How would you run a campaign based on the RE Franchise? Specifically 5

How would you run a campaign based on the RE Franchise? Specifically 5.
Puzzle design, mystery, and stating enemies are my holdups, so any help on those would be helpful

Other urls found in this thread:

mythcreants.com/blog/five-tips-for-running-a-mystery-game/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

>specificaly 5
You be a racist piece of shit.

You have a white hero save all the black people with his not quite black black strong woman tag along.

Make sure to have literal spear chuckers.

Do you know which system you'll be using? Also, are you aiming for a survival horror experience, or more action shoot-em-up?

On the subjects of puzzles and mystery, I'd suggest paying attention to the way RE games handle these elements, they're pretty good at it.

If you look at how the RE games are designed, they all basically involve one simple set of rules: the characters start in one location, and must work their way through a series of obstacles to travel to another location. The key to this is that the characters are always moving. RE games don't typically rely on stereotypical DnD-style dungeon riddles, their puzzles usually involve trapping the characters in an area and requiring them to collect items or kill certain enemies to escape. Think of how the temple in RE5 utilized this formula for examples.

Now, for a roleplaying game, there needs to be more of an intellectual element for the players to stay interested, as running from one room to another happens much more quickly in the theater of the mind than it does in a video game. For an example of this, I'll include a puzzle I ran in a Dark Heresy campaign recently below:

DnD 5e.
A bit of both but with more survival horror.
I was thinking the first encounters be harder so theres a looming sense of dread about them

"The PCs had arrived in a base conducting heretical biological experiments, with the intent of slaying the base's leader. Unfortunately, the leader had sealed herself behind a door protected by three things: a force field, a wall of living tissue that regenerates faster than it can be destroyed, and a DNA scanner. Additionally, due to the infestation of the base, I was secretly rolling on a table I made to randomly determine if they would encounter monsters when they went into the next room, what kind, and how many.

In order to deactivate the force field, the PCs had to get to a computer in the barracks part of the base, which was guarded by automated turrets. In the event the PCs didn't feel like trying to push their luck, they could also access a generator in another part of the base, though this would cut out power to everything, including lights, making it easier for monsters to sneak up on them.

As for the tissue, the PCs could find samples of it in beakers in a lab part of the base, along with lab notes describing the ingredients for an acid that could melt it away. The ingredients were in storage, which was in another part of the base. Once they had the ingredients, creating the acid was a simple task.

For the DNA scan, the PCs would either have to hunt down the leader's monstrous lieutenant who was prowling through the base and take his hand, or create one using scanner readings of the lab."

This puzzle works because

A) It's fairly simple, though when the PCs first encountered it, they hadn't explored the base much, so it seemed more complex than it actually was.
B) There are multiple ways to solve it, so every player class could be involved.
C) There are no riddles or instructions telling the PCs what to do, so it felt more grounded and required them to think as if they were in the situation.

(continued)
D) As I mentioned before, the PCs are always moving, and because there was a random chance to encounter monsters every time they entered a new room, the tension remained high throughout the adventure.

Why in the hell would you pick one of the worst games in the series?

4 is right fucking there. Why would you pick 5?

Also, make liberal use of how to handle mobs and cleaving through enemies. The DMG has rules for it to make the mowing down enemies without bogging things down... Though I bet you use a battlemap for every encounter.

Some advice for running survival horror:

>Isolate the PCs
Humans are significantly less scared of things when they have other humans at their back. So, make sure that, wherever the PCs are, they are almost 100% on their own. There is no way to contact the authorities and get rescued, there is no military coming to save them, and helpful side characters are few and far between.

>Keep Things Grounded
Don't allow the players to have a magic shop they can visit in between sessions to buy/upgrade weapons. Instead, make it so that they have to scavenge weapons and ammo, and make said weapons and ammo scarce. Sure, they could always pick up a dead Majini's club or crossbow, but these should be nowhere near as effective or reliable as a gun. If the player's find a new weapon, have the situation/weapon in question make sense. Also, don't resort to RE5's system of having enemies wielding primitve weapons dropping ammo for things like machine guns or rifles they obviously don't have access to and therefore would not have ammo for. Players can still upgrade weapons, but doing so requires certain rare items they have to go looking for in a dangerous situation. This will help immerse your players in the setting and maintain tension.

