Project: Zombicide - Day 0
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, March 13th, 2015 at 16:06 (9816 Views)
Hello there!
Fantasy Grounds is a great tool for playing Role-Playing Games with friends over the internet, just like you would at your own table at home.
The Name Who Cannot Be Named, Pathfinder, Savage Worlds and a few others have great rulesets who make things almost easier than playing in your living room. I love it.
Hmm. Table? Living Room? Friends dispersed?
Why not try to convert a board game instead of an RPG? Presumably the rules are easier to convert - and the same reason to play it with Fantasy Grounds applies.
As it is, my kickstartered huge box of Zombicide (Season 1-3 plus lots of add-ons) supposedly is on the boat and will arrive in a few days. With three small kids in the house, I don't supposed my wife would appreciate playing out the Zombie Apocalypse on our dinner table. Who knows, I'll try to convince her. But I am not hopeful.
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In any case - having a conversion of this cooperative board game sounds like a great idea - I am a sucker for coop games. Maybe I can use it to lift the lid on the one great problems Fantasy Grounds has: It's lack of accessibility to build your own rulesets. Frankly, the documentation sucks big time for those of us who don't program professionally - fortunately the forums are populated by savvy and very helpful people.
In the end this blog hopefully will help others in getting their feet wet and starting to build their own rulesets.
Okay let's move on.
Preparation
The first step, obviously, is to read the rules. Fortunately they are online in PDF form. This is great, because that way we can put them into a rules module very easily - giving all players easy access to it during a session, without me having to type in everything by hand.
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It starts out with components. We have game tiles for maps, miniatures, dice (haha), lots of tokens, survivor identity cards (basically character sheets), and two sets of cards (zombies and equipment).
Frankly - this looks doable. FG already works with maps. Worst case we can add tokens to a map and move them around, best case we can have "game master tokens" and "player tokens" on different layers to make things easier.
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Each character has great art, which means we can easily convert characters and zombies into tokens, along with scanning the other tokens. For the cards we'll have to look at something to make it snappy, but in a pinch (and we want a workable prototype asap, don't we?) we can rollable table for these - if we can set them up to remove choices already made (simulating taking a card out of the deck), we at least have the mechanism.
That's it for Day 0 - in the next post we'll tackle something easy, the rulebook.
Note: All rights for Zombicide as well as related images are with Guillotine Games. I will not be able to share the ruleset with you.