than they should normally be able to handle... and I can say... that was a bad idea, it took 5 sessions to get through, at one point a character had hold person cast on her and the player didn't get to do anything for 2½ hours.
Now when running horde scenarios I do two things differently:
1: I use the minion rules from MCDMs Flee Mortals to increase how many monsters I can run at a time without turning the game into a slog.
2: I separate the scenario into several smaller encounters, only ever adding monsters to the encounter when the action economy is starting to look a little ragged on the monster's side.
Make DnD zombies better: Give them a shove attack and a bonus bite attack on any prone enemy
The pdfs are amazing, im so grateful you do this
I liked this video! Something that also works well for Zombies I think is something like MCDM's rules for running Minions! Allows for the fantasy of cutting down hordes of zombies but less work for the DM.
man, you're just too good, really, I didn't ever see a channel so small with such high quality. Love your work and watched every of your videos
Thanks for another great video, Trek! As Matt Colville said, The Undead are great for these things because they are aren't in gray moral areas, they are just monsters you have to kill.
Although I do think most of them really lack some depth (in TTRPG, that is), I would atribute it to a lack of commitment: as the TTRPG creators usually try to make a setting neutral RPG system, they avoid making zombies such a big part of the setting (as to let the base setting cover as many scenarios as possible).
Will be testing this too (so many new things to throw at my poor players!) and letting you know how it went. See you in the next one!
IMC, there's about a 10% chance that any given humanoid death results in a "zombie" because intangible Primal Spirits are everywhere, and they crave the opportunity to interact with the physical world. They take "joyrides" in recent corpses - and their behavior could range from peaceful-but-creepy (the corpse walks home and attempt to have a "normal day") to completely psychotic (tries anything to get the blood pumping, and goes on a furious rampage when it fails). This doesn't lend itself to a Zombie Apocalypse style situation. But - as a player just reminded me tonight - there's also Taint in my world, where reality is damaged and mutations and aberrations spawn... so the idea of Taint Zombies that spread the Taint with a bite... Hmmm....
Thanks the PDF, and I'm a new subscriber to your site and your channel!
About morality about creating undead:
I do think that in dnd 5e at least undead are naturally evil, not only because its grave robbery, but also because whatever animates them naturally tries to murder and stuff the moment the necromancer loses control, at least with normal zombie creation spells.
Yes you can have your society of wholesome necromancers where the dead do all the work, however the moment one of those necromances forgets to reapply their raise dead, all hell will break loose.
Your ideas regarding stealth mechanics for D&D would definitely be something I am curious about. Just stumbled over the channel and I have to say, I am impressed. Looking forward to more!
There's always this jargon that my party uses when we hit half our hit points called bloody. Perhaps every half, quarter, and eighth of your HP you roll either a Con or Dex Saving throw starting at 15 and the DC going up by 4 for every threshold broken.
interesting, with my little knowledge of d&d games, this video is very useful for getting to know the existing zombie concepts better, what's even better now I'm thinking about starting a fantasy story to write, thanks for the knowledge friend
a little suggestion for your video, give the source of what game or movie you are showing on the screen, position it in the corner of the screen
whatever you do, you get subsciber friends
@@Kingslayer-bq2qj Will do, thanks for the feedback! Still very much in the process of figuring this CZcams thing out
Listening to the video and hearing Necromancer using Zombies as tools had me thinking about the Graveyard Keeper video game with it's Breaking Dead DLC, so you can use them to run your various workbenches to follow recipes to make things for you in automation. Makes me consider a 'good' Necromancer using dead people to complete various tasks like that for their community. Sort of like the 'I, Robot' city with zombies doing menial tasks people don't want to do.
I think the ideal setting for a zombie apocalypse campaign that’s already in DnD is Tomb of Annihilation-instead of the plague emanating from Chult being a wasting disease that affects people over time, it should be the dead rising. The longer the group takes to get to the heart of Chult, the more zombies they encounter. You still get the zombie dinosaur, but now you have a real reason for it existing in the world other than just “here’s a zombie dinosaur.”
"anyone who dies for any reason rises as a zombie" is also seen in Grimgal, although it only happens if the dead are not given a proper burial.
Man, you're the best. My next session is exactly a zombie horde siege. Thanks a lot!!