>Make it Clear That Fighting Isn't Always the Best Option
One of the reasons RE5's horror elements don't work as well as other entries in the franchise is that there is almost never a situation the characters can't shoot their way out of. Survival horror is about making our heroes feel weak and/or overwhelmed. Have the PCs encounter situations where stealth or running is preferable to fighting.

>Maintain Tension
Make the PCs feel like they're never truly safe. Have a list of random encounters to throw at the PCs if things feel like they're a little too under control, or have the PCs encounter evidence of much scarier monsters prowling the area, and let their imagination do the rest.

For advice on running mysteries, I'm going to refer you to a Mythcreants article which explains how to do it much better than I can.

mythcreants.com/blog/five-tips-for-running-a-mystery-game/

>the first encounters be harder so theres a looming sense of dread about them

That's fine to do, just be careful with how you go about it. You want to start with something big to grab your player's attention (like the Executioner/villager horde attack at the start of RE5), but make sure to use mostly mundane enemies for the first encounter so you have room to expand the threats from there.

5 because a buddy and I have been playing through it and he said he wanted to play DnD but wanted to know if it could be like RE5.

I don't use a map for everything. I'll look into the mob rules.

Make sure to constantly emphasize that your game is horrific. Constantly describe the smell and sight of gore and horror. That way, everyone will know that your game is serious business. Discourage table talk and insist that your players inhabit their characters. Make sure to remind them when it is not reasonable that a character would react in a nonchalant manner to the sight and smell of bodies. Constantly remind the players of how their characters feel. And make sure that all of the puzzles you do are logic-puzzles where, once the players learn to think about the puzzle the same way that you do, it'll become perfectly clear what the answer is. Puns are your friends.

Psych. Puzzles are easy, though: give them a clue that can be solved using your internal logic, but also fun results if they trial-and-error it. Three doors, where the other two have monsters but also some little bit of treasure, kinda things. Don't make your puzzles solveable in just one way, and always leave trial-and-error as a solution. That way it keeps it interesting and gives the players something to debate, but doesn't ever leave them stuck and frustrated if it turns out that your internal logic doesn't actually make sense to other people.

That being said, be careful about going overboard on blood and gore; you don't want your players to get desensitized to it.

I don't know if DnD has anything like this, but something you might want to check out are the rules for Fear and Insanity from Dark Heresy, they can help add tangible penalties to characters experiencing horror, even if the players have trouble emulating them.

Yeah, the "psych" was supposed to make it clear that I was joking. Don't ever tell your players how their characters feel or would "realistically" react, and shock-value floods the market pretty quick.

Puzzles? Lazily backtracking with shiny keys and hide some loot behind optional logic/spatial puzzles so that my players don't feel gypped if they can't get it.

If my players are smart I would slowly ramp up the complexity of the puzzles and give them an optional combat focused way around it if they couldn't beat the puzzles.

Horses for courses.

Characters in Resident Evil are pretty much immune to fear. At most female characters will make a little scream before shooting the critter to pieces with their trusty grenade-launchers.

Resident Evil should definitely be played on cinematic level. I'd choose a game that gives me this option (TriStat/BESM/dX, Mini Six, Fuzion, GURPS). There are probably other games, too, but I don't know them.

>You be a racist piece of shit.
But that would be wrong, because almost every enemy, including the spear-chuckers, were White or Arabic.
it's only racist if you fight The Black People that Live in the Former Soviet Republics.

>You have a white hero save all the black people with his not quite black black strong woman tag along.
Was there ever a time where white heroes didn't have to go and save the niggers?

