Zombie Apocalypse: The Sign-up

[krogothwolf]

It's good-natured till someone gets hurt, then it's a sport!

Defensible location also means sustainable to some degree. Our location is not sustainable. Most con rooms I've been to contain 2 or 3 exits from the room itself. Not sure if this one does, but if it does that means we have multiple locations to defend. Plus the windows(one which is now open, are we on the first floor anyways?) which the turned can get through. We have limited devices to defend ourselves from. Our current resources are as follows. The doors are also not going to last against something that managed to rip of a TV off the wall then threw it with seemingly a lot more ease then a normal human. The doors will not really last long against that, meaning our defensible position is not one of strength because we don't have a way of properly defending ourselves against whats out there. Our judge of their strength is Menarker right now, and that judge is they are strong.

What we have on us, what is in the room. Food wise it seems like a buncha junk food. Weapon wise it's furniture and video game supplies. Not much going on there. Sure we can pile it up against the door, but that still doesn't help us much.

Our biggest resource is living unaffected human bodies. Us, We need to use those resources wisely. Splitting them up to defend the doors(with our fists? yeah this is why we need weapons) and then holding down a zombie that manhandled a TV so we can examine it is not really that smart.

Now, you're also assuming the Zombies will disperse(which we wouldn't be able to figure out even if we examine Menarker) or not be able to find us(we may have figured this out, but with how quickly it seems they attack those unaffected and detected Rick, it seems we probably aren't exactly hidden). We even might have a better chance of leaving while the recently zombiefied deal with the 10% out there that wasn't. The chaos of that might help us escape. You also don't know if the zombiefied people can sense each other or be drawn to each other, meaning leaving a living one around us is not a wise idea either way.

Now wasting time figuring out if a zombie is intelligent and what it reacts to is mute right now because time is our biggest enemy aside from the flesh crazing horde. Experimentation requires time and resources. A 5-15 minute experimentation of the thing won't net us anything good. And again, unless someone's skills in human anatomy are greater then the norm, actually getting much from the hastily done experimentation is going to be difficult to get anything from.

Again, if your tactical self is saying that you should experiment on a zombie in the location we are currently in then we might have problems with you deciding our tactics. Our best bet for experimentation is observation as we get the hell out of a building full of zombies, and figuring out ways to stop them as we run into them.

I'm not saying experimenting on the zombies is a bad idea in the end, but right now it is.

[TDK]

Originally Posted by Geminex

Huh. This confuses me. Since when is Menarker dead? Choco didn't post, did he? And no matter how much you guys attack the zombie, none of us seem very good at weapons. You don't have much of a guarantee that you actually, y'know, hit him, or that your attacks have the effect you want them to. Usually the way it goes is that characters describe their actions, and then the DM describes the effects of those actions. I'm sure you know that.
So sure, you can talk about your characters vigorously attacking that zombie, but assuming that you've killed it does seem to border on god-moding a little.
Unless Players get to control weaker enemies? In which case, fair enough, if Choco's fine with it. But I didn't really have any way of knowing that. And while I'm fine with my character looking stupid for quite a number of reasons, my making a false but entirely justified assumption about the ruleset isn't one of them.

This is going to be a boring ass RP if we have to wait for IC to post every time we attack a zombie. We're not hunting them but it still seems likely that we will at least STRIKE a fair shitload of zombies through the course of this.


Also, its been, what, two minutes since the gas hit? Only 20% of the con isn't zombies, and the remaining humans are packed in like sardines, and also they are fat nerds. Thirty seconds, tops, they're all dead. These zombies are fast and don't appear very patient to search a building when they can see people on the streets through the windows. The main con floor is almost always, in my experience, at least NEAR the main entrance. The zombies also don't attack each other, as said on the news, so no infighting. There are almost certainly no zombies left in the con, save maybe a few chasing some (comparatively) lucky survivors who happened to be in an empty hallway or something.

if you guys weren't so damn overenthusiastic about murdering Menarker

Um, pardon me for reacting violently to a crazed, super-strong runner zombie five feet away from me who is about to murder one of my friends? This all took place in the space of a few seconds, so maybe if I had bullet-time I could stop to consider 'hey maybe I should be nonlethal and possibly get myself killed so we can check out his vital signs rather than just going with something (destroying the brain) that could not possibly NOT work', but until I level up and gain bullet time, I think I'll go with "bash menarker's face in with my steampunk rifle".

