Gowi

The Living Dead [Open]

czechmate46 said
It was just a suggestion...And I've seen at least two zombie apocalypse fictions where they use horses.

Well, in many of those continuities it's well into twenty years (The Last of Us) or have a large community with working farms to feed livestock. We're a rag-tag group of barely competent folks trying to make due who can probably barely feed ourselves, animals added on that and people are going to starve you know?

but by that point highways would be frickin' deserted and he could've still used some back-roads.

Except the abandoned cars and automotive wrecks would still be flooding the bulk of metropolitan and city highways. Not to mention any structural damage that causes parts of highways to collapse (see: Fallout, The Last of Us), and so on.

The Living Dead [Open]

czechmate46 said
I feel like a year would be more ideal for what we originally had planned. But who knows. But traveling across states by car would be challenging, seeing as we've already established the danger with high ways. I'd assume a lot of us would have to travel by foot or horseback, or some other alternative like biking. Either way, those are relatively slow ways to travel, assuming you have to find your own path ways and stay clear of roads and high ways.

I'm assuming Sloth's character drove on backroads and sub-routes. I've traveled throughout the United States and I've mapped out several zombie contingency routes (because I'm that much of a dork) - so it's possible he got a decent amount of travel to Oregon/Washington way if he stored up on a few gas tanks and drove/travelled smart. Might of even ran into a survivor group who traded gas for food, medicine, or ammo: as the four main resources of our world is gas, food, medicine, and ammo now. Also in the early days of the outbreak the problem was mostly in metropolitan cities over small towns though it spread like wildfire as the weeks turned into months...

That said, we just need a starting scenario to start. We can figure out "how the group formed" and "how long Jeff or Lucia have been in the group" and all that nonsense after that.

The Living Dead [Open]

there would be way more than just 10 on us

Debatable, in my experience with zombie fiction and survival horror long sustained groups larger than six people aren't likely outside of established survival communities (Wellington in The Walking Dead, Boston in The Last of Us, Argus Research Campus in Zombie Hunters, The Enclave in State of Decay, and so on).

so cars, lots of guns,

Fuel would be stripped by lots of survivors, some gas would be lost through other means and needed for other things outside of cars (electric generators for example). Ammo would also be difficult-ish to obtain and while we might have more guns we would definitely not have huge stockpiles of ammo especially if we are on the move/mobile. Also, working vehicles would be harder to maintain and many cars would be wrecked from day one of the apocalypse.

Not trying to put a stick in your thoughts, just counterpoints.

Hm, what about a a year and a half?

If you ask me, our group as it is (10 people is a lot of people to feed and keep armed) poses a fun challenge already. I think a year or so is a good challenge rating yet still allows moderate resources to plunder and pilfer.

As GM you have two choices to set up as our inital problem in the starting posts: is our enemy the infected or simply amoral humans? Meaning are we dealing with armed assholes or hungry ghouls?

Caught up to LoK

Sole said
Plasma would definitely not be for Firebenders.

Incorrect given the creators gave firebender's lightning, lol. I mean lightning is a common everyday example of a thing created from plasma itself. So by Avatar laws, raw plasma would be high tier firebending. This is why I make lightning a completely separate element in my custom roleplays where elemental benders are a thing.

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czechmate46 said
Ack four months is a rather short time for the ten of us to all meet up, considering the states we started from. And Washington is way up in the north west corner of America.

Yeah, either we have to amend our sheets (this is why I didn't say Will was from anywhere, though the original concept is from Oregon) to adapt or something. I mean Sloth's character is from Pennsylvania for chrissakes.

The Living Dead [Open]

The virus has been loose for four months

Then some people need to fix their CS's, lol. Trying to dig up where I read "two years into the apocalypse", but yeah.

I would also like to start today, despite me not being kosher with the highway.

EDIT: Also with four months into the zombie mess, we could still really effectively loot pharmacies, veterinary clinics, small convenience stores, apartments, houses, etc.