Niggers die of hunger: White people come to the rescue
Ebola-Chan kills too many niggers: White people come to the rescue
Niggers have war/civil war and kill civilians: White people come to the rescue
Niggers get taken hostage by other niggers: White people come to the rescue
Niggers get angry at their government and start a coup: White people come to the rescue
Niggers cannot train their army because nigs are chimping out too much: White people come to the rescue
Niggers want to build anything of importance (bridge, electric power station, skyscraper, etc.): White people come to the rescue

Honhonhon, that's so racist!

Did you even play the game?

Capcom gave you a black AI partner who follows you through the whole game and you meet up with black soldiers along the way. These black soldiers fight the infected alongside you. There's lighter skinned people mixed in with the enemy hordes, and enemies often have obvious monstrous features like tentacles coming out of their mouths to further differentiate them from regular humans. The spear-throwers were an indigenous tribe (something that exists) and are portrayed as innocent victims. The main villains of the game are white foreigners.

Capcom did basically everything they could to avert the "white guy kills a bunch of Africans" meme.

Go back to /pol/, shitposter

I'll go back to /pol/ when you fuck off to tumblr or reddit, pussy.

What do you want? Redo the whole game. Chris could be a trigender hipster, while Sheva is the lesbian main character ? While we're at it, Wesker could be gay or black (not both), and Excella could be replaced by an overweighted feminist with red hair who's offended all the time, and constantly shouts: "SHUT UP!!!" with a screeching voice. Jill Valentine becomes bisexual (has an affair with Excella and Sheva) and also should be overweight and suffer from dwarfism (healthy at any size). Ada Wong could be a South American adept of the Pastafarian church, because making her a strong Asian dragon lady is so much of a cliché. Rebecca Chambers could be an Indian transexual. Ricardo Irving on the other hand can stay a CIS white male as he's weak and unlikeable.

user, you know full well that if you did all of this, they still wouldn't be happy.
You only way to winning move is to not play the game.

I have no idea what the fuck you're ranting about. Something about how anyone who isn't a white supremacist is an obnoxious SJW?

Go back to /pol/

Resi 5?
hmmm ... have you tried throwing a bag of dicks across your table?

I'm ranting about some faggot who finds that Resident Evil 5 is incredibly racist and offensive because the main protagonist is white, while most bad mooks are Africans. I'm also ranting that people who have no problem with it are considered by the same faggot to be white supremacists. Because finding it not offensive that there are black people featured in a game set in Africa clearly means that we spend our evenings wearing a white hood, burning crosses in front of refugee centers, posting hate threads on Stormfront, and beating up colored people in the streets.

To go back to how to run a Resident Evil game:

You need different kinds of enemies and bosses with multiple forms. Things you think you killed often come back later and often more angry than before.

Resident Evil characters are always badasses that can do everything (fighting, climbing, be stealthy, first-aid, driving...) but in addition to their normal skill set they always have a special focus (sniping, stealing, piloting, computer hacking, sniping, medical or scientific skills etc.).

For the puzzles, I don't know how you'd incorporate them best in a table top RPG. Usually, you just have either to find a key/object to continue (find the keycard to open the lab's door, find the crank to lower the bridge...), or you have minigames (puzzles) you need to solve (turn valve A to the right and valve D to the left to empty the water or activate the fire extinguishers, etc.). It kind of reminds me of those old dungeon crawls from late 70's to early 80's.

Resi 5 did well at that until you started raiding villages in the swamps filled with crocodiles amd men in tribal masks shouting ooga booga

How am I supposed to respond when you begin every sentence with Nigger in a totally off-topic diatribe about whites saving blacks, on Veeky Forums of all places? Other than telling you to take your shit back to it's containment board?

You want to say that there are no tribal fishing villages in Africa, and that there are no crocodiles in African swamps?

If pic related would be turned into zombies, do you think they'd change their clothing to look less cliché before chasing you through the savanna (where you also find lions, hyenas and giraffes by the way)?

For me it seems they were shouting in some African dialect, but I'm no expert. As you assume that they only shout ooga booga, you're the real racist.

