Being within a half hour makes competing groups more like street gangs. They will be in each others face often, which makes sense if they are out there to grab from the big pie of illicit gains, or have cultural divides. For survivors? Why wouldn't they merge?
If they had radically different behaviors, maybe. Perhaps one side is a cult, or believes in slavery. I don't see players digging deep into that RP though.
@wanderer said:
Also, zombies are lame and so overdone. Come up with your own apocalyptic bad guy. Alien infestation. Triffids. Monsters from a secret government laboratory... well, okay, the horror of zombies is that they were once human, so you have to kill a decayed former-person. That's pretty cool. But the way they've been overplayed, especially in computer games like L4D, it's just gratuitous slaying of hordes. Zombies work best when it's not strangers, when the zombies are humanized. When they are family and close friends that the protagonist has to confront/kill. I guess ease of infection is a significant factor in this regard.
I think you may be missing the point in turning something like this into the game.
With a few exceptions - if you want to dangle the apocalypse's resolution in front of your characters as a potential goal, for example - it doesn't really matter what manner of creature has caused the breakdown. Whether it's brain-eating zombies or aliens craving human flesh, everyday roleplay will be between normal people thrust into abnormal circumstances, which means the threat works as just one of many environmental variables; that's what's interesting here, how the PCs' respond to these things.
With the caveat that there are more than one ways to make a game the focus should be on those interactions. Do you see the other person - or group - as a potential ally? As a joiner? As a competitor? As an enemy? Other human beings are your greatest potential asset and biggest threat, far more so than mindless hordes of whatever it is that's out there. Dealing with resource deprivation, psychological trauma and the knowledge all it takes is one bad day for it all to end.
In that context it doesn't matter what it is that's out there. You won't interact with it outside PrPs, it's just a point of reference.
IMHO one of the benchmarks to see if your game might be going the wrong way is if you have Flintstones-minded people trying to fix the apocalypse on channels, purely OOC. Let's build a steel wall, surrounded by an acid-filled moat leading into corridors with zombie-killing grinders powered by zombies on treadmills who're also providing infinite electricity, woohoo. If that gets traction it's all going into a different direction.
@Arkandel said:
IMHO one of the benchmarks to see if your game might be going the wrong way is if you have Flintstones-minded people trying to fix the apocalypse on channels, purely OOC. Let's build a steel wall, surrounded by an acid-filled moat leading into corridors with zombie-killing grinders powered by zombies on treadmills who're also providing infinite electricity, woohoo. If that gets traction it's all going into a different direction.
I think that might be lack of clear thematic direction really than a game breaking down. Some people, me included, agree that post-apocalyptic games are fun because you can play up the pathos of these tragic interactions and how they deal with a new, broken world and the whole struggle for survival. Other people are like, 'The characters on the Walking Dead are dumb, I would be so much better on it and if I'm playing a game like that I'll show them all'. It's totally different mindsets and I think it just has to emphasize the first is what the game is going for and not the second.
some fucking idiot who people only like because he's good at taking credit for the work of everyone under him, just like every other fucking L&L headwiz.
@Apos I agree with you - and I'm typing this fully aware it's a peeve of mine - but where it actually goes wrong is when things like that take over. Consider these two similar-sounding takes on them:
We need to build a great high-tech reinforced wall and moat, get a solar generator, motion detectors and heat sensors to detect incoming human threats. Let's launch a series of plots trying to get blueprints for this stuff, runs to gather supplies, political deals to get the manpower and expertise to build them and combat characters to deal with the zombie-attracting noise levels due to all this construction. Then when it's built let's deal with the consequences of having something other groups will want to take away from us since it's so cool.
We describe this on channels then put it in a +job. I have <merits> and so do the people I've CCed in this, so let's get rolling.
Obviously I've no issues with the former approach - if I was staff I'd love the kind of proactive players who'd go out there and make a try for something this ambitious.
@Apos
I know I personally watch the walking dead and am sure I would do it better.
"YOU COULD HAVE BEEN SLOWLY CULLING THIS HERD THIS WHOLE TIME YOU WERE JUST STANDING 'GUARD'."
"OMG YOU SAW THE WATER TOWER WAS F'D UP WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU."
@Kanye-Qwest If we start sanity-checking the Walking Dead we'll run into plenty of weird plot holes only there to advance the story. The sheer number their super-capable veteran group has been ambushed and caught flat-footed is something I roll my eyes at, for example. 
Here's a nutty idea. You want new settlements? Don't just take inspiration from The Walking Dead. Take it from Z Nation and Mad Max. Have the setting be a -caravan moving across North America-. Let everyone have a vehicle of some sort. They won't be fixed people, they'll be explicitly nomads roaming and gathering supplies.
Then people have an excuse for meeting together (caravan), or going their separate ways (you have transportation, you can drive to x and meet with y person) and its not the same old, same old. If someone wants to settle down and start a settlement? Fine, @dig them a room. Your grid is all of north America. But they can't count on a horde not tearing it all down and forcing them to move on at some point.