Caught up to LoK

As for “waterarms”, a thought occurred to me while spending countless paragraphs overanalyzing the series: ever heard of phantom-limb syndrome? When amputees still sort of “feel” a certain limb even though they don’t have it anymore? They’ve discovered that this is because the parts of your brain that control lost limbs still exist even if the limb itself is gone, and they’ve used this discovery to invent high-tech prostheses that connect to an amputees brain and allow them to control the fake limb the same way they would control a real one. It’s possible that waterarms (whose real name I honestly don’t remember, either) has learned to use waterbending in a similar way. Her arms don’t exist anymore, but the part of her brain that controls her arms still does, so maybe her bending ability allows her to use water as a substitute for her arms, controlled the same way that real people control those high-tech prostheses.

But there is no place for the chi to travel which is the central aspect of bending, if there is no place for chi to go and the movements aren’t available I personally think it shouldn’t be possible to bend an element that needs certain movements of chi in the arms. Of course, this is still my opinion of the subject. I think it’s a bit different than “phantom limb syndrome” considering the fundamentals of waterbending still requires chi to be moved in a certain way that is simply impossible (or perhaps improbable?) to do so without limbs to guide them. I don’t know, maybe I’m thinking of this too one-dimensionally.

To be honest, I really only like Combustion Girl because she’s a callback to Combustion Man from the original series, and his bending was a really unique and interesting concept.

One thing I especially dislike about “combustion bending” is that they can arc something that is entirely line-of-sight based. But yeah, I thought it was neat that they were going to expand on the style in Korra, but then we got like zero exposition about it which I think is Sloth’s problem with a lot of the antagonists and their bending in season three.

And this is why it hardly makes any sense to boil bending down to hard genetics. Like others said, bending is spiritual. I mean, non-benders all over the world turned magically turned into airbenders thanks to spirit nonsense, and no common ancestry or anything was ever really implied between the chosen non-benders.

I think it makes sense for talent regarding a bending sub-type to be at least somewhat hereditary, if you subscribe to the whole natural talent idea, but not only has the canon in both series made it clear that the origins of the four main bending types are spiritual, it’s also been made fairly clear that gray areas don’t really exist between the four types, and there really never has been a canon “hybrid” bender, again with the obvious exception of the avatar, but even then, the avatar’s bending also exists for spiritual reasons, so… yeah.

It’s certainly a tricky thing to involve genetic theory to the world of Avatar’s element bending, but I think in a way it should have a role as it’s become hereditary for many benders over time since the first lion turtles allowed humans the gift of one element. Some people honed it further in the ancient eras by studying respective “natural benders” but the majority of earthbenders get their earthbending from their genetics from the way I’ve looked at it.

I don’t subscribe that there’s much to “hybrid” children, but perhaps there could be aspects we could use to explain certain things. But that’s a big basket to handle.

The Living Dead [Open]

Heaven said
Gowi- where do you think it would be a good place to start? (: It's a group vote thing, I want us all to agree on it.

Really there's a lot of factors; current location, how much of the resources of it have been pilfered by survivors in two years, how many resources have spoiled in two years, etc. Though I did mention stuff like this a bit ago yesterday:

Though, 'ven you should probably establish some consistency of how long the outbreak has been about and where the group has traveled. For example, some apps allude to the outbreak starting two years ago and some people found the group in the "south" and "new mexico" that's a lot of traveling time through obstacles, seasons, and hordes. Probably should get our personal lore consistent which is why I've written a CS that is vague enough to fit anywhere.

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Still not sold on the highway pitch, my character would probably vote against scavenging a narrow "graveyard" with little room for safe retreat. There are plenty of other options, but there are places that are bad ideas 99% of the time in survival horror: highways, hospitals, shopping malls to name a few. I mean it's been two years so a lot of the 'dead' probably have moved on from the highway but even then it does provide a careless risk no matter how much bullets we have. Just my two cents.

The Living Dead [Open]

Because highways are the best place to suggest going...