Your preferred distance in any type of RPG conflict?

I like getting up close and personal in RPG conflict, not necessarily because every fight should be fought at arm’s length, but because danger is most exciting when it feels immediate, specific and personal.

I have only played The Walking Dead Universe RPG once, so this is very much a first impression, but I struggled with its swarm mechanic. It sensibly abstracts hundreds of individual walkers into Swarm Size and Threat Level. As the dead close in, the Threat Level rises, your choices narrow, and the consequences become increasingly lethal.

Mechanically, the jeopardy is certainly there. Yet I didn’t always feel it.

The abstraction created distance between me and the fiction. Instead of picturing grasping hands, snapping teeth and the rapidly disappearing route to safety, I found myself thinking about threat ratings and the number of successes we needed. The closer the walkers came to the characters, the further away I felt from the danger.

Perhaps my interest was also elsewhere. In such a dire and extreme setting, I wanted the conflict between the survivors to feel every bit as dangerous as the dead. Alerting a horde through carelessness, cowardice, or selfishness should not merely increase the Threat Level. It should make the other characters furious. One person’s actions can place everyone in mortal danger, destroy relationships and force choices that cannot be taken back.

That is my preferred distance in conflict: close enough that actions have consequences for people you care about. I don’t need to account for every walker in the horde, but I do need the horde to become the reason I may never forgive you.

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