Hello,

Wow - Nick Wedig's The End of the World is a fantastic blend of Dead Meat, Otherkind, and The Mountain Witch - neat! It speaks directly to a lot of my thinking and writing about zombie movies. From this game:

You have all congregated together for mutual protection, but as the stress increases, the internal tensions of your compatriots may be more dangerous to you than the undead outside the window.

Thematically, the game is about the breakdown of social taboos and mores. Once these outside limitations are removed, the hatred that usually bubbles beneath the surface comes forth. Zombies are only in the game peripherally as a way of addressing these themes, really. ... The nice suburb that the PCs lived in has been disrupted, for some reason, and now they have to band together and deal with that. More frightening, though, is that they need to deal with each other as their own sense of morality breaks down.

It all comes down to the fact that The Night of the Living Dead is not about zombies. It, like many horror and horror-SF flicks, presents the classic "isolated small group under stress" situation. We get to see people cope with one another, to see the conflicts among them fracture into unexpected alliances and antagonisms, such that the Real Person emerges in each character.

The quote you give about zombie movies is exactly what I wanted out of the game.  I don't even particularly like zombie movies, but thought that the subtext of zombie movies was interesting: zombies themselves are never the threat, the other human beings you are forced to deal with to survive are.  If everyone works together, then the party should be able to survive, but internal tensions make this unlikely.  I hope this would work out something like that in play.

Ron wrote:
1. Player-characters are too densely constructed: you hate one guy, you get one fact from each of the other players, you have something that pisses you off, you fear something beyond all reason, and you've committed a monstrous act? Geez, that's like ten zombies right there in one character. I strongly suggest slicing it down, both reducing the facts you get from others (great system for that, though) and picking one from among fear/hate/anger/act. That'll produce a nice solid niche for each character, and promote working toward one's narrational strengths during play.

Ron wrote:
2. If I'm reading right, the overall system is basically a race between the Trust you amass and the ever-escalating universal difficulty. I wonder whether Trust-manipulation isn't too nuanced, too character-specific. I'm also not sure about that "Trust in self" score, which seems like too much of a buffer, reducing inter-dependency. It's pretty fundamental that the protagonists in a zombie story must rely on one another.

Ron wrote:
If it weren't for the very weak treatment of Hatred and Suburb, this would have been a winner. It might not get a Ronny, but that aside, it's a already a great-looking game.

So, here's a question for you.  In the last few weeks, I've been working on a game ("The Dead Walk!") that's unnervingly similar to The End of the World.  Almost precisely the same Premise and setting (not focusing on the horror of the undead, but on the horror of what people will do to each other in the face of a stressful and seemingly hopeless situation, etc, etc), explicit mechanics for specific antagonisms and alliances between player characters, a steadily increasing stress pool that makes actions more difficult as time goes on, simple dice pool conflict resolution, bringing dead PCs back into play as zombies, and so on.  My question is, should I continue work on my game?  I've been working with the intention to present the game for comments and feedback here on the Forge when I'd banged it into some kind of shape, but is it worthwhile at all to submit something so close to a concept that's just been done?  (And quite well, I might add...)  It seems silly, but I almost feel like a plagiarist now, even though I've just now read Nick's game (and now, Ron's review of Dead Meat).  Stupid collective unconscious...

Hi Marc,

Parallelism isn't plagiarism, and one of the features of the Forge is that we all recognize that there's going to be a lot of cross-influencing.

A lot of people have good ideas, and a lot of them (not all) put them into some game design. But only some of them will push the process through actually to publishing a game. One of them is bound to get there first. The others will be divided into those who say, "Well, he did it, so I'm not going to finish," and those who say, "Mine's good too." They publish as well. What's really important about all this is that it happens most effectively when there's a lot of "simmering" and cross-communicating going on the whole time.

This is normal. It is exactly what you find in any artistic community, including basic scientific research if you can believe that. The widely-accepted image of the isolated geniuses of art and science is 100% mistaken. There is nothing wrong, weird, or unethical about seeing a few zombie games come out which share some ideas, especially since there are probably going to be some useful differences as well.

Role-playing publishing conformed to this approach in its early days, from the early 1970s until the middle-late 1980s. After that, a rather disgusting "race to the center" effect took over, in which everyone strove to publish the most gaudy, text-heavy game which conformed exactly to what they thought of as "mainstream gamer" desires. Only the independents, ranging from a few isolated cases for a ten-year period to today's current explosion, represent a real artistic process and market.

My hope, although I cannot make anyone do this, is that we all provide references, acknowledgments, and advertising that help one another out. You can find extensive lists in my game texts about where some of the influences came from, and I don't mean "Gee, that Cars song sure inspires me," I mean, "I learned that re-roll mechanics can be central from Robin Laws' work in The Dying Earth." A lot of us have found that this practice is very, very profitable for everyone.

We should probably take further discussion of this topic over to the Publishing forum, though. Many threads there provide information that should reassure you.

Best,
Ron

Nick,

The game reads great. It seems solid (best I can say without a playtest) and well thought out. I particularly like the way the conflicts are handled, in specific the way the trust points are allocated from the other players. My only negative comment is that right off-hand I can't think of a good way to start the game (as a GM). I would like to see some examples in the text for starting conflicts, just some ideas to break through the mental block of someone like me :)

Additionally, I was thinking about Aliens (the movie) while I read the part about betrayal. I (and many of my friends) really liked the way that Paul Riser's snivelling corporate worm gets killed by the Alien right after his betrayal is exposed. This just makes me question the whole 'Betrayal = Protection' idea.

Excellent work!,
Jason

Marc wrote:
My question is, should I continue work on my game? 

Jason wrote:
Nick,

The game reads great. It seems solid (best I can say without a playtest) and well thought out. I particularly like the way the conflicts are handled, in specific the way the trust points are allocated from the other players. My only negative comment is that right off-hand I can't think of a good way to start the game (as a GM). I would like to see some examples in the text for starting conflicts, just some ideas to break through the mental block of someone like me :)

Jason wrote:
Additionally, I was thinking about Aliens (the movie) while I read the part about betrayal. I (and many of my friends) really liked the way that Paul Riser's snivelling corporate worm gets killed by the Alien right after his betrayal is exposed. This just makes me question the whole 'Betrayal = Protection' idea.

mrteapot wrote:

I certainly would like to see what you would have done differently.  Finish your game, and then we can compare them and see which works better (or which works better at different things).  I would like to see other, similar games and what works in them and what works in ways I hadn't thought about.  I'm happy to give you permission to use as much of my game in yours as you wish.