You're the idiot who started derailing the thread as soon as you said OP is "a racist piece of shit" for him wanting to run a RE5 game because white man saving blacks, not-so-strong female sidekick, clichés, blablabla...

No, I'm not.

There is certainly a focus on movement, but don't overdo it. That was the downfall of RE6. The entire game just felt like one mad dash from checkpoint to checkpoint. Pace yourself.

Not all puzzles are doors either. How about a monster that can only be destroyed by a certain compound? Or trying to get the right signal to get a drone to land?

Mystery is pretty easy. Design for yourself what exactly happened, then that's it. There's little need to leave around glaring clues. If anything, the knowledge that something here has happened but being unable to know what will add to fear for the players.

Personally, I would make combat brutal. Bullet sponge foes, monsters with terrible, infection-carrying bites. You don't want to put them off combat entirely, but they must know that if they want to commit to a fight, it is literal life or death. The earlier games did this well "Do I use my bullets to kill this hunter, but then be fucked if I run into another one? Or do I dodge him, take some hits, but at least have my bullets to get out of some serious shit?" Almost every engagement was a choice to risk resources and gambling on skill and luck.

I wouldn't presume that they were actually shouting "Ooga booga!"

But rather that, in a game whose prerelease was beset on all sides by "Wow the big white guy is killing black people! das racist" but did a real good job proving those people wrong for the first few hours, suddenly having that portion of the game was a real kick in the teeth.

You as a player go through shipping yards, industrial areas, towns, cities and mines. The...(Dunno what they're called in 5) Uroboros zombies ride motorbikes and drive cars, they look like they live in an actual Africa that exists and could be in the grips of this bioterror epidemic.

Suddenly you kill the kwazy boston-boat man and you climb on a boat and go fight Tribal people who engage in ritual living sacrifice to giant crocodiles, they have wooden masks that block bullets and throw spears at you from the rooftops as you battle through what looks like a Crash Bandicoot temple on your way from an Oil Refinery. There's certainly a disparity between RE5s opening levels and that.

Also, you get chased across a Savanna by Zombies on Motorbikes, it's a pretty cool sequence and ends with you fighting an African El Gigante, no animals in sight as far as I recall. The only animals in the game are Dogs, giant botflies, various Uroboros monstrosities, giant scorpions, mutant bat thing and those spider things in the temple. All of these are clearly created by the virus, but the giant Crocodile? Nah that's just lurking around the village to eat sacrifices from the tribal villagers.

Fuckers like you are why nobody wants to set anything in Africa.

Are you being serious?
Either commit to one or the other, go through an Industrial Africa killing African zombies, or make a tribal survival horror about fending off cunning Hunters who know the land and its hostile inhabitants. Don't do one and then skip to the other. halfway through.

Second.

RE 1: Americans getting their shit wrecked Nobody cares.
RE 2: More Americans getting their shit wrecked. Nobody cares
RE 3: Americans getting their shit wrecked. Nobody cares.
RE 4: Spanish getting their shit wrecked. Nobody cares.
RE 5: Africans getting their shit wrecked. Massive shitstorm.
RE 6: Americans, Chinese and Slavs getting their shit wrecked. Nobody cares.

The original concept for RE5 was absolutely amazing. Chris and Barry surviving in a toxic savannah, having to negotiate with milita and tribes alike as they try to track down Wesker. Sheva was only supposed to be an NPC.

With the backlash though, they promptly made her a main character, cut out Barry entirely and made it more or less RE4+1.

Barry and Chris (and Jill) putting an end to Wesker would have made perfect sense and closed that loop that started in RE1 perfectly. Instead it was all somewhat forced.

As for "OOGA BOOGA" all the RE games have tried to tap into local mythology and savagery. It's why you get robed cultists using shields and axes against a gunman in RE4 and fits many of the monster names. They did go out of their way to show the 'real' Africa, but tapping into the whole Heart of Darkness would have been irresistible. It's still a country where Albino people are butchered for magic spells, so the barbarism is still 'real'

The tribals were not depicted as tribals because lolz niggerniggernigger. If I remind correctly there was a story why the tribals acted like that. Wasn't it because they were befallen by a mysterious illness and the medical help they had summoned didn't prove useful at all (Tricell medical team using them as guinea pigs)? As last resort and as opposition to Tricell they dropped their western clothing and turned to their ancient tribal rituals (which are still very practiced in Africa), which didn't help neither, as the plagas were warping their minds turning them into mindless zombies.

