How to prevent stagnation for G.M.s and players?

[Reagren Wright]

I curious how long has anyone keep up a Dead Reign campaign. The most I've ran one for my
players is about month (4 or 5 game sessions) before we move onto something. Just seems hard
to keep coming up new ideas and scenarios to run that not about the same old things or concepts.
Love to hear some ideas folk.

[filo_clarke]

The longest Dead Reign game I have run was a weekly campaign that lasted 6-monhs, or about 100 hours of gameplay. I need to predicate what I am about to say with the following disclaimer: The game didn’t end because it got stale, it ended because the story I told came to an end.

Dead Reign is, in many respects, one of the most difficult RPGs on the market today. Unlike most games, the PCs have no special abilities, no special equipment, and the environment is hostile to them from day-1. For instance, fantasy RPGs tend to have hostile environments with monsters, bandits, and hazards, but the PCs are skilled/powered up to deal with them. Investigative RPGs often feature “normal” PCs with no special abilities, but these tend to allow the players to return home to rest, or buy equipment at a store, or go to a hospital for emergency care. Dead Reign takes the PCs and throws them into the deep end of the pool with no floaties, so to speak. And I love it.

I have run every Palladium setting available, from Recon to Phase World, and never have I seen players jump higher and reach farther than when they play Dead Reign. When you have no special abilities to fall back on, and no safe haven to count on, then every decision you make becomes crucial. I have seen a player turn Immodium and black pepper into a painkiller, just to fight off the penalties of an injury to survive the day. I have seen a player fire a 5.56mm rifle round out of a Bersa 9mm because they had 1 bullet, and 1 empty gun, and no other options. I have seen a player use rat poison to treat a blood clot caused by an untreated broken leg. In short, the desperation that the players feel translated directly into a pulse-pounding, high-stress game every week.

But why didn’t the players get burnt out, or tired? With any difficult game, the buy-in from the players has to be firm. They need to know what kind of game they are getting into, and I certainly had my share of players over the years who did not care for the setting and left after a few (or one) sessions. I find fantasy games are formulaic: find the map, kill the monsters, get the treasure, repeat. Campaigns may be more rich and developed, but the underlying plot hardly ever changes. Investigative games tend to be concise bottle-episodes: something happened, investigate, stop it from happening again, go home until something new happens. These usually result in the PCs clinking glasses of scotch together after a job well done. But Dead Reign isn’t like that. There is no map, and there isn’t a cozy fireplace and a chilled glass of scotch. Nothing is made easy, and no comfort is to be had. So what keeps them interested?

Story. I know this is going to sound trite and hackneyed, but is remains true. What is the story that you want to tell? The game will last as long as the story is engaging and entertaining to the player, but shouldn’t be dragged on longer than it takes to tell. If the idea that the GM is working with is “how long can the players survive the apocalypse” then the game will go on for as long as the players find that a fun concept. If the game is “how many zombies can you kill” then that is your benchmark for player involvement. But if you have a fleshed-out story that needs the zombie apocalypse setting in order to tell it, then the players will willingly participate as long as the story is moving towards its conclusion. You may have a group that dislikes the setting, or wants more/less action, but these are elements within the story that you can control. Some of the best sessions that I have run tend to be those without any zombies… heck I have had more life-or-death drama from a lack of clean water than I have with a zombie horde. Each GM finds his/her own balance for the group.

I like the concept of loss. Dead Reign presents a bleak future for any survivor, as there is no timeline for the world going back to where it was before. Every victory the PCs score is ultimately fleeting, as the world is no longer easy, or comfortable. I like personal gains, over grandiose group victories. A parent being reunited with their child after a botched emergency evacuation is more poignant and touching than having the group discover a “cure” to the zombie plague and saving the world. The ending of the story doesn’t have to be a victory against the zombies, or against gangs, or even against nature. It can be something small, and personal to the characters, and that’s okay… the story has been told.

My longest campaign (alluded-to above) was comprised of three “scenes”. The first was during the wave, on a long-haul flight from Hong-Kong to Atlanta on an Airbus A-380. The players had to not only survive the onslaught of a plane full of the undead, but also how to land a superjumbo jet. The second scene took off after the landing and trying to get two of the PCs home and be reunited with their families. The final episode was a quest to find a safe space to live following the realization that the whole world (as they knew it) was gone. I went into the game with a plan, and almost no random encounters. Every encounter, every battle, every piece of loot or found gear was carefully placed to make an impact on the story. I used many optional rules, like Penetration Value, Shock & Trauma, environmental effects, pain penalties, sickness/diseases, etc. to make the game world more hostile and dangerous. In the end, the game took on a mythic quality, with the PCs literally surviving the worst that the setting had to offer, and coming out the other side alive.