[Geminex]

I wanted to respond in Haiku, but damn. It's late.

Well, are they gonna find us, though? Cause I don't think so. That's what I had sorta counted on. Menarker attacked Rick as soon as he saw him. But he had to see him first. As for the rest, did we ever see zombies navigating without eyesight? I don't think so. In fact, I'm pretty sure that their senses aren't dissimilar to ours, that they rely on vision quite a bit. Mind you, we don't know. That's one thing I wanna find out. And I could think of an effective way to learn it in 10 minutes, bit more if we wanna test intelligence. So I think waiting just 10 more minutes would really help us. But I wanna wait longer. Why?

Cause even if they were gonna find us, we still wouldn't be too badly off in the room. Sure, we're not armed very well. But even if we had guns, we'd run out of ammo way before the zombies ran out of bodies. Our clubs would break, our chainsaws run out of gas. These things have numbers. I don't think we'd be much good at combat against them, at least not against a horde. We could kill some stragglers. But we can still kill some stragglers in the room, albeit a bit less effectively.

The way I see it, the core of our strategy can't be combat. It has to be running, hiding. We could run, now, but I think we'd run into zombies. They'd have an easier time of finding us when we're out in the open, and they'd be far more capable of taking us down. We wouldn't have chokepoints, still wouldn't have weapons. And come on, we're nerds. They're superhuman. They'd run us down. Running would get us killed now. So yeah, let's hide. I think that if we move out, we're more likely to encounter zombies, and we're also less likely to win against them. In the room, they might not notice us (depends on their senses), and if they do, we'd have a better chance of surviving an attack by a small group of them. And it the group turns out to be larger, we can always barricade the doors, leave Menarker's corpse for them to feast on for a while, then abscond through the window.

If you wanna compromise, we can post lookouts, do the experiments on Menarker, then try to find a better hiding place within the compound.

[TDK]

Originally Posted by Geminex

leave Menarker's corpse for them to feast on for a while

Originally Posted by The Lady on the News Program

They don't seem to attack other people under the effects of the gas, only going after those that have survived it.

.

[Geminex]

Well, yeah. They wouldn't attack him when he was alive. But he'll be dead. Just a corpse. And...

biting and eating people they catch, whether alive or dead

I'm imagine that at least some of them would like to feast on some fleshmeats.
And hell, even if they don't, it's not like we're gonna take Menarker's corpse along. We'll leave it, if it distracts them for a while, great. If not, eh. We lost maybe ten seconds.

Edit: Oh, and...

This is going to be a boring ass RP if we have to wait for IC to post every time we attack a zombie. We're not hunting them but it still seems likely that we will at least STRIKE a fair shitload of zombies through the course of this.

True. But I have no problem with the rule itself. Just the fact that nobody really bothered to mention it, and I made a mistake as a result thereof. I don't like playing games without knowing the rules. Mind you, I won't complain as long as said mistake has no consequences. I'm gonna trust you all to make sure it has no consequences.

Also, its been, what, two minutes since the gas hit? Only 20% of the con isn't zombies, and the remaining humans are packed in like sardines, and also they are fat nerds. Thirty seconds, tops, they're all dead. These zombies are fast and don't appear very patient to search a building when they can see people on the streets through the windows. The main con floor is almost always, in my experience, at least NEAR the main entrance. The zombies also don't attack each other, as said on the news, so no infighting. There are almost certainly no zombies left in the con, save maybe a few chasing some (comparatively) lucky survivors who happened to be in an empty hallway or something.