Variants include: Reduced people. You could either have a world with lots of roving gangs, or one where there might not BE many living humans aside from the PCs. Either, if organized properly, can make the above seem more plausible.
@secretfire said:
Have the setting be a -caravan moving across North America-. Let everyone have a vehicle of some sort.
I had that same thought for a different game idea, but the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like it would be a nightmare to run. You'd constantly be building new mini-grids and - more importantly - coming up with ideas for where the caravan would go and what they'd encounter along the way. Players would constantly have to adapt to changing venues (where are we this week?) and that might make folks less comfortable with the theme as a whole. Very interesting idea - not so sure how well it would work in execution.
@Misadventure said:
You don't HAVE to keep building mini grids. You CAN. You aren't doing a tactical setup as grid/places though.
Well I said mini grid. I wasn't expecting you'd want to build an entire giant area every time they moved. But for me the real work isn't in the MUSH building, it's in the world building of defining each new area that they've come to.
I'm just coming in on this thread and am tired and haven't read all the way through yet, but....
The caravan idea thing could be cool. Why would you need any type of grid other than some generic landscape type things, anyway? Why would you have to tell people where they are? That's part of what I don't get about what seems to me to be current MU culture - I feel like people want to be spoon-fed. Which is fine for them, I guess, but not sustainable. Anyway, tangent...
Point is, if you (anyone) want a caravan/moving around type of setting, the focus should probably be generally what's happening around them, and not specifically where they are that week. Things that could happen anywhere.
That said, I should actually go read this thread now >>
@thebird I don't need to be spoon fed, but I do need some idea of the setting and the immediate vicinity. How else would you keep people from RPing wildly different things? As for the grid... one could argue that about any MUSH but players kind of expect at least some kind of grid.
Personally, I'd just make a "north America" grid, make it big but not detailed (focus on highways, a city could just be a single room or two), and then just specify what state the main convoy was in right now. If people rp different details in a specific scene....well, they ARE traveling.
I'm suddenly picturing the caravan in Reign of Fire driving around on highways while shooting zombies who get too close.
Speaking of zombies. I am enjoying this book series, the Remaining by DJ Moles. Guy is part of a program that has bunkers dotting North America and they basically get paid to live somewhat rurally and quietly and just present a normal face to their community. But sometimes, just sometimes, they get an alert that they have to go into their bunker and they stay there for however long and follow prescribed rules about when to leave.
In the book, the man hits the surface after a bacterial infection has killed much of the population, and left the rest as hyper-aggressive and predatory. They're not stupid. They are animalistic and territorial and have a pack mentality with others infected. And as such they do things like attack one part of a fence while breaching the fence on the other side of the place uninfected are holed up. The predators are just plain fun to read.
But still in all, a nice bread and butter setting. Generators still have a bit of diesel left. Building an enclave to hole up in, and making sure people are treated before the disease progresses to the brain and causes the damage that results. People still being able to use a car, or truck, or weld if you can find the utilities to do so, hey great. So it has a lot of creativity, like chain link fence building during the day when the predators are mostly inactive.
Long story short: It can be a fun setting to have characters moving around. Let them move in their own groups, or link together however they want. They all really just need their 'default room' which they can desc how they like, be it a highway, or a house, and let them 'survive'. Storytellers occasionally throw stuff at them. Have the highway group roll through the town where the other group are hole-up in a house. Let them organically link, or even clash. Above all, have fun, in this failing world.
I adore @Bennie's idea and would play that in a heartbeat, myself. You should also check out the video game "Walk of the Living," which is more or less FTL but with zombies and post apocalyptic stuff than spaceships.
@secretfire said in Input on a new mush idea:
Personally, I'd just make a "north America" grid, make it big but not detailed (focus on highways, a city could just be a single room or two), and then just specify what state the main convoy was in right now.
If you had a few people who like to build like crazy, it'd be rather fun to drop new parts of the grid in front of the PCs as they travel along, and leave their ruins behind. The players declare that they're gonna travel along Interstate 23, heading west, they hang about on the highway grid and RP getting attacked by zombie dogs while having to move cars out of the way of their caravan, you drop Deadsville, TN, in front of them and GM their entry into the town a few days later. After the terrible battle that ensues when Bob the PC rips a zombie-attracting fart, and the PCs get separated fleeing the area, you put a 'HORDE HERE' there. Which maybe somebody will clear out, or maybe you remove it at random eventually.
What fires the imagination about 'The Walking Dead' is imagining ways to solve the problem, which is why everybody likes to criticize how those dumb characters handle stuff. I think you'd really want it to be open-world -- not 'you are trapped in the city with zombies MUSH' but 'Zombies! What are ya gonna do about it?! MUSH.' 'Cause just trying to hold your city territory would get boring, but 'Well, living in this walled subdivision didn't work out, let's build a giant tree-house chicken farm!' type shit would be pretty great.
@Kanye-Qwest If we start sanity-checking the Walking Dead we'll run into plenty of weird plot holes only there to advance the story. The sheer number their super-capable veteran group has been ambushed and caught flat-footed is something I roll my eyes at, for example.