If that sounds like a lot of work to do, you are right. This setting doesn’t make the job of the GM any easier, and I have had to create a number of tools to assist me in making the sessions work. But yes, it is possible to run a Dead Reign campaign, long-term. If that is what you want to do.

[Reagren Wright]

Very impressive and forthcoming . I tip my G.M. hat to you sir.

[Vincent Takeda]

I've also run a dead reign campaign weekly that lasted about 6 months. It true the devil is in the details. Keeping it interesting long term did have a lot to do with constantly pivoting the narrative and small victories... Every idea no matter how simple can take several sessions to play out simply due to caution and careful planning or lack of it. Lots of switching back and forth between tenuous relative safety and run like your butt's on fire. Familiarity with the tropes and genres is the biggest help because players who like the genre will instantly recognize every tiniest one as the come up and really enjoy tackling the huge gamut of all the possible subversions and permutations of what to expect. I agree that the trick to keeping it going long term is to not spend too much time on one particular thing, keep up the momentum. No campaign session should feel like it covered ground that was covered in a previous session... For me I think its also important to toss in some sighs of relief and light hearted laughter moments otherwise its easy for one of these to become a long stretch of gray... To make that gray more poignant is to dash in a little shock of bright vivid color here and there. Murphy's law is your friend... Grand plans will be formed, small successes can slowly build upon each other... But something small always goes wrong and then its back to square one. Making sure each rise and fall is entirely different than the last is what helps keep the game going. How many different ways can we do this?

[Michael Barakofsky]

Well my Dead Reign campaign is still going strong, sort of, I started running it back in January 12 2009, its on and off gaming as my group plays several different settings, Rifts, Heroes Unlimited, AD&D (2nd edition way old school now a days), Star Wars D6 system, Marvel Superheroes & Shadowrun. I happen to run most of the games I have a co-GM for Rifts so as my mood shifts from one genre to another the game we play changes as well but somehow we have managed to maintain a steady campaign unique to each system with the same main characters (again unique to each system) for years on end. Don't ask me how I keep each campaign straight in my head other then they are filed away under the specific setting they belong to since I don't do much for notes or pre-planning my games I tend to go with the flow and simply react to my players actions the most planing I do is figure what the objective is for the day then drop clues to try to get my players involved, my players seem to like my free form style and I have even added a new player recently, thanks to Dead Reign, who had given up on RPGs for 5 years before he met my group.

I guess to be a little more specific to your question my DR campaign has been running for 8 years almost averaging roughly 1 game session every 3 months that lasts between 6 to 12 hours.

[Razzinold]

I agree, DR is a difficult setting to maintain player interest. Heck my wife gave up on watching The Walking Dead because she was like "What's the point? All that's left is misery at every turn, what's the point of them going on when there is no 'end/victory' in view."

So I could imagine how hard it would be more me, as a GM, to maintain her interest in a game as unforgiving as DR. Perhaps if I focused more on the survival aspect and less on the zombies. Right now we are playing 7 Days to Die and we have the zombies set to zero and she is having an amazing time building defences, hunting food, scavenging for items, exploring abandoned areas, mining resources. I say she but I am enjoying it as well.
She is enjoying the game so much that she actually wants me to turn on zombies back on.
So I could run a DR game like that, but it's tailored pretty specific and while it may appeal to some it won't to others.

[CarCrasher]

I have a once a month game that has been going for 4 years. 6-7 hours a session. Some of the sessions have been "home base" only sessions. Stuff like food is going missing so it needs to be investigated. Or medical supplies are being taken. Gardening needs to get done. Vehicles need maintenance. There is a saboteur in the base and one of the new members is suspected. Base walls sections are in constant need of repair and replace. Even someone has an idea for a new "war wagon" and needs help to build and find salvageable pieces for it. A bunch of new members joined and the sleep shack needs to be expanded. Livestock needs to be tended to as well. Just a few ideas i use in my games hope it helps you!

[Razzinold]

I have a once a month game that has been going for 4 years. 6-7 hours a session. Some of the sessions have been "home base" only sessions. Stuff like food is going missing so it needs to be investigated. Or medical supplies are being taken. Gardening needs to get done. Vehicles need maintenance. There is a saboteur in the base and one of the new members is suspected. Base walls sections are in constant need of repair and replace. Even someone has an idea for a new "war wagon" and needs help to build and find salvageable pieces for it. A bunch of new members joined and the sleep shack needs to be expanded. Livestock needs to be tended to as well. Just a few ideas i use in my games hope it helps you!

