The Gaming Den

Obviously there's no such thing as a realistic post-apocalyptic RPG setting, because if the post-apocalpyse existed, there'd be no RPGs. But we can imagine relatively plausible ones.

A search of my memory mostly turns up things like Fallout, or Road Warrior-flavored stuff. I can't think of anything that tries to address actual concerns of people after the fall of civilization, a la the Steampunk's Guide to the Apocalypse - which seems more like people thinking about post-apoc LARPs they'd like to run.

Can you offer any suggestions? (I'm sure there's *something* for GURPS, but there's everything for GURPS. Rule 42.)

Well, Fallout has psionics (NPC only though) so that sort of takes out realistic. Unless you figure psionics is realistic.

Mad Max ?

Jeremiah: The Roleplaying Game
Rapture: The Second Coming(now with extra Jesus)
Neuroshima


Video games:
Neo Scavenger
The Fall: Last Days of Gaia
Metal Max/Saga series (very lighthearted)

Twighlight 2000
The Morrow Project

Twilight 2000 definitely aimed to be realistic. You were even expected to pick up your spent bullet casings after a firefight (because new cartridges don't grow on trees), for instance.

Project Zomboid is another pretty good video game. You are a lone survivor in a zombie apocalypse and have to scavenge food, weapons, and supplies to eventually build a safe house and try to be come self-sustaining.

Also the game Dead State, you gather people and it's has a turn based combat system.

Thanks for the suggestions, everybody. I'll check those out.

(Fallout is highly entertaining, but it's not even close to realism. Secret mutant formulas that involve being dipped in a glowing solution? Radiation ghouls? Bizarre 1950s tech in a world that never developed the transistor? Oy.)

hogarth wrote:Twilight 2000 definitely aimed to be realistic. You were even expected to pick up your spent bullet casings after a firefight (because new cartridges don't grow on trees), for instance.

Oh, yeah. It's also entirely from a military perspective, character creation dwells on the infinite minutiae of various minor differences between assorted US military units, and there are page long rants about the effects of ethanol on engines.

Good times, good times.

I was a military brat living on a US military base in Germany at the time, playing the game with other military brats, and even then we found it pretty intolerable for the amount of military trivia fappery and fanfic of how WW3 would go.

Leress wrote:Also the game Dead State, you gather people and it's has a turn based combat system.

I can second this, it's a game I got the day it came out, and its pretty much the steam game I have the most hours in collectively (or least a good 2nd or 3rd at most). The "Re-animated" I felt made it suck now that animations look slower, can't sneak up on people with melee weapons to get a save-scum auto-kill, and they fixed the soak system (which was needed, but its a sucky feeling when in endgame armor still take sizable damage from 9mm pistols).

State of Decay I would recommend, but you do grow crops, and fix things pretty quickly, so if that doesn't bother you, it's a fun game.

For Metal Max, I've only played the one in america: Metal Saga on the PS2. Which is post apocalypse wild west-esque world with TANKS...not to mention monsters, not so sure that's realistic at all. Sure, Fallout has monsters, but these are all as you said, lighthearted and wacky.

GURPS hasn't really done much of it, actually. Post-apocalypse was always a setting book that Steve Jackson had penned to write himself, IIRC, but just never had the time.

Still, they did just do it anyway - After the End 1 and 2 came out a few months ago. As usual, they're worldbuilding manuals more than anything else, so there's plenty of discussion of what might result - though it's not a full-sized book, so it presents its own base themes of bullets=money and so forth.

Twlight 2013 is another RPG that fits. It died fairly quickly, but it's a decent system - though tending towards rather... verbose... mechanics - with a lot of appropriate detail.

Occluded Sun wrote:Obviously there's no such thing as a realistic post-apocalyptic RPG setting, because if the post-apocalpyse existed, there'd be no RPGs. But we can imagine relatively plausible ones.

Things can be "realistic" without being true.

And speaking of things that are true, the "post-apocalypse" does exist. We're living in it, and RPGs also exist.

JigokuBosatsu wrote:

Occluded Sun wrote:Obviously there's no such thing as a realistic post-apocalyptic RPG setting, because if the post-apocalpyse existed, there'd be no RPGs. But we can imagine relatively plausible ones.

Things can be "realistic" without being true.

And speaking of things that are true, the "post-apocalypse" does exist. We're living in it, and RPGs also exist.

