Quarantine Zone - Reloaded

So I got a bunch of my pals together Saturday night and we played a quick game of Quarantine Zone. Just another playtest really, we didn't get much further than character creation and played through a kinda long combat- it started to drag out so we ended it and went for beers. I got some pretty decent feed back and the players seemed to like a couple of things. I also pinpointed some areas that needed fixing or  further development.

The biggest thing to come out of the session is that I have decided to rethink one of my original game concepts. One of my big selling points for the game was that when you play QZ you are encouraged to set the game in you real-world location. After a few sessions I have realized this might not be the best approach. I think that instead of trying to do a rules lite real world simulation type thingy I should rework QZ into a sandbox type map crawl.

I was thinking I would get a big sheet of 1inch graph paper and draw out the roads and buildings of a town onto the sheet. I figured each square would represent a kinda abstract sized portion of the city, like a road/street would be 1 square wide and individual city buildings would usually take up 1 square each. Using this model I could draw out fairly large areas onto each sheet, and then just keep track of where each sheet meets up with the other sheets to make bordering territories. Like one sheet could represent "Downtown" and an adjacent areas could be "Lakeside" and the "Industrial District" for example. The more I think about using this method the more I like it, I can make up some cool random encounter charts and seed each map with cool locations and stuff. This way I can leave alot of the control in my player's hands and let them decide how they want to try to survive in the zombie filled sandbox.

Hopefully I  have done a decent job explaining what I plan to do but I will also take some pictures as I start drawing out the maps.

Another problem area was in combat. In my combat rules it was wayyyyyy too easy for PCs to end up breaking their weapons in combat. Nearly every player broke their weapons within the first few rounds of battle. The problem was that anytime a 1 was rolled on the damage chart a weapon would break, and the way it worked out was that the better a player did the more likely it was that their weapon would break. To fix this I am adding a simple correction to my weapon damage rules:

 "Only the highest dice result applies when rolling on a weapon damage chart."

This fix should work out nicely because you will need to roll all 1s on your damage roll for the weapon to break. Obviously the more dice you roll the less likely it will be for all of them to come up 1s, whereas there is a 1 in 6 chance if you only are rolling 1 d6.

Anyway, sorry for the wall of text. Hopefully it is semi-readable. Comments and questions are welcome.

-Cheers!