Sounds pretty similar to the video game I'm playing right now, 7 Days to Die.
After binge playing for like the last month or so I really want to play a Dead Reign game and base it along the same premises as this.
The game is a brutal struggle for survival, your character literally starts with the boxer shorts, boy cut shorts/sports bra if playing a female character, he is wearing and that's it! You have to build tools, shelter clothing, etc. and your character is effected by things like weather so fingers crossed they don't randomly start you in the snow biome.

[Michael Barakofsky]

I have a once a month game that has been going for 4 years. 6-7 hours a session. Some of the sessions have been "home base" only sessions. Stuff like food is going missing so it needs to be investigated. Or medical supplies are being taken. Gardening needs to get done. Vehicles need maintenance. There is a saboteur in the base and one of the new members is suspected. Base walls sections are in constant need of repair and replace. Even someone has an idea for a new "war wagon" and needs help to build and find salvageable pieces for it. A bunch of new members joined and the sleep shack needs to be expanded. Livestock needs to be tended to as well. Just a few ideas i use in my games hope it helps you!

Thats kind of along the lines of my campaign for DR. I started at the begining when the zombies were first starting to get up and move around. It has been about a month in game and my players have just finished fortifying their base of operations. Their main HQ is a fire station in town with a farm/ranch as a fall back point about 20 miles outside of town. The overall goal is to clear out as much of our home town as possible. Running around to gather supplies and materials to secure the HQ has been keeping the players busy and I have been using the random encounters rolled to spice things up. Its been a challenge but I have managed to keep the adrenaline flowing while the group is outside of their HQ.

[Epically]

I've found that my players don't really find zombies interesting. A died out trope really. But what they love is what happened to humanity and the world the zombies created. People are much, much worse than zombies and I find that's easier to write than interesting zombie encounters.

One campaign I did was a Heroes: Unlimited cross where a secret government lab were able to give people super powers. All employees were given a power, and a disgruntled employee thought he didn't get any until an accident caused someone to die. Then he realised he was able to rise and control the dead. Also found out he could bestow his gift on others later, which created the Death Cult you all know and love.
Long story short, he got power hungry, he created the wave and he was a supreme ruler of sorts. The players didn't find the lab until well into the campaign, and once they did, they got their superpowers - so long as they track down and kill the former employee's puppets, who followed him out of the lab and helped bring about the apocalypse.
It was a little confusing, but it was the first campaign I ever did and I kinda wrote it as I was going on. But after the powers, it was more people encounters than zombie ones.

Another campaign I did was what was left of the military planned to bomb every major city on the planet and the players were torn between stopping them or helping them.

My current campaign had the players accidentally (on purpose) locked inside a bomb shelter at the start of the wave for five months. They emerged having no idea what had happened to the world. Luckily, I'm flexible and 99/100 let the players play whatever kind of character they want. They are all playing not very nice people lol. A mob boss and his right hand man, a secret agent, a military pilot (helicopters, and almost any land vehicle), and a cop. The cop did not last very long lol.
The story is about a military general attempting to learn more about, and perhaps tap into, aspects of the soul (PPE). It goes bad, individual souls are corrupted and turned into zombies (This is why they feed off PPE - an attempt to return to normal). Being killed by a corrupted soul, probably obviously, corrupts the victims soul. Depending on the victims own morality and sins in life, the corruption would represent itself in the different types of zombies. (Flesh eaters, thinkers, fast zombies, slouchers (crawlers, bug boys and worm meat are all variants of slouchers.) etc...). A small percentage of people's souls are already so corrupted, they actually adapt to it and become carriers as well as bonding to it (Death priests). That's how the wave began. A singular survivor of the testing, who showed no signs of falling ill, started unintentionally spreading the corruption wherever he went. As he wasn't killing anyway however, the corruption he was spreading was weak, but infectiveness was strong. The corruption eventually killed it's host. Bizarre flu-like symptoms without a cure.
Then General is now doing everything in his power to reverse the curse he plagued on the world. He has two objectives. 1. Round up zombies for mass collection. 2. Kidnap as many babies and women as possible. Why the second one? Babies are the purest form of an untainted soul. His research has found that unleashing a massive infusion of untainted souls all at the same time actually reverses the corruption and turns the zombie back into a human! (Which made sense when I wrote the story because PPE heals zombies, so why not a massive amount of PPE at once?) How many babies need to be sacrificed to achieve this? Around 25 for every 90m. There's not many babies around, so where do we get the babies?
The players interaction so far has been the brother of a player was killed and the wife of a different player was kidnapped by the General's black ops team, who proceeded to rape her among a few other women they had down in the lab. They never saw him, just heard his name.
Fun side note: the General is another player who isn't with the group and I intend for him to join the session when the group finally meets him.

Anyway, as mentioned by another post, it's all about the story. And people. Definitely people. I think my players have killed maybe 3 zombies, tops? They are also rural, but still.