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Interesting idea. Not sure if I like the group SDC thing, but I'm intrigued. Any chance you could run it this way once for your players and then let us all know how it went?

Lol, I did this ages ago. In fact it was my first post asking the same question.....

It went fairly well. There were 50 zeds, and I had a combined SDC/health of 1000. Every time they tallied 20 DMG, I just said you killed one in the general area they were firing/swinging. The game play went for about one and a half hours, but no one got bored because the players were doing different things, such as roadhouse kicking a fast attack off a roof, cutting down a bell in a bell tower, blowing up a motobike, and one dude hilariously fell out of the bell tower, was followed by an NPC who happened to break her leg, he got grossed out by the bone sticking out of her leg and vomitted, then went over to another player and to ask what he was doing only to be caught be the blast of the motobike blowing up. One of my favourite role playing sessions ever. Funny stuff.

None the less, a lot more things happened, but the list kept going til they did 1000 DMG.

dirtyg wrote:My guys like about 20 minute battles at the most. The roleplaying at it's core is what they like. But I'll just give zombies less S.D.C for a group and let them fight them. I'll work something out and tell you what happened. Could you imagine running a fight against 100 zombies using normal rules? You would be there about 4 or 5 hours.

As much as I like a good fight while playing, I can't stand it when the fight starts to take an hour or longer. And it never ceases to amaze me that the more powerful the characters are, the longer the fight takes. Example: In our last heroes campaign, we averaged at around 8th level. We had a bionics character, an experiment, a robotics person, and a hardware character (weapons expert). We were in a fight with some "local law enforcement agencies" as we were "escaping from prison", and it was four on four. Fight lasted 2 hours. 2 freaking hours!

For situations like this, where it is an overwhelming number of enemies (such as 100 zombies vs. 4-6 PCs), I'd just rule that after they killed about 20 of them or so, there is either a clear enough path for them to escape to fight another day, or the zombies are effectively held at bay for the time being and no further combat is taking place. I'm still intrigued by the group SDC thing, but even that may still take too much time.

And then again, area of effect weapons are always handy. One molotov for you, one grenade for you...