Number Crunching

I had a "Professor Farnsworth" moment last night.

While watching TV last night I did a bit of number crunching during the commercials and statistically my survivors wont last many more games in my "No More Room In Hell" campaign.

Percentage wise my current three survivors will be able to hit 2.4 zombies when they shoot at them a turn.

 Of the 2.4 zombies they hit, they will only be able to kill off 1.68 zombies.

 Of all the shots fired to kill this 1.68 zombies, they will attract 9 zombies per turn. (Based on a medium Zombie threat level)

 And this doesn't factor in the chance of running out of ammunition, which I have found to happen quite easily.

Why did I work all of this out? Well, I was taking a look at my "On the Road" scenario set up and trying to figure out the best way to have my characters survive the game, and it doesn't look good to say the least.

 Now admittedly I am down about 600 points worth of Survivors as laid out in the actual scenario in the rule book, so this doesn't help one bit. This is compounded by the fact that I am using the suggested number of zombies.

This means I may have to do one or more of a few things:

a) get more survivors. I don't want to use this option because I don't want to fit the extra characters into the story line I am working with just yet.

b) make the weapons stronger. By ignoring the AZ value of weapons and using the AP rating only I double my chances of killing a zombie. This means some weapons go from a 30% chance of killing a zombie to a 60% chance. I could argue that survivors know that they need to shoot zombies in the head to stop them, otherwise they probably wouldn't be survivors, but it throws a few survivor skills out the window making them useless.

c) scale down the zombie numbers.  This is most likely the option I will take. Rather than use the full number of zombies that start in some games I will reduce the starting number of zombies, and or drop the zombie threat levels down a level, so a ATL of 5 becomes a ATL of 4.

I will play test a few different options and see how they go. Hopefully they wont unbalance game play, and I suspect option c) will be the best. If I played the "On the road" scenario as it is meant to be played, then 10d10 + # rounds fired each turn zombies can show up. Not only do I not have that many zombies, but the chances of surviving what is supposed to be the second scenario in a campaign would be very low indeed.