Great White Games/Pinnacle Entertainment Group

[drkrash]

It is bittersweet that I'm posting that our group has decided not to finish War of the Dead. We are ending in week 1 of chapter 4.

This is not to say we haven't enjoyed it. We've loved it. And we've gotten a lot of excellent role-playing, stress, and angst out of the campaign.

One of the main reasons we're stopping has little to do with the campaign itself. Our group is recently attracted to a new shiny and so we're rolling with the enthusiasm of that.

But despite our love of WotD (and I will heartily recommend it to anyone who asks), the campaign started to wear us down too much. Some of this was unique to our game. Only one player had his original character, so the continuity of the game was affected and the game had become pretty much about that one character. The other players liked their characters well enough, but had considerably less investment.

Some of it had to do with the genre. While the stress and the non-stop depression was a lot of fun at first, after a year of almost weekly play, the game became sort of masochistic. "I look forward to seeing how we get F'ed this week" was a pretty common statement from the players.

Some if it had to do with the system. This was our first time with Savage Worlds, and there was a lot to like about the system. And we played it through Legendary, so we saw a lot of it. SW combat also has a lot to recommend it, but when you face the same handful of opponents over and over (and we didn't use a battlemap), combat loses some of its fun.

And finally some of it was due to the story itself. As the story moved into Chapter 4 (and I'll keep things spoiler free here), it became harder to deviate from the rails. Of course, it was our game so we could do whatever we wanted, but each step away from "the script" meant more work for me and less using what I paid for. I found this especially so in the first half of chapter 4, which has huge amounts of exposition with not very useful advice like "try to involve them in the role-play." My players were fully aware that they could follow the story as written or not, but they also realized that they wouldn't get the full "cinematic" experience unless they skewed closely to what was written. For awhile that was fun too, but eventually they grew frustrated by what they perceived as the inevitability of some events (which I don't think is an unfair critique of parts of it as-written).

But I'm really not writing this to bash the writers. We had an awesome run with the game and we got much further than I expected. Thank you for the great experiences! I wish the team the best of luck with World of the Dead!

[DGMiller]

I'm sorry to hear this. Hopefully I can learn from your experiences as posted on these forums (and those of others like Jordan, Ferret, and Wibbs).

One of the things I plan to do to minimize the grind is take a cue from the serial nature of the campaign as written and take a brief "mid-season" hiatus of a week or two, and then take a few weeks off between chapters as well. During the hiatus weeks, we'll (hopefully) be playing the Deadlands game that one of my players has been running (he's talking about doing a Shadowrun game, but I'm not a fan). I'll also continue to hype the WotD game during these "off" weeks, through the Obsidian Portal and social media (Facebook).

We're also new to SW (played a short-lived Hellfrost game that just ended). I'm curious what you liked and didn't like.

[drkrash]

We had also talked about hiatuses between chapters, but with our group, that loss of momentum usually spelled death for us, so we plowed through.

I don't have a problem with the SW rules. They're very easy to use, I like all the "props," and the power scale is beautiful. We had a Legendary guy and a Veteran safely adventuring together.

But after zillions of Shamblers, nameless humans, and Ragers, combat just became a chore. It really just came down to whether or not I'd get lucky dice rolls to injure them, and then them getting lousy rolls to soak, and then figuring out how the story just got marred by a PC dying.

I will happily share any other thoughts about how certain parts of it ran to anyone who wants to know; I'd love my experience to be of use to others.

[DGMiller]

[drkrash]

[Spoilers]

Chapter 1 was the least problematic of the chapters. Everything is new and fresh, there is a decent amount of variety in the events, things can be changed from the script with comparative ease.

A couple things come immediately to mind. Make sure Hell stays alive. It's not too hard; he's pretty hard to kill - but my players did take shots at him. If he gets killed, the end of the campaign becomes problematic.

Beginning characters are not glass, but unless they're combat focused, they will dangerously struggle with even a few zombies (the scenarios do this well by only having encounters with single zombies on the boat). We had two character deaths in Chapter One.

[Wibbs]

[spoilers]

Chapter 1 is the only one I've had character deaths in as well. The danger is that the characters don't necessarily know that much about the best tactics to beat the zombies at that point.

However, I didn't and don't really see this as a problem, as the deaths reinforced the fact that the setting was dangerous, and they sure as hell became more cautious after they happened.

One thing I've found really helps is to provide ways to avoid fights, particularly later in the campaign. Any sensible character will be doing that as a matter of course anyway, and I get a lot of satisfaction out of situations where PC actions circumnavigate potential dangerous combat encounters.

Depending on the character skills chosen, its important to try and give non-combat skills plenty of work out wherever possible, and I ended up tweaking significant parts of the initial encounters to enable me to do this.

Also, I've run chapter 1 with two different groups, and found that the development where Jason Kirkman wants all survivors and injured moved to one location simply didnt work well, as by that point the characters knew enough about the infection to work out that it would be a death trap. In both cases I altered the story based on this, so it never happened. This also meant that the whole plot thread with Ms. Hartman was missed as well. YMMV though depending on the group you're playing with.

The campaign as written has a number of sections that can feel quite rail-roady, and I would encourage you to try to be as flexible as possible so that the character choices are seen to be significant.

I guess my final piece of advice would be to relax and enjoy it yourself. It's a really fun campaign completely different to anything else I've run, and although I'm only half way through chapter 2, my group loves it and we fully intend to carry on to the end.

[Wibbs]

[definite spoilers...]

A quick couple of other things I've just remembered:

Be clear in your head with what will happen if players try to contact the outside world near the beginning of the outbreak, and what information they will get e.g. phone, internet etc. I ended up altering the story so the cruise ship was specifically designed to hark back to the golden age of cruises in the 50s, with no phones, computers etc allowed, which neatly solved the problem.

Another thing that came up was how the PCs would gain access to staff areas of the ship, and also linked to this, the problem of zombies not being able to open doors. I got around this with the ship being fitted with cardless security doors activated as long as you have a security key fob on your person.

[Jordan Peacock]

[Wibbs]

In fact, that was exactly the way I ran it - a cruise to get away from hectic modern life, along with a fully decked out ballroom with chandeliers etc.

[DGMiller]

Thanks, Wibbs! Very helpful.