How do you make a zombie encounter fun and engaging without being overly gimmicky, Veeky Forums?

How do you make a zombie encounter fun and engaging without being overly gimmicky, Veeky Forums?

Add shotguns

If your zombies are the infectious kind then trying to avoid any bites, scratches, or (depending on how contagious) contact with the enemies could make for an interesting problem to have to work around

Zombies retain fine motoric and ability to use most gear.

So, most middle-class Americans then?

Not quite, more athletic.

The players are the zombies.

>the zombies are an additional environmental hazard
>have to climb rope over zombies grabbing at you
>fight in facility with restrained zombies awaiting cure lining the walls
>you are in a tunnel/trench with zombies walking on a floor grate over you, their gunk drips down occasionally

>the enemy herds zombies towards your position
>you have to secure a particular zombie in a herd/an item carried by it

>you do the old rub yourself with zombie entrails trick to blend in a horde, suddenly you encounter your enemy, doing the same. Fighting to intensively will blow your cover.
>you just have to barricade a gate against pressure from zombies as long as possible
>a crawler/severed zombie limbs that haven't stopped moving have surprised you while camping out due to their low profile
>zombie caught fire, attacks undeterred
>zombies rushing from higher position, throwing themselves down a building to get to you

>zombie chaingang trips players with the chain connecting them
>encounter on dangerous ground, zombies ignore effects of caltrops
>fighting on brittle frozen lake
>you have to prepare traps for the attack you know is comming

if the zombies are infectious, how could rubbing their entrails all over your body possibly not be a vector for infection?

>what is a poncho?
>what is a full bodysuit

>>>you have to secure a particular zombie in a herd/an item carried by it
>>you do the old rub yourself with zombie entrails trick to blend in a horde, suddenly you encounter your enemy, doing the same. Fighting to intensively will blow your cover.

These two are especially excellent.

Use Return of the Living Dead style zombies

Virus is in the saliva, but the flesh is poisonous.

If zombies are dead, and no longer have working digestive/circulatory systems how do they produce saliva? Also, if their mouthes are constantly open, as zombies often do, their mouthes would quickly dry out.

...

Have the actual fight be against spirits possessing random shit around a catacombs, so killing a zombie animates a skeleton, and then some random shit.

In most fantasy games, zombies are going to be simple, slow-moving meatgrinder enemies. That's fine. Either throw a bunch of weak ones at them for a classic mob of zombies, or throw a few hard-hitting ones if you want the creature itself to be more imposing than the sheer number of them.

Either way, it's mechanically going to be pretty similar to any other basic bad-guy encounter. Zombies don't have many tricks. They don't need many. And if you start adding them, they start looking less and less like zombies. Instead, use the atmosphere and environment to make the encounter memorable. Have it happen in a spooky place. Give the players some kind of time limit (fantasy-evac is only going to be available during a certain window, the duke's daughter is trapped in a building and they're tearing down the walls, etc.), or objective, or have some quirk of the environment complicate things. This user's got a few great ideas: Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that you don't make zombie-encounters more mechanically interesting by complicating the zombies. You do it by complicating other stuff and letting the zombies be zombies.

It's not saliva it's slime

>Make the combat unwinnable
>Give the Zombies really slow movement
>Make them a horde
>Can't be beaten by simple killing them all dead
>Say the words "TOO MANY TO KILL BY HAND"
>Don't assign a number to them