There's also the part where we survive with burning oxygen and enjoy the cleansing glare of the sun, which are lethal agents to the original primitive lifeforms (that can still be found underground). We already are the giant mutants that thrive in toxic radiation while the older ones hide below the earth.

Even if i would not ever recommend the game to anybody, but technically, i think, the Battletech RPG does qualify.

JigokuBosatsu wrote:Things can be "realistic" without being true.

But we have nothing to compare a game experience to, in order to evaluate its realism.

Our world hasn't ended, and we can't really compare to the end of others' worlds.

Occluded Sun wrote: Our world hasn't ended, and we can't really compare to the end of others' worlds.

Give it a few months, we seem to be right on track...
BAM! Topical political humor, free of charge!

Occluded Sun, trying to use more randomly generated words to explain your previous nonsense isn't helping.

I'm not sure if I can dumb things down enough for you to 'get it'.

Well, let's give it a try. Our world has never ended - which we know because we're alive in our world. We've never had a real apocalypse in the sense of 'post-apocalyptic'. Our planet has undergone major changes to the point that various lifeforms' 'worlds' could be said to have ended, but we can't even begin to guess at what it would mean for our world to end.

Thus the degree to which any game representation of an apocalypse matches what would actual happen cannot be evaluated. But we can try to guess at how plausible it would be.

What kind of anti-science bullshit is this? Of course you can find out what happens after people abandon a place for any number of reasons. They've filmed specials about what happens to our cities after all the people leave. It's pretty amazing and pretty well documented.

We also know what happens after we drop a nuclear bomb on a city, for instance. That's something that actually happened.

Now, our world has a lot of variables, and the end of it could, too. But we have a pretty decent grasp of physics and biology to know what is realistic. And yes, we can 'guess' how plausible it would be. But we don't have to guess. If we know what caused the apocalypse, we know what it should look like up to 50 years later.

deaddmwalking wrote: Now, our world has a lot of variables, and the end of it could, too. But we have a pretty decent grasp of physics and biology to know what is realistic. And yes, we can 'guess' how plausible it would be. But we don't have to guess. If we know what caused the apocalypse, we know what it should look like up to 50 years later.

Well there are some variables to predicting the future with regards to certain apocalyptic scenarios. We don't know precisely how severe a nuclear winter might be, for example, or how it might interact with ongoing variations in year to year weather cycles. Disaster + a few bad years of worldwide weather unfolds differently from disaster + a few good years. So there's a lot of variability you can tease out from what is roughly the same scenario.

The are also 'author plays god' apocalypse scenarios (nanotech is in vogue) that basically allow for the design of any sort of post-apocalyptic condition you want while still have a veneer of realism.

The tricky thing about a realistic post-apocalyptic RPG is that you have to arrange it so the resource balance works, because people don't want to play Robinson Crusoe the RPG. So you need the apocalypse to be sufficiently mild and to leave behind sufficient resources such that there's actually something to fight over beyond the 'avoid starving' imperative, and you also need some kind of active agent that is engaged in trying to make things even worse for the survivors. One reason zombie apocalypse is so popular is that it wraps both those things up into the same package.

OS, I think your conceptual space for what classifies a PA setting is made patently false with trivial effort.
Realistic Post-Apocalypse setting in less than 60 seconds:

The fall of the classic Maya period and the invasion of the Spaniards
Indestructible Metal Men who seem like gods are impervious to your weapons
A huge indiginous people suffers an extinction event from western diseases
An entire way of life vanishes and supplanted by powers that oppress you for hundreds of years

Robinson Crusoe actually salvaged a whole lot of technology from the wreck. As a story of raw survival, it's not a good example - but it was pretty much the first of its kind.

Hatchet always struck me as a very realistic story about surviving in the wilderness with barely any resources and less knowledge. But of course the protagonist came close to starving to death, and as discussed in the book would likely not have lived through the winter.

Harshax wrote:The fall of the classic Maya period and the invasion of the Spaniards
Indestructible Metal Men who seem like gods are impervious to your weapons
A huge indiginous people suffers an extinction event from western diseases
An entire way of life vanishes and supplanted by powers that oppress you for hundreds of years

And the natives could never have imagined that. If you had asked them to speculate about what the ending of their world would be like, they'd either have gone with religious dogma or extrapolated the problems they knew about. They would never have imagined aliens. Or, for that matter, metal.

In Robinson Crusoe the titular character collected supplies from the shipwreck.

In Hatchet the main character ended up getting a lot of supplies fron the crashed plane. If memory serves, the most significant item was a radio.