How To Play The Walking Dead

How To Play The Walking Dead

 

Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for The Walking Dead. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own The Walking Dead game at home.

 

I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections.

1. Game category

2. Skills

3. Pushing and stress

4. How to attack

5. Armor

6. Cover

7. Moving

8. Dueling

9. Sneak attacks

10. Brawling

11. Leadership

12. Swarms

13. Threat levels

14. Single walker attack

15. Fighting a swarm

16. Sacrifice someone

17. Relieving stress

18. Dying

19. Healing

20. Helping allies

21. Jargon

22. Building a character

 

Game category. This is the official tabletop roleplaying game of the famous TV show, The Walking Dead. You are role playing as a character in a world where society has collapsed. An unidentified malady has spread to all living people, infecting everyone. Anyone who dies, regardless of the cause of the death, is reanimated into what is called a Walker, an undead shambling corpse driven by a compulsion to consume living flesh. If one of the living gets scratched or bitten by a walker, they will succumb, quickly becoming one if the bitten limb is not amputated. Your character can kill an individual Walker, but never enough of them to make a dent in how many there are in the world. It’s not safe out there. You might be able to clear the Walkers from a small haven, such as a roof top, so you can sleep. At your haven you can store food, water, medicine, and other resources, maybe collaborating with a close knit group of fellow survivors. But in a world with no law enforcement, can you trust the people you meet? They might be robbers eyeing your limited food, or murderers, or cannibals, or could simply make too much noise and attract a Walker swarm, a gathering of the undead so numerous that they overrun anything in their path. How long will you survive in this roleplaying game before you become one of… the walking dead. To describe the mechanics in five sentences, this is a game where you will roll six sided dice, also called d6. You succeed when you see at least one six in the dice you rolled. You c