The rule from the plan: everyone starts the same, and gear is the only difference. This week it became real. There are things on the ground, you can pick them up, and some of them you can wear.
What’s on the ground
Five things exist so far. A rusty knife, a dented helmet, a can of food, a bandage and a backpack. The knife makes you hit harder. The helmet is a layer that takes hits before your health does, and it wears down as it takes them. The other three are just names for now, but they are the shape of what’s coming: something to eat, something to heal with, something to carry more in.
Things lie in piles on the street, mostly where a zombie died. An ordinary zombie leaves food or a bandage. A zombie that used to be a survivor leaves one of the good things, the knife, the helmet or the backpack, which is a first taste of the idea from the Dying entry: the dangerous zombie is the one worth killing.
Gear is all you are
No levels, no stats that grow, no skill you get better at by doing it a lot. A survivor who has been alive for a month and one who started this morning are the same person, and the only question is what each of them is holding. A new player who finds the right thing is dangerous on day one, and a veteran who loses it is nobody. That is on purpose. If gear is all you are, then losing it on death costs exactly what a death should cost, no more, no less.
Zombie Days did it the other way. Every swing earned points, you spent them on stats, and the log would tell you your agility had gone up. It’s the kind of number that’s nice to watch, and I don’t want it. A number that only goes up is a reason to keep swinging at nothing, and it makes the person who has played longest the safest person in the city.
Two things about this week are placeholders. When you die, what you wore and what you carried drop on the ground where you fell. The rule from the Dying entry stands, the zombie should keep what you wore, but that needs the zombie to have slots, and it doesn’t yet. And nothing weighs anything. That is the number I care about most, because picking something up should mean deciding what it’s worth to you, and you can’t decide that when everything is free to carry. I want it in before there’s a shop to empty.
The doubt is whether five items and one rule are enough to tell. Right now the knife and the helmet are the only things worth having, so everyone who finds them is the same person again.