On 1/3/2018 at 6:44 PM, Richardbuxton said:

I just had a look at the GenCon adventure FFZg released. There’s a Zombie stat Block in it that’s very fantasy themed, called Reanimate (Minion). They have a really cool ability:

Undying; The GM may spend 3 Threat from any check a PC makes to return one previously defeated Reanimate to an existing minion group, removing damage from the group accordingly; the GM may spend 1 Despair to return two Reanimates to a minion group.

i think it should be added to the list of options.

Thinking about it more, I like this better than Implacable BUT since zombie minions are rarely going to have a defense value or a way of upgrading incoming combat checks, I doubt Undying would occur often enough for my liking.

1 hour ago, widomknight said:

Not really, as a group they only attack once if Im correct on how groups work).
Im not a bit fan of minion groups.

Why don't you like minion groups? They do perfectly what you're looking for: enable swarms of zombies to attack the players. Remember, in this system, a round of combat isn't 6 seconds, it's more like 1-5 minutes, and minion groups have ranks in their skills (in this case Brawl) for each minion in the group beyond the first, so one combat check represents all the zombies in one minion group attacking for a few minutes.

You probably want to limit each group to 4-5 zombies, but you can have several of those groups.

17 minutes ago, yeti1069 said:

Why don't you like minion groups? They do perfectly what you're looking for: enable swarms of zombies to attack the players. Remember, in this system, a round of combat isn't 6 seconds, it's more like 1-5 minutes, and minion groups have ranks in their skills (in this case Brawl) for each minion in the group beyond the first, so one combat check represents all the zombies in one minion group attacking for a few minutes.

You probably want to limit each group to 4-5 zombies, but you can have several of those groups.

Maybe I dont understand the advantage of using them.

You still have to keep track of all their wounds (4 zombies with 3 wounds still equal 12, and you still subtract them)

A group with only a single attack doesnt really fit IMO anyhow.

You pool their wounds, yeah.

If you want 16 zombies in the encounter, you could roll two ability dice 16 times, probably missing most of those, probably scoring 0 critical hits, and probably triggering 0 extra effects. Players have to devote their attacks against single zombies, almost certainly killing them one at a time on each swing--criticals and most weapon qualities are wasted. They become a time sink, and little more.

Or, you make 4 minion groups of 4 zombies, rolling two ability dice and two proficiency dice 4 times, probably hitting fairly often, scoring a few criticals, and probably activating extra effects (such as Knockdown) with some frequency. Players attack a group, and can use criticals to kill off minions. The overall combat takes much less time, but is more threatening, more exciting.

We have two options in this thread for capturing the feel of those hard to kill zombies:

-Exceeding wound threshold doesn't kill them, only a critical hit does. Now the minions are more resilient, more of a threat for longer, with more time to get in their own critical hits, or Knockdown players.

-Minions go down as normal, but every time a player generates 3 threat or a despair, one or more minions come back.

I see where your coming from yeti1069 .

I might have to give minion groups a go and see what happens

Thanks for taking the time to explain it better, much appreciated man

The dice pool benefit of grouping minions caps at 6, that’s the point where they have 5 ranks in their group skills and can’t get any more ranks... but if just one Minion dies then instantly the rank goes down by 1, the dice pool looses a green, their effectiveness diminishes.

If you have a group of 10 minions then the pc’s need to kill 5 before the dice pool diminishes. Killing 5 minions in a single round is not unheard of, in fact that would be common. 15 in the group and they start to really last, these are zombies you want to run away from as they will be rolling 5 dice for at least 2 Rounds.

Have a couple of those big groups and it’s actually threatening to the pc’s. If a pc gets hit by one there’s a good chance of causing a Crit. They can’t just kill two from every group to weaken the whole encounter, they have to focus their attack. Yet for you as gm your just running 2 Minion groups, tracking their Wounds is simple and you only have to make two or three dice rolls a round.

Its not something to do every encounter, but it’s a great way to ratchet up the tension and the threat without having a huge number of npc’s to manage. And you must be sure to do it with low Soak low WT minions.

To track Minion Wounds you break them up, not as a single number, but all together. Let’s say you have a group of 4, wt 5, Soak 3. They get hit for 11 damage, minus their Soak, that’s 8, I would note it like this:

5/3/0/0. One is dead

each number gets counted up to the wt, starting from the left. Once a zero is increased then all minions before that are dead.

If that group took another 4 after Soak:

5/5/2/0. Now two are down.

Thanks Richard .

That really helps

5 hours ago, yeti1069 said:

Thinking about it more, I like this better than Implacable BUT since zombie minions are rarely going to have a defense value or a way of upgrading incoming combat checks, I doubt Undying would occur often enough for my liking.

Anyone with thoughts on this? Undying is cool, but if the party is rarely generating 3 threat or despair, it won't come up often enough to really make an impression on the players. At least, that's how I'm seeing it. Players will be rolling probably YYYG vs PP, maybe PPB.

What if it also triggered on 3 Advantage or a Triumph? Minions rolling PPAAA

3 hours ago, Richardbuxton said:

What if it also triggered on 3 Advantage or a Triumph? Minions rolling PPAAA

Yeah. Good call.

The other thing is if there are Nemesis in the encounter, Defense 2 with Adversary 2 could trigger it a few times.

44 minutes ago, Richardbuxton said:

The other thing is if there are Nemesis in the encounter, Defense 2 with Adversary 2 could trigger it a few times.

Apparently I just wasn't thinking much today. Yeah...other sources of Challenge dice...

I'll be honest, I'm not 100% sure how I feel about the common trope of "wounds don't matter" because even in zombie movies, you can still down a walker with damage.

Maybe something along the line of "without destroying the brain, a zombie will continue to keep coming. If a zombies wound threshold is exceeded, the zombie is staggered for one round. At the end of the next round the zombie recovers one hitpoint. If a zombies wound threshold is exceeded, it will not take a critical injury. A critical injury will kill a zombie like normal."

This means that you can still hold a walker off with damage, but still need that crit to really put them down. I don't know many times we've gone through entire rounds without rolling crits, so that'd be lethal if wounds were completely irrelevant. Not to mention then high damage low crit (3+ advantage) are actually useless.