>>43621442
bump

It's really, really not good. It tries to sell itself on the gimmick of playing yourself and your friends during the apocalypse, but in practice there's very little in it to help with it. Character creation is (over) simplistic, but it still ultimately runs on a perfectly standard pool of points to ensure that everyone is equally capable (yes, there's a voting phase in which the players all agree on whether or not to raise or lower the attributes of their fellow ones BUT you get a point back/lose a point if they decide to lower/raise it so effectively you're still balanced). You cannot have the game balance cake and the real simulation cake. If you are a fat neckbeard whose greatest skill is rote memory of the rules of D&D 3.5th edition and your pal is a fit, coolheaded ex-Ranger who's won medals in Afghanistan, than in a real situation YOU WOULDN'T BE BALANCED. They even invalidate whether or not each player is "prepared" for the apocalypse in real life because the rules are the characters/players start with "what they have around, right now at this moment" (yes, the assumption is that the apocalypse literally starts the moment you sit down to play The End of the World RPG. There's even a funny little rule that says the GM has to be the first one to die, to save him the trouble of playing himself.), so what gear you'd get depends entirely on whether or not the player hosting the game is currently keeping shotguns around his pizza tables, not on whether Colonel McBadass has an entire arsenal at home (unless he's the type who always carries around his bug-out-bag).

So it completely fails to do that. The mechanics themselves are very uninspired, lots of descriptive, freeform advantages and disadvantages that add dice to your pool (so depending on whether or not you're playing with assholes it's either insanely gameable or just boring). It doesn't run fast enough to really flow, but far too simplistic to be a simulation.

(cont.)

>>43621849
The "Stress" mechanics are pants-on-head, managing to somehow be both a poor representation of the genre, unrealistic, and wonky (in the sense that poor rolling could lead to bizarre situations where characters rip through a horde of monsters with a toothpick while only spraining their ankle near the end, but then stumble on a pebble and break their necks - and not even the grimmest of apocalyptic stories are these stupid about applying character death. It's supposed to be either dramatic or tell something about the story, even if that something is that the stakes are high and everyone can die, not literally be pointless). It's also got this kind of holistic system treating mental and emotional damage the exact same way as physical, which really doesn't work.

The scenarios are bad. I'll get to that in a minute, but the important thing is that is REALLY BAD since you don't get anything else. The End of the World prides itself on replayability because you get a whopping 5 scenarios with each book, but what they don't sell you on the back cover is that THIS IS IT. There isn't even GM advice on how to create your own scenario, no nothing like that. Five scenarios, that's what each game can do. Pre-Apocalypse, Post-Apocalypse, yadda yadda.

And the scenarios are bad. Most of them range from banal to stupid, they fail to cover the breadth of the genre they're meant to (I guarantee you that there are more than 5 ways of doing zombies, even if you stick to the iconic, and infinitely more ways than that of doing something like an "alien invasion". When your entire game relies on 5 scenarios meant to cover the entire "Alien Invasion" genre, can you really afford to "waste" one on something as pointless as "giant radioactive ants"?).

(cont.)

>>43621903

They're kind of lazily designed, with many of them missing what would be obvious extra needed rules (like, the post-Apocalypse of the Ragnarok scenario insinuates magic returns to the world and everyone's now living in a fantasy setting, basically. Rules for magic? Nope. Not even for NPCs. Gods are running around, they even have game stats. You just got to pull their powers out of your ass. I mean, if they were meant to be all powerful, which they're not because the premise of the scenario is that you can kill them, why bother with stats?). The most insulting things about the scenarios (although this applies mostly to Zombie Apocalypse, which is by far the worst of the lot) is that some of them aren't even shooting in the right direction. Long story short, each EotW scenario has two parts: the apocalypse itself, and struggling to survive in the post-apocalypse world. In Zombie Apocalypse, a whopping THREE out 5 scenarios don't even feature zombies in the post-apocalypse except as a sidenote. It's all like "the zombies were defeated, but the megacorp who invented the cure now turned the world into a cyberpunk dystopia". I mean, if I wanted to play cyberpunk dystopia, why would I play End of the World: Zombie Apocalypse? Or "the zombies were defeated, but now everyone is living in bunkers underground." That's a cool premise for a game but it's got no ZOMBIES in it.

