As we said yesterday, we’ve made a playtest edition of Outlive Outdead available for free downloads. It’s not complete–there’s no artwork, the formatting is bland, and most of the GM’s section still needs to be written–but it’s playable. And it’s available as a torrent. This is our experiment: To make Outlive Outdead available for free
Outlive Outdead is moving closer to publication. Right now, we’re moving into open playtesting. Care to play? A playtest version of the rulebook is available here as a large PDF file. It doesn’t include any art and the formatting is bland, but it has everything you need: character generation, rules, equipment lists, pregens, and the
Many of the rules in Outlive Outdead are uncomplicated. One of our design goals is to keep the rules quick and fluid so players can focus on the game experience. However, distance and movement are vital to a game about zombies and need extra attention. Because zombies can only harm humans when they’re within arm’s
The latest playtest of Outlive Outdead was a resounding success! What does that mean? Three things: We found some rules that need fixing but nothing major. The core of the game is fundamentally sound. Most importantly, the players had a blast! After playtests, we collect data from our players using a survey. Of course we
It’s a staple of zombie media: One of the human survivors gets bitten and hides this from the others. Then he turns into a zombie and attacks his former friends. We really wanted this to happen in Outlive Outdead, but how can we encourage people to hide bites from other players, maybe even to get into
Fighting zombies is fun – in a game. To do that for real would be stressful to say the least. That’s why human characters in Outlive Outdead can break. As we discussed earlier, human characters have two numbers for each attribute, such as “Fight 11(19)” or “Repair 09(20)”. The first number is the target number
In case you didn’t know, I wrote a novel! It’s called Traitor Hangout and it’s set in the PARANOIA game universe of science fiction-based dark humor. If you have read it, thanks! Feel free to send me an email (wjmacguffin at gmail) to tell me what you think. If you haven’t read it, then you
Outlive Outdead will use an original “rules-light” system. In creating this system, we get to decide which attributes are necessary. Attributes are the statistics used in describing characters and they often form the core of the game’s rules. Many roleplaying games use attributes that cover everything a human can do, such as “Body, Mind, and
We will be running a final playtest of Outlive Outdead at the EN World Gameday 31, and in preparation for that, we have produced a quickstart version of the rules. You can download it for free right here or by clinking on the link to the right under the Downloads section. These rules are subject to
One of the problems of roleplaying games is dealing with character death. Players can put a lot into their characters, and if they die, that’s it. The character is gone and all that work is for naught. The worst part, in my opinion, is how the player has no way to continue playing the game.