How To Play The Walking Dead

Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for The Walking Dead. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own The Walking Dead game at home.

I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections.

1. 
   

   Game category

   
   


2. 
   

   Skills

   
   


3. 
   

   Pushing and stress

   
   


4. 
   

   How to attack

   
   


5. 
   

   Armor

   
   


6. 
   

   Cover

   
   


7. 
   

   Moving

   
   


8. 
   

   Dueling

   
   


9. 
   

   Sneak attacks

   
   


10. 
    

    Brawling

    
    


11. 
    

    Leadership

    
    


12. 
    

    Swarms

    
    


13. 
    

    Threat levels

    
    


14. 
    

    Single walker attack

    
    


15. 
    

    Fighting a swarm

    
    


16. 
    

    Sacrifice someone

    
    


17. 
    

    Relieving stress

    
    


18. 
    

    Dying

    
    


19. 
    

    Healing

    
    


20. 
    

    Helping allies

    
    


21. 
    

    Jargon

    
    


22. 
    

    Building a character

    
    

Game category. This is the official tabletop roleplaying game of the famous TV show, The Walking Dead. You are role playing as a character in a world where society has collapsed. An unidentified malady has spread to all living people, infecting everyone. Anyone who dies, regardless of the cause of the death, is reanimated into what is called a Walker, an undead shambling corpse driven by a compulsion to consume living flesh. If one of the living gets scratched or bitten by a walker, they will succumb, quickly becoming one if the bitten limb is not amputated. Your character can kill an individual Walker, but never enough of them to make a dent in how many there are in the world. It’s not safe out there. You might be able to clear the Walkers from a small haven, such as a roof top, so you can sleep. At your haven you can store food, water, medicine, and other resources, maybe collaborating with a close knit group of fellow survivors. But in a world with no law enforcement, can you trust the people you meet? They might be robbers eyeing your limited food, or murderers, or cannibals, or could simply make too much noise and attract a Walker swarm, a gathering of the undead so numerous that they overrun anything in their path. How long will you survive in this roleplaying game before you become one of… the walking dead. To describe the mechanics in five sentences, this is a game where you will roll six sided dice, also called d6. You succeed when you see at least one six in the dice you rolled. You can push to re roll failures, which adds stress dice. If you get a one on a stress dice, something goes wrong. Weapons deal a set number of damage depending on the weapon, and all characters have three hit points.

Skills. When your character tries to accomplish something in the game world, you might roll dice to see if they are successful or not. A good game master will call for a dice roll any time the character failing could increase tension, make the situation much worse, or make the game more exciting. How do you know how many dice you will roll? Find the skill that best fits what you’re trying to do, and the attribute associated with that skill. The number next to the skill, plus the number next to the attribute, are how many dice you get to roll.

Here is an example skill roll. Rick is trapped, surrounded by Walkers on all sides with no way out. Glenn’s player wants to help Rick. She proposes that Glenn sneak through the Walker filled streets, find a car without being detected, hot wire it, and drive it back to Rick to pick him up. Because the first part of her plan is sneaking, and because if that fails that dramatically changes the outcome of this plan, the game master calls for a roll. Glenn’s player looks at his character sheet. The number three is written next to the stealth skill, and it’s one of three skills under the agility attribute, which has the number four. With three dice from the stealth skill and four dice from the agility attribute, Glenn’s player rolls seven dice total. There are very good odds that at least one of them will be a six. The player rolls and the result is… two sixes! Excellent. Glenn’s stealthy sneaking through the streets was successful, he found a car with no Walkers around. For the extra six, the game master rewards Glenn’s player with a little something extra, such as asking her what color the car is. She says orange. Sweet. The next step will be hot wiring it.

Pushing and stress. In The Walking Dead, a roll isn’t necessarily over if you don’t get any sixes. You can choose to push. Pushing is when you pick up all those dice, add one point of stress to your character, and roll again. For each point of stress, you add one more special dice to the pool. This special stress dice could be a different color than the other dice, or have different symbols on its faces, or can be rolled after the other dice on its own, or could be rolled in a different location on your table, etc. Anyway, to push, you pick up all those failed dice and re roll them, and also re roll as many extra dice called stress dice as you have points of stress. This is another chance to see a six. If you get at least one six as a result, congratulations, your skill roll succeeded. From now on, you’ll roll as many extra dice on all rolls as you have points of stress. If you’ve pushed once, you have one stress, and roll one extra dice. If you’ve pushed twice, you have two stress, and roll two extra dice. Now here’s where keeping track of which dice are the stress dice matter. If you get a one on specifically a stress dice, not your regular dice, then the one on the stress dice means you’ve quote, “messed up”. When you mess up, the threat level on page seventy nine raises. For example you didn’t notice a Walker until it got close enough to attack you, or you were loud enough to get the attention of a Walker Swarm, etc. Something goes very wrong. Stress stays with you until you do something to relieve the stress. This includes narrating a roleplaying scene with your anchor, narrating a roleplaying scene with another character, and resting. When you sleep a full night’s rest, roll two dice and relieve the lower number of stress.

Here is an example of pushing. Glenn is at the car he found. There aren’t any Walkers around. He’d like to try to hot wire the car, so he can drive it back to where Rick is trapped and rescue him. Hot wiring a car is the tech skill. The player looks at Glenn’s character sheet. There’s a zero written next to the tech skill, uh oh. But the tech skill is under the wits attribute, which Glenn has a four in, whew. Glenn’s player will be rolling four dice. She rolls the four dice and gets… four, one, two, two. Yikes, there aren’t any sixes. Glenn’s not going to be able to hot wire this car because he doesn’t have any tech ski