But anyway, that's not really the question in this thread. The question is how to run a RE5-type game?

I'd love to play that original RE5, it sounded fantastic. My issue isn't that you kill Africans at all. I'm not even talking about Gameplay or story really, the story of Re5 is a whole other shitshow and the gameplay is a pale imitation of Re4.

I've said a number of times that I liked Re5 to start with, going through oil refineries, towns and cities and the mines, they were new places that Resident Evil hadn't gone before (at least 1-5, I've not played much of all the spinoffs) and it was decidedly more action oriented like 4. So it was a blast to be in this town filled with Majini (had to google it), and see how Uroborus and Tricell had destroyed this land for their own gain, cool shit.

It's just the tonal shift that gets me, if the whole game had been in the Savannah and it was a little more low-key, with Urborus having been dumped into a river and poisoning and infecting all the wildlife and villages on the river, that would've been great. But instead we see that it's in the cities and industrial areas, so then why do we go to the Tribes but for a change of scenery? The temple area I don't mind, Resident Evil has always had silly temples and churches as fronts for mad science. It'd fit in fine alongside Re4's Church segment where you take on Knights and crossbowmen, I may be wrong but what were the Spanish cultural drives in 4, I only picked up that we were actually in Spain because it's mentioned at the start and the language sounded vaguely Spanish with names like El Gigante etc. Re5 felt a bit more on the nose with those sorts of "Oh, that's where we are".

Huh, that's interesting. Thanks for the input.

One question would also be how close you want to emulate the video game. Do you want healing sprays and magic herbs? Do you want equipment micromanagement and the possibility to upgrade your gear? Or would you rather have a realistic Delta Green-type game set in Africa.

Either did OP ran away after the SJW shitstorm or this is a bait-thread.

...

...

...

...

>puzzle design
Shittiest part of RE games and RPGs in general, dump it
>system
Savage Worlds actually fits really well for this
>mystery
Fucked if I know, I tried running an RE campaign and it was focused on more survival and character relationships (think Outbreak). It fell through but I'd love to try it again
>statting enemies
SW has incredibly customisable zombies (even exploding ones if you want your players to have REmake flashbacks and cry uncontrollably) and giant spiders already there, monsters in general are easy to stat, just select how good they are at things from 1-5 and that's the size die they'll use for it (d4, d6, d8 etc).

Can't remember how I did Crimson Heads: I think I had zombies roll a vigor test once taken out by anything not fire or a direct bullet to the brain. If they succeeded they turned red and got up the turn after with higher stats.

I actually made the thread then went to sleep.
This shit is fucking hilarious.

You know what ? I must thank you, if only because I now see I'm not the only one who would have liked to play Resi 4.5 as it was intended. That first build looked great.

Also - lost lovecraftian city. Because yes, they wanted to include that in this game.

Complete with Uroboros based not-Shoggoths.

There are people that defend RE5? It was a really shitty game that Capcom made much more racist in an attempt to make it less racist.

Anyone that knows the background wanted the original concept before PR suits got involved, and anyone playing the game realizes that villages wearing Black Heart of Africa masks based on a different continent's tribes that sacrifice people to alligator gods in order to cure a disease with bullshit was fucked up.

What else is fucked up is that people criticized RE4 for having an American kill foreigners at all (people should still remember this shit after Iraq started), but without social media those types that will scream about anything were harder to hear and there is no paper trail.

Fuck you, SJW faggot! This thread isn't about your precious little snowflake's feelings, but about how to make RE5 into an RPG. You don't like the idea, you fuck off to whatever thread you want, but let the others discus intelligently.