Well, if there's no zombies left here, there's even less of a reason to leave our nice safe hiding spot.

But honestly, I don't think that the con area is entirely , or even nearly, empty yet. There's gonna be quite a crowd, and we really don't know how intelligent those things are. Maybe they're just milling around, running aimlessly. I'm thinking that they'll have dispersed a little right now, but that there's still gonna be a lot more zombies within 200 yards of us than anywhere else in the city. Give them a few more hours to disperse, and we should be good. Especially, like I said, if we travel by night.

[krogothwolf]

We don't know he saw Rick first, we just saw him attack Rick first. Though considering others were near the TV's before hand the chances of Menarker seeing Rick first seems very flimsy when he's in a room full of people. We haven't seen them navigate at all Gem so we don't know what they do. If you think their senses are similiar to ours means they probably have hearing too. And after hearing the TV crash through a window they might have heard that.

We aren't in a very well defensible room. Do you not understand that Gem? Is it so hard to get that through your head? There are windows and doors, we should be on the first floor. Meaning they have multiple entrance points, we have limited choke points. A thing that ripped a TV off the door is not going to have issues smashing windows and pulling down doors and furniture. If they are all that strong. We have limited supplies.

And no Gem, I highly doubt anything you could do in the 5-15 minutes would provide us with anything that we could find out with observation. Can they operate machinery? are you going to let a hand be free to give it something to operate?

Lets put it this way, we have nothing to really hold it down with that would be effective enough. You would need to deal with 2 arms, 2 legs and the head to prevent biting. That's probably 3 people holding down the Zombie. Then you pulling your experiments that are pointless on it, again observations will serve just as well and not put anyone at risk by being that close to one. We have limited living bodies to be useful in dividing up are resources in such a fashion.

The big thing "Will the zombies diverse" and can the zombies sense each other are things we won't find out poking at Menarker, the only things you can find out are do they track by site and sound, We can figure that out by observing them as we move or by looking out the window. The figuring out what works against them, we figured that out enough when they took it down. We aren't going to waste time on experimenting on the Zombies until we are decently safe. Which we aren't in the room we currently are in.

Did I say go out an actively fight? No, I said get out of this location, find decent resources and then get out of town. Moving now as a organized group is more effective while the chaos of the turning zombies chase down the random nonzombiefied congoers.

Also, choke points only really work when you can handle the onrush. We can't handle an onrush of zombies. Plus choke points against super human don't really go that well. Did you not listen to the news? They don't attack other zombie's, meaning they won't feast on Menarkers corpse.

[Overcast]

We are on the second floor. So barring ourselves in if they can detect us sans sight would put us in a bad way if they decided to just crowd around the doorways until we are almost entirely doomed.

Doing experiments on Mern is incredibly bad for group morale(as if killing him alone wasn't already a major hit to it) and almost certain to cause some major split for anyone that took the loyal to friends trait.

We also have not checked on the con, we don't know how it has affected them yet. What we do know is the gas is here, so that means there are zombies. We can stereotype them as being entirely useless, or we can assume they are as bad as us. I mean come on I'm the guy in cosplay and I'm in pretty damn good shape.

We need to at least survey, if we do not we are taking our chance on assumed information. Never a proper strategy.

[krogothwolf]

I agree with Overcast.

[Overcast]

Also to explain why I keep ragging on the Impact thing. We all have normal names, or in the case of Mauve, a name we are all already familiar with. Impact is nothing I am familiar with, and in the end it just comes off as something you name a character on a children's action show to make him sound cool. Which by extension makes him sound lame to me. Thus do I tell you so, because I'm a blunt bastard. Though I will stop, if it makes you feel better.

[Inbred Chocobo]

You know, discussing strategy on what to do sounds like something you should do as roleplaying, because this whole discussion could have taken place in there. Mixed with a little freaking out and dealing with ZOMG ZOMIBES!!!!