Wow, loving this channel already! I just found you, and subscribed after two videos lol
I ran a very fun tabletop idea, using the Cyberpunk Red system I had a system where the players had already contracted a mutated strain of the zombie virus. Each time they were bitten thereafter, they'd suddenly mutate horrific zombie augments. These would give them incredible power, but slowly chip away at their humanity. Run out of humanity? My friend, you just became a zombie.
Goodberry and create water are still useful for survival, since you can survive 3+con modifier days without food, and eating restores all food, meaning that if you eat right before midnight, of when you'd get exhausted, you don't get exhausted, and if you eat the rest right after midnight you get one more day.
The more tricky part would be that create water only lasts for 2 days for a 5-player adventuring party (which is optimal for this)
The 5 player party-sustaining options are:
Warlock with a druid dip
Level 2 cleric (assuming harness divine power works), with magic initiate druid/druid dip
Level 3 circle of the land druid
Level 2 circle of the land druid (has to ration spellslots between food and water, can't cast both after the same rest)
Honourable mentions:
Level 2/3+ Wizard with a druid dip
Level 2/4+ Sorcerer with a druid dip.
I stumbled onto your videos. It is such good content! Keep it up.
Thanks. Good video.
Totally snagging the pdf, much appreciated.
really cool! im currently working on a zombie dnd homebrew and man! this video is absolutely what i was looking for
2:54 you also forgot the fact that the Zombie itself is Chaotic Evil, and that should you perish or fail to re-exert control, you have unleashed a hungering, chaotic evil creature unto the world to wreak havoc.
That, at least, is another of the explanations I have heard for D&D Necromancy being an evil act.
I have a D&D one shot setup that just barely counts as a zombie apocalypse. I tell players to make at least 3 level 20 characters. Then I drop them in the trailer for the Magic the Gathering card set War of the Spark.
You're all planeswalkers trapped in the tenth district of Ravnica by Nicol Bolas. His undead hoard is flooding the streets. 3 or 4 planeswalkers loyal to the dragon are keeping a few of the Ravnica Guilds out of the fight, but otherwise it's all out war in the streets. There are 3 artifacts that need to be destroyed. And of course the dragon sitting atop his ziggurat needs slain.
Every ten minutes of in-game time I roll an encounter with the dread horde using the following table.
3d6Death Knights
2d4 Liches
1d6 Creatures listed in the Planeshift Amonkhet pdf. All Zombified and coated in blue full plate mail.
There are no rests.
If any PC drops to zero HP or falls unconscious, any adjacent member of the dread horde can use a reaction to self destruct, insta-kill the PC, and send their planeswalker spark to Nicol Bolas.
When you die you pull out your next PC and they get ported into the fight.
The game ends when all players run out of PCs, the game session runs out of time and whatever building the PCs are in gets overrun by 500 Death Knights, or all 3 artifacts are destroyed and the dragon is slain.
The great thing about War of the Spark one shots is you can use each time Gideon Jura gets shot out of the sky by Nicol Bolas as the main time tracking clocks for the session. This can be run multiple times and each cluster of PCs for each session could accomplish different main objectives like shutting down the Planar Beacon, shutting down the Immoral Sun, shutting down the Planar Bridge, or killing any of the 4 zombified Amonkhet gods running around. Any attempts to slay the dragon before at least half of the other objectives are accomplished, and a sizable portion of the Ravnican population has joined the fight will likely not end well.
I'm using these zombies tomorrow for a unique undead encounter! Thank you so much for your content, it's incredible
great vid, will use
Amazing work and I have been wanting to do a zombie campaign but wasn't sure on how to do it thank you for the help
This is very interesting. Might have to run a mini campaign.
Thanks for the great content! Lots to chew on in the video, and I'll definitely be using that zombie template. Just one question-each mutation increases the CR by 1, so I'm assuming the challenge saying +1 is accounting for having one mutation? Or is it that the undead fortitude and con boost the CR by 1 on their own, and then each mutation you use increases the CR again?
Yup, you increase the CR for each mutation. The CR system has many flaws, but one of the ways in which it's consistent is that a monster gains 1 defensive CR every time it gains ~15 hit points, and 1 offensive CR every time it gains ~6 damage, so the mutations were designed with that in mind.
This video is great! The pacing is super good and the content was well delivered 🙏 My man is improving by the day
Mörk Borg has Goblins with a very interesting way of spreading.
