Zombie Survivalist: Second Edition

Veteran gamers know what the "other classic dice" are, but people who've never played a TTRPG won't. 

There's no explanation on how a playbook is different from a character class, profession, or role. Aside from being a modified PbtA game, why choose Playbooks as your primary system for character abilities?

On 2d6, your success/failure scale weighs heavily on the failure side, especially considering a wide range is only "partial success." 

The skull dude covering up the explanation for damage is pretty condescending. While three of our players have played in a game(lots of games), several haven't. That doesn't even consider people who would like or need a clear cut explanation. Many games have damage affect your rolls, result in death, etc. I have no idea what damage does in this game because the explanation is literally hidden by a skull being mean. (eg, in Shadowrun, the more damage you take, the more it affects almost everything you do.)

For most actions, there's over double the negative outcome over positive. Many positives can't be applied to all scenarios, making it difficult to pick three. Additionally, do you have to pick three different ones? That's not clarified. If everything in the apocalypse doesn't suck, why aren't there more good outcomes?

The "considering the Following" section, many of the questions boil down to being the same thing: a perception check. 

It’s said you can run this game w/out a GM or as many as you want, but there is really no offering on how to do that. How does the narrative get pushed forward? How is the world run? Who decides what's happening if there's no GM? "You and the groups will come up with..." Etc. There's just no information or explanation on how to do this. Our new players were utterly confused by this whole book and these concepts. Our vet players are concerned that this stuff is so ill-defined. We have played enough games to know that without some systems in place, this doesn't work, and it works even less without a GM.

"If it has stats, they'll try and kill it!" Um, what? I've never played with a group that uses this mindset. Stats are useful for figuring out an NPC's boundaries, capabilities, and/or what they're likely to know, and their possible disposition. 

So. Many. Blank. Pages. I've used/played/read books and games with placeholders for art and stat blocks, in those they tell you (x goes here, this is in layout). You've just got confusingly blank pages and boxes.

Factions all seem like bad guy factions you don't want to be a part of. Ultimately they kinda boil down to the same themes of the apocalypse sucks and people are generally the bad guys. And yes, I'm arguing that werewolves, vampires, fae, and merfolk are people too. 

-The vestige: trying to make everything suck, with Magic!

-The returned: trying to ignore everything that sucks, making it suck for everyone else

-The Legion: pretty bog standard zombie bad guys

-The cold riders: treat everyone like shit

-The aristocracy: trying to make the peasants suffer (aka make everything suck)

-The raiders: no blurb text, exact copy pasted IACA as the Legion.

-Slayians: most interesting faction, but basically just better raiders in concept

-The Verdant Penumbra: cool name for a fae faction, oh it's werewolves? And they're like a Werewolf the Apocalypse Lite? They want to destroy all humans (?) And make everything suck. 

-The Abyssal: an Eldritch faction that wants to destroy everything (and make it suck)

-The Fae of Fancy: lol RaNdOm XD meanies who make everything suck for everything around them. We especially hate this treatment of fae, as they offer much better, deeper, and more meaningful storytelling in real life. Exact copy pasted IACA as the Legion. 

-Agency of Bermuda Collections: want to make everything suck, but also I have no idea how they even fit into the world. Like. What? Also, everything except the name of this faction is duplicated on the following page.

It's been made pretty clear that these factions are basically only out for themselves. They universally want to make everything suck for everyone outside their faction, and are generally antithetical to a party or group, and will generally not trust outsiders. I'm really unsure how this goes against the grain of zombie or apocalypse fiction. In your own words, this is all just "people are the real monsters misery porn."

"An encounter is not just combat" only works if you provide systems for other things, such as disposition for social encounters. This is an example of how spelling out an NPC could be useful. What they know, what they're likely to tell you, and methods for gaining that from them. NPCs should have abilities and clear cut roles just like the PCs do. This allows us to know what they can/cannot do in gameplay both mechanically and narratively.

"When you make a character, Pick a playbook and three moves" playbooks only contain 8 moves total. prestige classes only have 3. You have five things within your playbooks to choose from there. This feels very sparse, there should be more ways to customize your character. 

I really hated trying to randomly generate a character. While I, a dice collector, have odd dice such as D3 and D5,  the hassle of going to find them was too much. I had a standard set of TTRPG dice in my grasp and they weren't adequate for these charts. Some offer pretty standard (d8, d4, d6), others were labeled 1-4 with repeat numbers, 1-9, and 1-3. I gave up and used a browser based RNG. It still sucked because every other step I had to change what the range was. This step should be clear cut and simple, you should only need one or two dice to complete it (such as a d20 or Percentiles), and it should be very clear how it all works. This was muddy as all heck. Additionally, the rules state you can start with a prestige class if you want, but random character gen lets you start with one as well, but it’s not clarified if this is any different than just picking one and starting with less moves in your regular playbook.

In the aside in the “Prestige Classes” section, I get you were trying to make a video game joke, but it falls really flat considering tons of RPGs have prestige classes. Also  calling them Prestige classes instead of Playbooks further muddies how Playbooks are any different than classes. So, why point out you're using playbooks vs classes at all?

A lot of the individual prestige classes were really weird. Like, since when could merfolk climb on walls and ceilings? Why do they have a banshee scream? Banshees are undead, and merfolk aren't known for doing damage with their voice. The wizard only has One box filled in: ritual casting. Cantrips & sacred texts are blank. There's no expansion or explanation of magic/spells. There's more we take issue with in regards to these prestige classes but. . . Getting into it would take too much time.

Also starting with a prestige class is theoretically more punishing by RAW than getting one later because it costs two advancements worth AND having less money, versus just two advancements

Why is the slow unending march of time included with the moves? It seems pretty important for GMing....

End of session questions.

-What if we have no GM? 

-What if we want to Play by Post? What is a session?

 -The max xp you can get per session is 7? Meaning you can level at a rate of 1 per session or less? Meaning your playbooks run out really fast. Balance reasons, picking from a different playbook should probably cost 2 advancements, not just one

Improvements… felt lackluster. Additionally, there's lots of talk about being able to upgrade a weapon, but I couldn't find any information on how to actually do that. Also, getting a prestige class states that you get all your playbook moves at once but there's improvements for getting prestige moves as if you didn't'

Money system:

-Whats "a few?" 

-Why does getting a few cheap things do nothing to Expensive, but average does?

-Could you please just give it a number system, like I dunno 1-5 or something and you start with x amount And each item you get subtracts from your total? I'm fine with vague systems when they work, but this one's just confusing. 

The book doesn't talk about how we keep the apocalypse from sucking. Lots of talk about how it does suck  and factions that want to make it worse for us, or somehow take advantage of others, or who want to literally end all life on Earth, or who want to control everything. These are all very standard apocalypse themes. Where's my faction of grannies that just go around teaching lost skills like pasta making, gardening, and sewing while kicking ass and taking names? Where's my faction of paladin-like dino riders who go around saving people from hordes of undead? Where's my camaraderie, friendship, and fun? Why do I have to come up with that? Why aren't there good-guy factions in the book? 

I wouldn't call this game "feature complete" because there's just so much missing information, a lack of systems for things there should clearly be systems for, and some systems are confusing, don't work  or need expansion. The book really just doesn't talk about how things happened, how they got this way, or why anything is like it is. It's fine to leave some things up to the players and community, but if you're doing that you really need to tell them that's what you're doing and still provide some examples to get the creativity flowing.