(cont.)

>>43621952

And I know this is being autistic by now but the cyberpunk dystopia scenario is just an affront to logic. This mysterious phenomenon has caused all dead everywhere (including animals, including deep underground) to rise and they are 100% indestructible. Already bullshit, but hear this: the "Eden" corporation invents a way of dealing with them... but in return, the "leaders of the world" "sell them" "world domination". That's a lot of use of inverted commas because each part of that sentence is individually that retarded. Apparently, "the leaders of the world", which are a single unified organization, can just SELL SOMEBODY WORLD DOMINATION for something. How do you sell world domination? What the fuck do you give them? The key to every single city? A piece of paper saying they're now official leaders of the world? And the people are supposed to accept that because... magic? Why would anyone accept that?

And the fact that they did it IN THE FIRST PLACE is just... ludicrous. If someone tried (and that's essentially what they're doing there, folks) HOLDING ALL LIFE ON EARTH HOSTAGE AND DANGLING THE KEY TO SURVIVAL IN FRONT OF THE UN OR SOMETHING, I'd be surprised if the end result wouldn't be them being hanged for crimes against humanity, rather than receiving their "world domination". This is some literally children's cartoon logic, and Gravity Falls was mature enough to make fun of that.

In short, The End of the World is not a good game. It's not shit, either, and the art is really good, but there's literally NOTHING it can do which All Flesh Must Be Eaten can not do better, and AFMBE can do far, far, far more. If you have infinite money and want to buy every RPG on the market to line your shelves, sure, go for it. If it comes down to a choice between The End of the World and nearly any other RPG, I'd say go with the other one.

Well, I can't max out the character count four times over like that other anon, but I can give you a link to the book.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/xmx7bjbwrx9g1jw/The+End+Of+The+World+-+Zombie+Apocalypse.pdf

>>43621849
>>43621903
>>43621952

fucking sticky this thread!

>>43621849
>>43621903
>>43621952
>>43621987
Somehow, this review is both incredibly informative and incredibly persnickety at the same time. Like,

>Five scenarios, that's what each game can do.
How is that a bad thing, I don't get your criticism. Even assuming you want to play these games for a long time, 5x4=20 scenarios (setting aside how retarded each one can be), is nothing to sneer at.

>No magic powers in magic world
The conceit of the game is that you're playing yourself, yes? I don't know of anyone IRL who can do magic, so it's safe to assume no PC will be doing magic. And for the Gods I can also assume that any magic use would be part of their re-fluffed stats, no? Do you really need a complex magic system if nobody will actually be casting magic?

>>43623185
>The conceit of the game is that you're playing yourself, yes? I don't know of anyone IRL who can do magic, so it's safe to assume no PC will be doing magic. And for the Gods I can also assume that any magic use would be part of their re-fluffed stats, no? Do you really need a complex magic system if nobody will actually be casting magic?
Read the actual scenarios. I won't get into the details, but some of them put the players in positions where it wouldn't be out of place for them to be able to use magic. Even if they couldn't, many of their opponents absolutely can, and without rules you're left with GM fiat to cover something which can be a life of death matter. In games like that, this isn't a good position to be in.

>>43623185
It doesn't matter that the players don't get it, magic still gets used in situations where it's mechanically important. Besides, some example NPCs absolutely should have magical abilities, but these are never detailed, so the GM is left with the choice of either making them bullshit "they do what I want them to do" or just not giving them any powers, which in the context of some of the scenarios (especially in Wrath of the Gods), could mean that characters like the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Cthulhu, Odin, Quetzelcoatl and SATAN HIMSELF are effectively nothing more than especially tough combatants so far as the rules are concerned.