If anyone get targeted by a Goblin you WILL turn into a Goblin within a week.
The only way of curing this condition is to kill the Goblin that targeted the character.
That's a cool idea; reminds me of how some stories do lycanthropy or vampirism, but I think those fall into the trap of "I'm totally fine with my character being a werewolf/vampire" where goblin/zombie usually isn't. Thanks for sharing that.
Oh boy! I am very glad i found this channel :D
Great channel!
I've been struggling to make zombies more dangerous and fun in my CoS campaign that I'm starting after like a two year hiatus and this is what I needed!
You mentioned the chimera as a good zombie candidate. I see you, and raise you the "nutrtured one of yutrus" from the orcs section of volos guide to monsters.
Also, imo there should be a con save on infection from bites, but thats just me. Its not required or anything.
Also, i think some of your statblocks dont have a bite. I may have missed it though, i was skimming.
Man these videos are gold
Cool Video😊
so far I really like your content! It kinda reminds me of Pointy Hat tbh
Im a huge zombie fan and I like your templates. Maybe I can convince some of my players to play a more zombie focused game :P
Fun fact the original night of the living dead they were called Ghouls, not zombies. That term was adopted long after the movie came out.
This was fun
That is a quality pdf.
An issue with vaccine or even a cure in the classic medical fantasy setting of DnD would be the logistics of how it would be spread, especially if it's a magical cure. That could lead to some interesting stuff though. It might be too close tonhome though considering the last few years.
Dungeon of darkknehiem as veriants zombies in there .
Anyways, I really like Dead Rising and am surprised you skipped it. That one's got the one basic zombie en mass but they're basically minions with all the garbage you use to beat them back.
Please post your Discord link.
Man! I hate basic ass players who don't track resources!
"It was good"
Visually yes story wise no.
Kind of defeats the whole point of the story if the Fire Flys know how Ellie became immune in the first place.
I feel like it's going to get boring quick, like in terms of longevity it couldn't last more than 4 levels
May be so, but I would disagree. Even though the base zombies are really weak, I think that is their purpose, and they are made in a way that you can put a lot of them together and make a BIG horde that would tackle at higher levels.
If that's not what you're looking for, he did make a template so you can slap it on higher level creatures to keep things interesting.
All that said, I do think that this ends up being a problem in the zombie trope in general: eventually (unless they evolve or get stronger as in Resident Evil), zombies stop being the problem and become just background noise.
But I do generally play in lower levels, so that isn't a negative for me. I think that DnD gets out of control really easily at higher levels unless everyone on the table is on the exact same page.
Yeah, a zombie apocalypse game could get real old real fast. But the walking dead made a long story out of it so it must be possible. Guess it depends how you do it and what your group wants.
Well a bit of a problem with Zobies being an "apocalyptic" threat in a fantasy world like D&D compared to "realistic modern" settings is that even with all the magical means of transportation there aren't that many ways of widespread and easily available quick transportation methods for hosts of zombie virus(or whatever causes the zombification) to travel far before turning, which also makes containing and eliminating the hot spots of infections much easier with proper military force, especially if there is also magic involved that allows keeping even tighter control over the area
Also I'm personally somewhat tired of how widespread "zombie apocalypse" as a setting has become so probably would pass on a D&D champing in such a setting, especially with how soaked in modern-day nihilism it became just a vehicle for all the "look how much of a monster a human can be" types of stories that if you keep telling over and over and over... just gets annoying...
Interesting thoughts, but that whole 'gritty realism' rule destroys casters and hurts some martials as well. 7 DAYS to get your spells back is way too harsh, even with a variety of cantrips at your disposal. That's basically punishing your players for wanting to play certain classes at all, ESPECIALLY if you use the E6 rules on top of that.
I assume the title is probably just for click bait but I still disagree with its central premise. Movie zombies aren’t better than d&d, they’re just different. D&D zombies are based on the fantasy trope of zombies which is itself more closely linked to actual historical traditions of reanimation. Movie and video game zombies are based more on the horror/sci-fi trope version of zombies. If that’s what you’re looking for, you’re probably better off with ghouls. I personally think D&D zombies fit a medieval fantasy setting far better.
I don't think you know what "vaccine" and "cure" mean.